by Norm Stamper
Not likely. The Neanderthal spirit is alive and well in America’s police departments. Los Angeles cops, for example, used their MDTs (mobile data terminals) to send car-to-car messages about “gorillas in the mists” at the time of the Rodney King incident (1991). After O. J. Simpson was acquitted, one of my veteran cops in Seattle was inspired to use his own MDT to enlighten peers about the differences between white and black juries. (I took him off the streets and “constructively terminated” him, meaning he quit before I could fire him.) The King beating, the Diallo and Louima incidents in New York, the profiling cases on the New Jersey turnpike—all make it clear that racism continues to thrive in policing.
But what of the higher echelons of police leadership? Just two years before the Southeast Investigation, Kolender’s predecessor, Chief Ray Hoobler, had this answer to a subordinate’s sycophantic suggestion that he run for mayor: “Can’t do it. I don’t like the niggers and the Mexicans don’t like me.” A commander, years after that same investigation, sat a captain down in his office and told him he wanted something done about the “nigger whores” downtown.
I know several white police chiefs who are authentic, effective leaders in the effort to combat racism in their departments and within their local communities, but I know just as many who are either overt or closet racists. Or who are numbingly ignorant of their own insensitivity to racial issues. They give themselves away when they make Daryl Gates–type statements (who can forget his comparison between blacks and “normal” people?). They let slip a “good-natured” slur at an all-white Rotary meeting. They get defensive if not combative when one of their own shoots an unarmed black man and the community demands answers.
Most white chiefs fall in the middle, of course. They think things are fine, and they see no racial divide. To them, policing is “color-blind.” To them, I say take off your blinkers and have a look around. If they’re open to it these chiefs will see evidence of racism within their departments. If this troubles them they’ll set nonnegotiable standards for performance and conduct—at all levels. They’ll provide “diversity” training, “cross-cultural relations” training. But they’ll also let it be known that they will fire cops, including ranking officers, who use racial and ethnic slurs or who engage in racist practices.
I’m proud of the actions my old department took on the heels of the Southeast Investigation. The first thing Kolender did was reissue a statement he’d made when he became chief: “These walls have heard for the last time the ‘N’ word. You will treat everyone with dignity and respect. If you can’t do that, Convair’s hiring.” Most people got the message.
At that point in my career I’d been a cop for ten years. I decided to trade my captain’s authority for greater influence within the broader institution of policing, thinking I’d wind up teaching and consulting. I resigned my police officer commission at the conclusion of the Southeast Investigation. But the city manager and the chief hired me back—as the PD’s ombudsman, and it was in that capacity that Kolender assigned me to oversee and facilitate organizational changes designed to root out racism.
I headed up two groups, one of rank-and-filers, the other of department brass. We examined policies, procedures, training, equipment, supervision, discipline, performance evaluations, and promotions—and sought the kind of deep systemic changes required to give spine and muscle to our good intentions. Here’s what we came up with.
•Modifications to the recruitment, testing, and screening of new officers to specifically target racial attitudes and behavior;
•All-new academy curricula on cross-cultural relations, interpersonal relations, and communications skills—much of it taught by teams of police, academic, and community experts;
•A program that put police recruits into social service agencies in the black community for two weeks at a time, sans uniform, to experience life through the eyes of the residents;
•Ongoing in-service training in performance expectations for supervisors and veteran cops;
•Debriefings for officers involved in traumatic incidents;
•Analysis and reporting of suspected individual and organizational patterns of racial discrimination;
•A “beat tenure” program that examined officers’ ongoing fitness for duty in ethnic minority communities;
•Systematic and spot inspections of arrest quality, crime reporting, and courtroom testimony;
•A requirement that supervisors investigate all instances of rumored or suspected excessive force;
•A department-wide program of physical fitness, combined with a requirement that officers meet job-related standards of physical strength and agility;
•Training to help internal investigators distinguish between “discourtesy” and racial discrimination;
•Outfitting every patrol car with a shotgun; and, of course:
•The discharge of employees who used racial slurs, or who otherwise demonstrated contempt for the rule of law in policing ethnic minority communities.
Shotguns? How, you may ask, does providing cops with twelve-gauge shotguns foster improved relations between a predominantly white PD and a black community?
One of the things we had wanted to learn from the Southeast Investigation was whether our cops had the confidence needed to work effectively in a black community. So we asked questions about training, one-versus two-officer patrols, equipment, and so forth. When it came to the question of equipment the cops let me have it with both barrels: feeble police cars, too many miles on them; broken-down seats; bare retreads; filthy interiors; catalytic converters that produced excessive heat in the passenger compartment; an absence of light bars and handheld spots; not enough walkie-talkies to go around; no semiautomatic pistols, no canines, no saps, no tape recorders, no binoculars, no night-viewing devices, no photographic equipment, no print kits, no this, no that. But the biggest no was no shotguns.
There are good reasons in both urban and rural communities for cops to carry shotguns, locked and loaded, in their patrol cars—and no good reason not to. But my department had for years nurtured a list of pathetic excuses for not providing them: They were bad for our image; they were too costly; and, most telling: you couldn’t trust the cops. Our officers had heard all these excuses for years. I figured the purchase of shotguns would buy much-needed credibility for an administration poised to come down hard on police racism and other misconduct. Besides, it was the right thing to do.
Throughout the Kolender administration and on into the next three, racial equality and nondiscriminatory policing inched closer to becoming a permanent way of life. We hadn’t undone racism within the ranks, of course. But by the late 1980s the department had turned into a decidedly unfriendly place for anyone stupid enough to vent his or her bigotry. The “Toms” of the agency had been weeded out, or driven underground with the rest of the rodents.
If the “Southeast Investigation” were replicated today it would yield a picture of a far different police department. One that would make SDPD look not like fifteen cents but a million bucks.
CHAPTER 10
“SPLIT TAILS”
THE CONFERENCE ROOM AT Northern Division is a beehive of creativity, the buzz fueled by equal parts anger and bewilderment.
“They can make coffee at the command post during riots.”
“Yeah, and rock concerts and parades. And they can sweep out the van when the events are over.”
“What about missing juveniles? We can give them missing juvenile calls and . . .”
“Right. And death notifications. And found property calls. And . . .”
“Hey, wait a minute. I got it! They can handle all cold calls. You know, day-old burglaries. Things like that.”
“Yeah! They could take all the reports in the field. They’re great report writers.”
It’s 1973. I’m a lieutenant, attending a special supervisors’ brainstorming session. Women will soon be hitting the streets, in uniform, and the department’s captains have been instruct
ed to coax ideas out of their sergeants and lieutenants about how to make the transition as smooth as possible. But why? the men want to know. Patrol is no place for a woman. It’s unimaginable. How could Ray Hoobler, our own macho-cowboy-blood-and-guts-police chief—our hero, whose own publicly proclaimed hero is General George S. Patton, Jr.—let this happen?
I remember Hoobler’s position on the issue from just a year before. We were standing outside my Patrol Planning office when I suggested it was time to put women on the streets. He scowled, shook his head. “Over my dead body!” Then he gave me another lecture about my goddamn-bleeding-heart-social-worker-liberal attitude.
Later, I made the mistake of telling the chief about another police chief, one who’d dared to challenge the status quo.
Back when he was a sergeant at the Indianapolis police academy, Winston Churchill promised recruits Betty Blankenship and Elizabeth Coffal, then destined for “female seats” in the detective bureau, that if he ever made chief he’d put them out on patrol—something they’d lobbied for from the moment they signed on. In 1968 Churchill was named chief, and one of his first acts was to make good on his promise to the two women. Blankenship and Coffal were assigned to “Car 47,” the first women in the U.S. to serve as uniformed patrol officers.
“You finished?” said Hoobler.
“Yeah.”
“Good.” He stuck his finger in my face and told me it would “never happen in San Diego.” He punctuated the point with a not-so-soft poke to the chest. “Never!”
Hoobler saw it the same way most male cops saw it. Women on patrol would spell the end of police work as we knew it: the ladies fussing with their hair, leaving toilet seats down, “wearing” instead of carrying their guns, fainting at the sight of blood. Guys not allowed to say fuck or shit anymore.
Shortly before the brainstorming session I learned from one of Hoobler’s assistants how our leader had suddenly become a champion of “women’s lib.” The feds had shown up one day, gunning for a police chief whose public defiance of the law had piqued Justice Department brass. The chief had been summoned to the city manager’s office. I picture how the meeting went down:
Hoobler glares at the head fed, says, “Read my lips: It ain’t gonna happen.”
“But it’s the law, Chief.”
“Not where I come from, it ain’t.”
“Well, if you come from anywhere here in these United States of America it is the law, and even as we speak, you’re breaking it.”
“So sue me.”
“Happy to oblige” says the fed, with the smile of a guy who holds the trump card. “But, first, we’re going to take away all your federal money.” Hoobler’s fiscal minions have tallied up the department’s federal law enforcement grants. The numbers in his hip pocket, the chief is unmoved.
“Fine,” he says. “Take it.”
“I don’t think you understand,” says the fed. “We’re talking all your federal dollars.”
“Take it, I said. I don’t need your stinking money.”
The city manager, Hoobler’s boss, mum to this point, seeks clarification: “Whoa. What do you men by all our federal money, G-man?”
“Just what I said. We’ll take every last federal nickel from your city treasury. That means all your transportation money, all your housing subsidies, all your . . .” The city manager grabbed Hoobler’s cards and threw them on the table.
“We fold.”
I’m eight, standing across the street from the Boys Club on D Avenue, my nose in the air, sniffing. Whatever it is, it’s close. I peer down the bank and into the shadows of the culvert. There it is, on the other side of the putrid creek. I scramble down the bank, my nostrils full of the ripeness of it. The bottom part of it is submerged in the green-black water, but the top half is reachable. I take off my shoes and sox, pick up a stick and wade across. Its head is bashed in. A bloody rock the size of a cantaloupe rests on the bank near the body of the gray striped creature. Catslaughter. I have to investigate. As I poke at it I hear a loud, pleasing sound: potato, potato, potato. I turn toward the sound and see an unforgettable sight. I rush home to tell Mom.
“Mom! Guess what I saw?”
“Where are your shoes, Norman?”
“I’ll go get ’em, I promise. But guess what I saw?”
“What?”
“A motorcycle!”
“Yes?”
“A big one, with big handlebars!”
“So, it was a big motorcycle with big handlebars?”
“Yep!”
“And?”
“And, and, and . . . there was a girl driving it!” I picture the scene anew, the young woman motoring languidly, as in a parade, potato, potato, potatoing up D Avenue on a shiny black chopped Harley. She has long, flowing red hair. She’s wearing jeans, engineer boots, and a sleeveless black leather vest with fringe on the back.
“Oh. A girl? Really?” My mother is duly astonished. “Well, now. That’s something you don’t see every day.”
It’s a major shaping incident in my young life, what sociologist Edgar Schein calls a “catalytic marker event.” It shocks me, teaches me, makes a rudimentary little feminist of me. If that “girl” can ride a motorcycle—no training wheels, no big man’s hairy arms around her to negotiate the beast—why can’t girls and women do other things? Things that only boys and men are supposed to be able to do. Wasn’t Mom the first girl at Sweetwater High to take wood shop, hadn’t she—Beulah the Riveter—worked at Convair during the war? It isn’t that I’d formed some fully realized understanding of and commitment to gender-based equal opportunity. I was only eight. And it was the fifties. But the image seared itself into my brain.
When I became a cop in 1966, about 2 percent of police officers were women, “policewomen” to be exact, all them working as detectives. According to Dorothy Moses Schulz in From Social Worker to Crimefighter: Women in United States Policing (1995), the nation’s first “policewoman” was Mary Owens, the widow of a Chicago cop in 1893. Because there were no pensions in the nineteenth century, the city had the grace and generosity to grant Owens the rank, title, pay, and even, symbolically, the powers of arrest enjoyed by her late husband. Although she served in the Chicago Police Department for thirty years, Owens never actually inherited her husband’s work.
The next “real” policewoman to replace “matrons” (who began work in 1845 in New York, assisting with juveniles and jailed women) was Lola Baldwin of Portland, Oregon, in 1905. Baldwin was actually sworn in as a police officer. The first woman in the country with legitimate arrest powers, her job was to oversee the city’s social workers. Later in her career she headed a program to protect the “moral safety” of young girls and women in the city.
Finally, we have Alice Stebbins Wells, who at a hair over five feet tall was hired by the 350-member LAPD in 1910. Wells never patrolled the streets of L.A.; she, too, was confined to working with women and children. But as the founder and first president of the International Association of Policewomen she would play a key role in the formation of “women’s bureaus” that multiplied within American police forces from 1910 through the twenties. Thanks to her example, women did become involved in “real” police work, working mostly as detectives in vice and juvenile. During World War I, with men off fighting, large numbers of women joined police forces throughout the country. By the forties, there was good reason to believe women were on a path toward parity with their male counterparts.
Such hopes were dashed, however, by police chiefs August Vollmer (Berkeley) and O. W. Wilson (Chicago), veritable saints in this country’s first wave of police reform. These guys decided that women were not “emotionally fit” to become crime fighters, much less police leaders. Lesser-known chiefs all over the country held the same opinion.
J. Edgar Hoover, despite his own penchant for nylons, heels, and tasteful navy frocks, had even less use for women in federal law enforcement. Before it became known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, three women, Alask
a P. Davidson, Jessie B. Duckstein, and Lenore Houston, served as Special Agents or Special Investigators for the “Bureau of Investigation.” Shortly after he was named director of the new FBI in 1924, Hoover asked Davidson (hired in 1922) and Duckstein (1923) for their resignations, ostensibly because of budgetary reductions in the agency. When Houston resigned in 1928 she became the last woman to serve as an FBI agent for forty-four years. Hoover died in office in 1972. That year L. Patrick Gray, acting director of the FBI, citing new federal employment laws, appointed Susan Lynn Roley and Joanne E. Pierce as Special Agents. (Today, over 2,000 of the FBI’s 12,500 agents are women, many of them serving as executives, overseeing field offices and occupying high ranks at headquarters.)
Employment discrimination against female officers in the fifties and sixties was sweeping, systemic, and deliberate. The American woman in policing was a subspecies within the classification structure of the civil service “merit” system. Since they were denied patrol experience, a prerequisite for promotion to supervisor, there were no women sergeants, lieutenants, captains, or chiefs. No women policymakers. The relegation of women to entry-level, women’s bureau-type jobs denied them the take-home pay, and hefty pensions, of their male counterparts. And ensured that they would wield negligible political power.
It was a pernicious form of discrimination, injected with a large dose of misogyny, that led to the labeling of the lone female officer in my academy class as a “split-tail.” I didn’t know what the term meant, and didn’t ask, but I speculated it had something to do with a woman’s vagina. One sergeant couldn’t even bring himself to call Connie Borchers a gal or a girl. His every reference to her was as “the split-tail” in the Forty-ninth Academy class.
But Borchers was a woman of exceptional character, competence, and courage. She fought the system, and individual prejudice, even as she fought back tears. Borchers went on to amass a long list of “firsts” within the SDPD, including the first woman on patrol and the first to get promoted.