by Norm Stamper
Why would a cop risk his career, reputation, and freedom by being a “cockhound”? For the same reason men everywhere, especially those wedded to their own sense of entitlement, force themselves on women. In police work, you can add the inescapable on-the-job enticements like “cop groupies,” the not uncommon presence of misogyny within the male-dominated culture, and even the fear of getting caught which, as with other sex offenders, can quicken the pulse.
You see these same conditions in other lines of work and play, celebrities from all walks of life using their positions to try to score with or force themselves upon women.
Some U.S. servicemen in Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, sexually assault and rape servicewomen (in just a year and a half the Army recorded eighty-six incidents, the Navy twelve, the Air Force eight, and the Marine Corps six). And let’s not forget studio bosses, other corporate and public CEOs, educators, athletes, shop foremen, priests. And elected officials who use the prestige of the highest offices in the land to woo a woman to her knees.
What steps can a community take to protect itself from predatory cops? Pay attention to your local PD, for starters. Whom does it hire? Does it insist on rigorous background investigations and psychological screening of all candidates? Is every member of the agency made to understand, explicitly, that sexual misconduct will lead to disciplinary action, including the probability of dismissal and the possibility of criminal prosecution? Are cops fired when they’re uncovered as sexual predators?
Citizens should ask whether an “inspection and control” or “professional responsibility” unit regularly and randomly monitors police behavior. Such units check for trends and patterns within the workforce, and in the conduct of particular officers. Say a certain traffic cop habitually stops nine female drivers to every male he pulls over, or hands out more citations (or, more telling, a greater number of nonpunitive warnings) to women than to men. Shouldn’t we know a little more about this guy?
Sting operations make sense. A department that has cause to believe a cop is on the make should set him up. Arrange for him to cross paths with a woman dressed in tight skirt and fishnet stockings (or as Laura Bush, if that’s what turns him on). Toss the bait, see if he bites. I once arrested a woman who was drunk out of her mind. Or was she? I put her in the backseat of my police car but before I could shut the door she turned toward me, spread her legs and said (I’m not making this up), “Fuck me, fuck me now, fuck me hard.” Had I succumbed—and had she been an Internal Affairs plant—I would have been cleaning out my locker that night.
Unfair? No. Effective supervision of cops demands a balance between trust and control. When it comes to the integrity of the force and public confidence in the local PD you’ve got to tip those scales toward control. My fellow chiefs and I did stings all the time when we suspected a cop was into dope, or stealing from local merchants. In terms of the sheer number of sexual offenders in blue, there’s far greater justification for “sex stings.”
It’s also important, as it was during the aftermath of the Rodney King beating, to make sure that cops understand this: If they witness, or are aware of, sexual misconduct by another officer, including superiors, and they fail to blow the whistle they, too, will take the fall.
It’s not enough for the PD to get tough on sexual misconduct. Local prosecutors have to be willing to file charges against cops who engage in criminal sexual conduct. Because they work with the police day in and day out, because they’re afraid of the political fallout, and because they can’t tolerate the migraines caused by vengeful police unions, some DAs look the other way in police crimes. More accurately, they look back to the PD for internal disciplinary action—leaving this ex-chief wondering if they’d do the same if the sexual predator were a shoe salesman or a construction worker.
The Los Angeles Police Department over a five-year period sent 350 cases (for all alleged crimes, including sexual offenses) involving five hundred police officer suspects to then-DA Gil Garcetti. How many did Garcetti prosecute? Twenty-seven! The guilt of many of those he declined to charge was overwhelming—some had been caught on tape, many had confessed. Prosecutor spinelessness has a chilling effect on the willingness of victims, and fellow police officers, to confront sexual abuse (or other criminal offenses) within the ranks.
Another step? Hire more women. Studies have shown that the feminization of police ranks over the past two decades has had many positive effects: fewer instances of brutality, fewer citizen complaints, improved problem-solving effectiveness, better relations with the community. One generally unexpressed benefit? A predatory male cop is at least somewhat less likely to try out his moves if his partner or backup is a female. (Unless, of course, he’s got his sights on her.)
Police emergency lights are meant to convey a strong message to citizens: Stop and comply. Twenty-year-old Cara Knott pulled over on that cold December night when CHP officer Peyer lit up her white ’68 Beetle. But when she refused to “comply” she paid for it with her life. That a cop went to prison for murder is of small comfort to legions of women who’ve been hit on by lawmen. Women should not experience more than the normal apprehension when those blue and red lights flash in their rearview mirror.
* David Kalish, an openly gay, highly respected assistant chief of LAPD was recently relieved of duty for allegedly molesting six youngsters in that department’s police explorer program back in the seventies. Damn him! Until the charges came to light I could honestly say I’d never heard of a gay cop molesting kids.
CHAPTER 12
THE BLUE WALL OF SILENCE
COPS LIE. MOST OF them lie a couple of times per shift, at least. In some cases lies are not only permissible but beneficial, perhaps even life-saving. Informing a murder suspect that his accomplice, who’s actually been silent as a clam, has copped to the crime may offend a defense attorney but it’s lawful, and sometimes effective. Lying to a stalker could save his victim. “Freeze or I’ll shoot!” could very well be a lie but if it stops a fleeing suspect in his tracks then let’s hear it for mendacity.
But there’s another form of untruthfulness that has no place in police business: lying on a report, lying to an IA investigator, lying on the stand. As any defense attorney (or candid supervisor or chief) will attest, a good deal of “bad lying” goes on in police work, by cops who don’t seem to know the meaning of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Some police officers bring a lifelong tradition of bad lying to the job, but most seem to pick up the habit in the workplace. I remember vividly my first instruction in the fine art of bad lying.
“Andy Taggart” was one of the first cops I worked with. I was still in the academy, and quite impressionable. Taggart was like a BB in a beer can, bouncing off the walls, darting in and out of alleys, stopping everything that moved on his beat—and on fellow officers’ beats.
On our first night together Taggart cut his lights and started coasting down a long hill in a residential neighborhood two beats over from ours. The car picked up speed, going faster, faster. I puckered up. What the hell was he up to? How the hell could he see to drive? At the bottom of the hill he drove up over the curb and onto the front lawn of an old frame house. “Come on!” he said in an urgent whisper. “Come on!” I bailed out of the car and trailed him up to the front porch where he kicked in the door. I kept following him, past a family watching TV and down a hall to a back bedroom where he jerked open a closet door and pulled a man out of hiding. Taggert put the cuffs on the twenty-year-old murder suspect. We walked him past protesting family members out to our car. It was surrounded by six of San Diego’s finest.
Taggart’s colleagues had been sitting on the residence, whispering tactics over the radio, getting ready to take the house when this phantom car went zipping by their Code-5 locations. Taggart had bested them, like it was a sport. They were furious. “Fuck you,” he told them, not bothering to stop and chat. “I didn’t even know you guys were in the neighborhood.” They knew better. He knew bet
ter. I knew better.
Taggart worked The Heights, a predominantly black community in Southeast San Diego. But every shift, unless we caught a call right out of the barn, he would drive around the streets of downtown before heading east to his own beat. “The idea,” he said, “is to get your numbers out of the way, right off. Keep the sergeant off your back. Then when you get out to your beat you can do some real police work.” He was talking about the “numbers game,” SDPD’s quota system. Five shakedowns,* two “moving” citations (parking tickets didn’t count), and one criminal arrest per shift: it was expected. “Working downtown,” continued Taggart, “if you can’t nail a gaggle of swabbies from Bumfuck, Iowa, you shouldn’t be a cop, you should be selling Kirbys door-to-door. With swabbies, you stop ’em, write ’em up, shake ’em down, maybe even haul one or two off to Shore Patrol. Presto! You got most of your numbers for the whole night.”
To prove his point, he poached four sailors walking against the Wait sign at Fourth and Broadway. Taggart was a “hot pen” which meant that he could write out the four “coupons” in the time it would take me to complete one. Ten minutes later we were back in the car, the backseat crammed with four underage sailors, each with booze on his breath and a mover in his pocket. Four double-headers (four traffic citations, four arrests—you couldn’t carry them as shakedowns if you pinched them), almost a full night’s work for most cops. If you were lazy and ethically challenged you could complete the picture with a trip through Mt. Hope Cemetery, picking off names from gravestones and carrying them as shakedowns. Some used the phone book, a lot more convenient but it carried a risk since most people in it were still alive. In my first two years on the job there’d been major internal investigations into “daily padding.” Two cops got fired for it.
Taggart’s arrests that night were all the more efficient because all you had to do with hapless military personnel was deposit them at Shore Patrol headquarters and waltz out. No arrest reports required. No probable cause to justify.
The night after we’d pinched the homicide suspect, Taggart let me drive. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” he said as I made my way out Market toward his beat.
“Sir?”
“I said, ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ ”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Hey. Do me a favor, will you?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Stop calling me ‘sir.’ I’m not a ranking officer, okay? My parents were married.”
I was sure it was a joke, but I didn’t get it. “Yes, sir. I mean . . . okay.”
“Now, let’s get back to business. Do I have to spell it out for you? Turn around . . . go back . . . turn up Fifth. Will you?”
“Yes, si . . . right. Right.” I dropped down to Island and worked my way back to Fifth Avenue where I began scanning the sidewalks for sailors from Bumfuck. Or an unlucky tourist, or a transvestite, or a . . .
“Aren’t you going to answer that?”
“Wha . . . what?” How could I look for numbers, drive a police car, without wrecking it, and listen to the radio at the same time? It was an all-units. Shore Patrol chasing a suspect, on foot. Last seen in the vicinity of Sixth and G. We were now at Fifth and G, but I didn’t know that. That’s another thing: A cop is always supposed to know exactly where he is. Which would be fine if you were walking a beat, but . . .
“Are you planning to fucking do something about that?”
“Wha . . .”
“That!” He jabbed a thumb out his window. A hundred fifty feet away a shore patrolman was chasing a white male. “Get ’em! Get ’em! Get ’em!” screamed Taggart. I put my on turn signal, checked behind me, and prepared to make my turn. “What the hell are you doing! Get the bastard! Now!” He took out his baton. I thought he was going to hit me. Instead he rained down blows on the metal dash, screeching as he did, “Get ’em! Get ’em! Get ’em!” The inside of the car sounded like a brick tumbling in a dryer. I punched it, noticing out of the corner of my eye that Taggart had dented the dogshit out of the dash. What fib could possibly explain that? I swept east on G then south on Sixth, driving the wrong way on the one-way street. And cutting across three lanes of oncoming traffic. I made for the curb where the shore patrolman and his prey, a kid sailor in dungarees, white T-shirt with smokes rolled up in the sleeve, and a bottle of rotgut whisky in one hand, stood panting and heaving, staring at us.
At about 15 mph, Taggart attempted to “exit the vehicle,” as we say in police work. He got tangled up in the seatbelt and fell to the pavement, his butt bouncing off the asphalt. Once, twice, three times. Like a cowboy thrown from a horse, his foot caught in the stirrup. I tried to stop, but not too suddenly—I didn’t want to run him over. The whole time I’m thinking, Oh shit. I’ve killed my senior officer. How am I going to explain this at critique tonight?
I finally brought the car to a stop. My senior officer leaped from the pavement and sprinted to the sidewalk. The two men were standing side by side now, watching the show, still gasping for breath. Taggart went right for the kid’s neck. He throttled him, pulled him up on his back, and shouted at me to get my cuffs out. The kid, his oxygen all but depleted, went out in a flash. I bent over and hooked him up. Taggart’s pants were ripped to shreds, his black shoe laid open from heel to toe, his legs and hindquarters bearing the makings of some awesome strawberries and bruises to come. He looked into my eyes as he bent down to pull the groggy sailor to his feet. “You saw him start to hit me with that bottle, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
That was the first time I’d been asked to lie, but it was far from the last. Senior officers and peers were always making sure we “got our stories straight.” No, I didn’t see Smith hit the guy, Sarge . . . No, Lieutenant, that dent in the fender was already there . . . I didn’t hear Jones say a word to the complainant . . . Well, yeah, Martin choked him out, but the guy kicked him in the balls first . . . Yes, your honor, we saw the gun before we searched him . . .
I don’t remember actually lying on the stand. But I do remember composing some “creative” arrest reports. Every drunk I ever arrested, for example, whether hammered or sober, walked with a staggered gait, viewed the world through bloodshot eyes, and had about his breath and person an odor characteristic of an alcoholic beverage.
If I’d not undergone a near-religious conversion at the end of my rookie year, the result of that ethical prosecutor shocking me into a new habit of honesty, there’s no telling how many of these bad lies I would have told. Before getting fired.
From 1969 to 2000 I was a police supervisor, manager, or executive. In all that time I fired or influenced the firing of hundreds of cops for incompetence, major policy violations, or crimes. I’m guessing anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of the policy violators would have survived—if only they’d told the truth. To this day, I’m amazed at the numbers of police officers who, caught in an infraction, lie, and cling to their lies, until they get sacked—for dishonesty, not for backing their police car into a light pole.
Many chiefs, burned by bad-lying cops, have told their force: Tell a lie and you’re history. This “zero tolerance” policy is intended to drive home the moral imperative of honesty in one’s professional communication. It’s a worthy goal, but zero tolerance often backfires, serving, paradoxically, to institutionalize deceit and dishonesty.
Most cops, especially rookies, are in love with the job. They can’t imagine doing any other kind of work. It becomes their identity: what they live for, who they are. And because most police agencies embrace a chickenshit disciplinary process, their cops live in constant fear of being reprimanded, suspended, or fired, even for an honest mistake. It’s important to understand that the first impulse of a lot of otherwise good and decent cops is to lie when called on the carpet.
As a captain, I once questioned one of my officers about his having witnessed an act of excessive force. The moment he answered I knew he was covering for a fellow cop. “I have a problem with your answer, John.”
> “What do you mean, Captain.”
“I mean I don’t think you’re being truthful here.”
“But I am. I’m telling the truth.” I felt like his father, or his junior high school vice principal. And I’m sure he felt like a kid. But the truth was non-negotiable.
“Just so we’re clear: If you’re lying to me I’m going to see to it that you’re fired.”
“But, Cap . . .”
“Here’s what I want you to do, John. Go home, now. Think about your answers. Come back tomorrow, same time. I’m going to ask the same question.”
“But . . .”
“Leave. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He came in to my office the next day. And told the truth. I ended up reprimanding him for failing to intervene in the excessive force incident (which, truth be told, was not an egregious case), and not being forthcoming initially. But he kept his job. And learned an important lesson.
Peer pressure in every line of work is intense. In police work it can be all-consuming. You have to rely on your fellow officers to back you. A cop with a reputation as a snitch is one vulnerable police officer, likely to find his or her peers slow to respond to requests for backup—if they show up at all. A snitch is subject to social snubbing. Or malicious mischief, or sabotage (typically directed at his or her locker or his or her automobile). This peer pressure is childish and churlish, but it’s real. Few cops can stand up to it.
That’s why the second shot at truth-telling (“Is that your final answer?”) makes sense. And zero tolerance does not. The exception to this second-chance rule? When an officer lies on a report or raises his or her right hand, swears to tell the truth, and then lies. When that happens its too late for a second chance. Dismissal from the force is the only option.