Breaking Rank

by Norm Stamper

  While my clear preference is that cops look fit, feel fit, and be fit, I can’t shake the thought that at least some of my partiality is the product of pure prejudice. Since shedding my own surplus weight I’ve sized up obese cops as slothful, undisciplined.

  But I’m also forced to admit that some of the best cops I’ve ever worked with, including two police chiefs, were overweight. Substantially, conspicuously overweight. But they were fully competent police officers who could (and did) pass job-related physical fitness tests—a standard and a practice I’m not wishy-washy about, at all. Plus, these cops were sensitive, compassionate, energetic, altogether decent people. So I guess what I’m saying is I’d take one of those fat cops over twenty slender, supercilious “recruitment poster” pretty boys and girls any day.

  * SDPD continues to provide incentives. Its FIT (“Fitness, Image, Training”) program tests body fat, cardiovascular recovery, strength, and flexibility.

  THE POLICE DEPARTMENT

  CHAPTER 16

  DEMILITARIZING THE POLICE

  Sgt. First Class “Arnold Davis” and his squad are on a mission to locate and take out a machine gunner who’s pinned down half a platoon for the better part of a day. Darkness has descended. Night goggles in place, Davis and his men crawl through a desert dotted with darkened shacks and landmines. They flank the nest where the machine gunner is hiding. Davis signals for two of his men to leapfrog their way behind the nest, avoiding potential crossfire, and for the others to spread out and provide cover fire as necessary. The two soldiers work their way behind the nest, toss a hand grenade into it, and end the threat.

  Police Officer “Dan Barry,” while on routine patrol at three in the morning, spots a suspicious vehicle midway down an alley. The car, its lights off but its dome light on, is parked outside the back door of an electronics store. As Barry reaches for the mike to call for backup, a white male in his thirties rushes out of the store, a duffel bag in each hand. The suspect spots the police car, drops the bag in his right hand, and reaches for his waistband. Barry, gun drawn, aims at the suspect and orders him to freeze. The suspect complies, and Barry hooks him up. The officer collects and impounds evidence—including the .380 handgun the suspect had been reaching for—then writes extensive crime and arrest reports. Later that morning, he calls the shop owners on his beat, with whom he had been meeting for over a month, to give them the good news.

  THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN A soldier on the outskirts of Baghdad and a beat cop in Schenectady are noteworthy. The mission of soldiers is to win battles on foreign soil, the mission of police officers is to keep the peace in America’s cities. More to the point, a soldier follows orders for a living, a police officer makes decisions for a living. Therein resides the justification for a radical reconstruction of America’s police agencies.

  Many Americans view their local PD as an occupational force—repressive, distant, arrogant. It’s no wonder: their police department operates within the framework of a paramilitary bureaucracy, a structure that fortifies that image and promotes the behavior. Your local PD takes raw material, the average police recruit drawn from your own community, and molds him or her into a soldier-bureaucrat, starting in the academy.

  That rigid, top-down, highly centralized, militarily oriented “command and control” system simply does not work for policing—not in America, not in our multicultural, ostensibly pluralistic, democratic society. The paramilitary bureaucracy, or “PMB,” as I’ve referred to it in my notes over the years, is a slow-footed, buck-passing, blame-laying, bullying, bigotry-fostering institutional arrangement, as constipated by tradition and as resistant to change as Mel Gibson’s version of the Catholic Church. I cannot imagine other essential reforms in policing—improved crime-fighting, safety and morale of the force, the honoring of constitutional guarantees—without significant structural transformation.

  The following is a rational and objective examination of the advantages and disadvantages of the police paramilitary bureaucracy.

  A RATIONAL AND OBJECTIVE EXAMINATION OF THE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF THE POLICE PARAMILITARY BUREAUCRACY (PMB)

  ADVANTAGES

  DISADVANTAGES

  Gives cops a chance to play soldier

  Reduces crime-fighting effectiveness

  Dampens enthusiasm for risk-taking

  Distances police from community

  Breeds ignorance and arrogance

  Discourages creativity and imagination

  Slows pace and quality of decision-making

  Encourages dishonesty

  Tolerates sloth

  Wastes time and money

  Cultivates a culture of deceit

  Protects incompetence within the ranks

  Creates sinecures within management

  Rewards machismo

  Winks at abuses of civil liberties

  Invites the wrong kind of police candidates

  Promotes obsequious ass-kissers

  Teaches low tolerance of ambiguity

  Demands blind, often misplaced loyalty

  Supports heavy-handed conduct

  Hides mistakes

  Accepts excuses

  Institutionalizes mediocrity

  Laughs at bigotry

  Crushes differences in worldviews

  Homogenizes employee diversity

  Gags, censures, or exiles internal critics

  Installs barriers to effective communication

  Undermines officer safety

  Sniffs at “family-friendly” employee policies

  Fosters corruption

  Rejects accountability

  Snubs community activists

  Stonewalls the media

  Ignores excellent performance

  Disregards constructive employee advice

  Does violence to employee morale

  Safeguards the police “code of silence”

  I think you have to agree that I’ve been fair and balanced in my presentation of the pros and cons of the PMB. It is a system I ran afoul of often, even as I railed against it during my thirty-four-year career. In the waning moments of my time in San Diego I decided to take one final, bloody stand against it.

  It was 1992. SDPD chief Bob Burgreen had asked me, as his number-two guy, to conduct a management audit of the department, and to “concentrate on our warts.” To no one’s surprise, a “lack of communication” surfaced as our biggest (internal) problem. Well, did I have an answer to that: demilitarize the place! And start by civilianizing the titles of mid-ranking department bosses—which I theorized had a deleterious effect on communication.

  I knew there’d be a shit-rain of opposition—military titles are a cultural icon in civilian policing, as much a part of the cop culture as mustaches, sidearms, and doughnuts. But, win or lose, I believed it was important to air the rationale behind “demilitarization.” I hoped to encourage a departmentwide dialogue on the principles of a more “democratic,” less militaristic police force. And since language structures reality, I was convinced that our military nomenclature stood between us and the community, between the brass and rank-and-file cops. I walked into Burgreen’s office to let him know of my intentions.

  “You’re going to what?”

  “Recommend a change in the titles of ‘sergeant,’ ‘lieutenant,’ and ‘captain.’ ”

  “What do you propose we call them?” Burgreen and I had been sergeants, lieutenants, captains. We knew what it meant to stitch stripes to our uniform sleeves, to pin the single bar, then the double bars to our collars. We could remember the pride we felt in having earned the insignia.

  “I don’t know yet. I was kind of looking at the federal model.” The FBI calls its entry-level people “special agents.” Its first-line supervisors are “supervising agents.” The head of an office is a “special agent in charge.” That might not be so bad. Maybe if the cops understood they were special . . .

  I certainly wasn’t going to recommend the “Lakewood Model.”

  Incorpor
ated in 1970, Lakewood, Colorado, had the rare opportunity to build its police department, and its vocabulary, from the ground up. Its officials, including Pierce Brooks, Lakewood PD’s first chief, were driven to create a “user-friendly” agency whose members would be, in form as well as substance, part of and not apart from the community. Their beat cops would be “agents.” Sergeants would be “field advisors,” lieutenants “senior field advisors,” and captains “agents in charge.” They’d sport gray slacks, light blue shirts, and navy blazers.

  It didn’t last long. Patrol cops are still called agents, but as early as 1973 their bosses had been permanently rebranded: sergeants, lieutenants, captains. Seems other PDs didn’t know what the hell an “advisor” was. Their blazers wound up at the Goodwill, replaced by sharp, traditional police blues. Score one for common sense on that last one.

  “The feds? Hmm.” Burgreen conjured the gathering clouds. “Why risk what’s left of your credibility with the troops? Why recommend something you know is not going to fly? Why allow your critics to . . . Ah ha! You sly bastard. It’s a stalking horse, right? Get everybody in a lather over ‘demilitarization’ so your other recommendations won’t seem so ‘extreme.’ ” I laughed. It was a plausible theory—I had decided to recommend the “flattening” of SDPD’s tortuously long chain of command by eliminating two ranks. And to impose “quality assurance audits” of the work of top-ranking personnel. You could see where these ideas might be a little threatening.

  “No. I’m serious,” I said. “Look, I know you’re not going to buy it, but let’s just put it out there for two or three months.” Until now, my advocacy of the idea had been confined to classrooms and conferences. “Let’s see what our cops have to say.”

  Burgreen laughed.

  “You know damn well what they’re going to say.” But my chief always did love a spirited debate. “Two months. That’s it.”

  That week we announced all my recommendations, injecting “demilitarization” directly into the bloodstream of the department. Would the body reject it, or, miracle of miracles, accept it?

  We wanted more communication? Well, we got it. People throughout the department, and beyond, couldn’t wait to express themselves. Critics of demilitarization shrieked, howled, chortled, guffawed. They penned hate mail—from down the hall and from across the country. They wrote derisive editorials, sketched mocking cartoons. The San Diego Union-Tribune, while lauding the other twenty-one recommendations of my audit, suggested that “Normanclature” be deep-sixed, posthaste.

  One of my cops addressed a letter to me in my capacity as editor of The Corner Pocket, our in-house administrative rag:

  Dear Editor,

  If only Chief Stamper could hear the jokes and ridicule . . . from the working cop, he would really understand how out of touch he is with police work. While most of the recommendations are viable, changing names to fit the esoteric thoughts of Chief Stamper will do nothing in our effort to relate with the public . . . . We are a paramilitary unit at war with gang members who carry automatic weapons. Stamper, if you really want to be a CEO of a [corporation] then you take one of those “Golden Handshake” retirements and go work in the Silicon Valley. I aspire to be a Police Captain not a Division Director . . .

  That was cool, but my favorite less-than-enthusiastic commentary came from a sergeant who wrote an article for The Corner Pocket. In it she offered a new lexicon for just about every noun used in police work. My position, for example, she labeled “One Who Oversees Division Directors, Assistant Directors, Assistant Division Directors, Supervising Agents, and Agents.” She put it on a nameplate and sent it to me. I kept it on my desk throughout our “dialogue” on demilitarization.

  I wasn’t without supporters. Former U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese called to offer solace and, to my surprise, an endorsement of the plan. He always thought frontline police officers deserved more respect—from their bosses, mostly. And Joe Wambaugh phoned in his encouragement: “What the hell were you thinking, Norm?”

  “What, you don’t like the idea?”

  “I didn’t say that. I think it’s a terrific idea, I really do. But you want to model things after federal law enforcement? You know the locals never get along with the feds.” He suggested the British system (constables, chief constables, and so forth). With the origins of American policing traceable to the U.K., he was probably on to something. The British titles had a more, what did he call it, historic, romantic ring.

  After the initial shock, many of our employees settled down and actually started talking about the substance and the symbolism of the proposal. But I still couldn’t walk ten feet without running into another explanation of why it was such a bad idea.

  When Burgreen ripped the life-support needle out, true to his word, sixty days later, it was time for a last check of vital signs. How had the cop culture taken to this transfusion of “new blood”? Was the lieutenant who’d come to see me a week before the drop-dead date typical? A bright, up-and-coming individual, he told me, “When you first raised the issue I thought, ‘Man, the cheese has finally slipped off Stamper’s cracker.’ I thought it was the goofiest idea I’d ever heard. But the more I thought about it the more I realized, hey, we’re not the military, we’re cops. We’re community cops. We ought to have titles that make sense to the community. What does ‘lieutenant’ or ‘sergeant’ mean to the average citizen?”

  The lieutenant’s change of heart brought the number of converts up to approximately eleven. Given that we had 2,800 employees, I guess you could say it was an idea whose time had not yet come.

  “Demilitarization” may be fine in theory, said the cops. But what of the real-world challenges of barricaded suspects and riots and other emergencies that crop up in police work? These incidents require military-like tactics, communication, and compliance. And what about esprit de corps and discipline? Don’t these matters cry out for retention of the paramilitary system? No, they do not. They represent issues that must be resolved in the construction of what I’ll call a “PPO,” or Progressive Police Organization.

  We underestimate the intelligence, creativity, and adaptability of our communities, and of our police officers and their leaders, if we assume they can’t get together and build a new system. The PPO would retain and strengthen SWAT (special weapons and tactics) units. It would continue to provide (improved) first-responder training to all emergencies, including terrorist attacks. It would continue to field better equipped cops in police uniforms, driving police cars. Officers and all other employees at all levels would continue to be held to (even higher) standards of performance and conduct. These real-world demands—as well as the need for the coercive powers of government to be both conspicuous and authoritative—require that certain critical traditions be preserved.

  What, then, would change under the new and improved PPO? Just about everything else:

  •The steep hierarchy would be dramatically flattened to improve the timeliness of communication and the speed and quality of decision making. Generous severance packages (handed out in both San Diego and Seattle) ensure a safe landing for those losing their management jobs. The costs are more than offset by long-term savings.

  •Decision-making authority would be reduced to the lowest possible level, not merely in theory but in policy-driven practice.

  •Rank-and-file police officers and civilian employees would participate freely in policymaking, program development, priority setting, and other issues, including “oversight” activities, that affect them—and about which they often have more firsthand knowledge than others in the department, including top brass.

  •Citizens would be involved in the same arenas as rank-and-file officers. They, too, would sit on oversight boards that investigate and/or review citizen complaints, monitor intelligence gathering, and render judgments on police shootings.

  •The creation of effective communication vehicles would be mandated (sessions with the chief, cross-bureau meetings, community forums, and teleco
nferencing), and the timely exchange of relevant information would, instead of being left to chance, become nonnegotiable.

  •Standards of performance and conduct would be required for all employees at all levels. Individuals who exceed those standards would be recognized, tangibly if not financially (time off with pay is a terrific reward for today’s overworked, often underpaid aces). Individuals falling shy of these standards would be required, within a given period of time (say 30, 45, or 60 days), and with proffered assistance, to improve their performance and/or conduct. Or be fired.

  •Police officers would be treated like adults. Discipline would be two-pronged: punishment for misconduct, nonpunitive assistance for honest mistakes or performance problems. “Progressive” discipline would be used except in cases of broomstick rectal exams, sex with teenage explorer scouts, or other such egregious behavior—in such instances the officer would be fired, prosecuted, and a photo, suitable for framing, provided to all media outlets.