by Norm Stamper
By framing these traits in behavioral terms, and by developing new measures and instruments to test for them, screeners can do a much better job of keeping both the goons and the “naïve, overly trusting, easily duped” out of a police uniform.
There are four basic issues on which the law enforcement community is divided when it comes to picking new cops. How old is old enough? How much education is necessary? Is military experience an advantage? And, how much dope-smoking is too much?
The typical minimum age requirement is twenty-one, with a few agencies, like Chicago, setting it at twenty-three. But a handful of cities allow eighteen-year-olds to become cops. Now, that’s just plain stupid. Developmentally, your average teenager is simply not ready to exercise life-and-death decision-making authority. If your city’s officials are putting children in police uniforms, please tell them to stop. If they refuse, recall them.
Most agencies require a high school diploma or GED equivalent. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, only 15 percent of local PDs require some form of higher education, with sixty semester units the norm.
In 1979, I proposed that the city require all SDPD candidates to have an associate degree or sixty semester units or more of higher education from an accredited college or university. I believed then and still do that higher education, preferably in the liberal arts, gives a candidate an edge over a non-college-educated applicant. It’s not so much the product of the learning but the process of matriculation that produces the advantage: setting out a program, declaring a major, picking courses, enduring the registration nightmare, getting up in the morning for classes or attending at night after work, reading dense texts, writing term papers, questioning professors, associating with people and ideas that force you to think, taking midterms and finals. The politics of higher education, the discipline of learning how to learn—that was the most useful thing about higher ed. Not the degree, not the units.
The city accepted the proposal. But two years later we had to abandon the requirement when the pool of eligible ethnic minorities all but dried up. (The number of women candidates was unaffected.) For college-educated ethnic minorities, police work simply couldn’t compete with the pay or the cachet of the private sector. Or was it because of the “blue-collarness” of police work, or the image of policing in the black community? Or the dangers and strains of life as a cop? We dropped the requirement, the pool filled back up.
It’s a tough call, but unless a department in a multicultural community is able to reflect that community’s diversity within its ranks, I’d oppose a post–high school educational requirement. And look for ways to “incentivize” a career in policing.
I said earlier that tenured cops in big cities ought to be bringing home $100K a year. But what do they make? According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the average salary of a police officer in 2002 was $42,270. The middle 50 percent earned between $32,300 and $53,500. The highest 10 percent earned more than $65,330 and the lowest 10 percent less than $25,220. An NYPD officer makes $54,048. (Elsewhere in the state, in Suffolk and Nassau Counties, top pay has reached almost $85,000—with some Suffolk County cops bringing home over $100,000 when you throw in longevity pay, shift differentials, and other add-ons. This, of course, has made NYPD a choice training ground for those other agencies.)
A lot of people think being a cop and being a soldier are interchangeable, that honorably discharged military personnel would make super cops. Just because they’ve served in the armed forces and worn a uniform. This is nonsense, of course.
There are huge differences in the everyday existence of a soldier vis-à-vis a cop (not to mention profound variances in the geography and political systems against which each occupation is set). Also, being a soldier in wartime is a hell of a lot more dangerous than being a city cop. Military personnel are trained to kill, to inflict pain, and some can’t seem to turn it off. Those four or five soldiers who killed their wives at Ft. Bragg are a case in point, the soldiers at Abu Ghraib another. While it would be both morally wrong and shortsighted to generalize based on these horrors, it does suggest the need for a rigorous check for such tendencies during the selection process.
My position is simple: judge each candidate, with or without military experience, against the standards set for the job. Some of the best cops I worked with were military veterans who brought to the work a maturity, self-discipline, and loyalty to the principles of ethical policing that some nonservice personnel lacked.
Drugs? I remember the day we learned SDPD was going to start accepting candidates who’d smoked pot. It was scandalous! Of course, it was also the late sixties: if the department refused to hire ex-pot smokers we’d have three people sitting in the academy classroom instead of forty.
A few years later, the doors were opened to cokesters. The test was whether you were a user or an “experimenter.” Those who’d tried cocaine had to have been clean and sober for three years. Potheads? Twelve months.
Those standards fluctuated a bit over time, in San Diego and elsewhere, as we coped with the cultural reality that millions of young folk had at least dabbled in a variety of banned substances. We stuck to our guns on certain drugs: no hallucinogens (the literature was full of tales of years-after LSD flashbacks) and no “injectibles.”
Despite my “relaxed” attitude about social drug use I’m rigid on the topic of cops who use. I say just say no: Cities must reject candidates who went far beyond youthful experimentation, or who’ve used recently. They’re not worth the risk.
Bill Kolender used to tell his recruiters, “Bring me good people, damn it! I can’t make chicken soup out of chicken shit.” Picking the right people starts with rounding them up in the first place, and “role model” cops of all colors, both genders, straight and gay do it best.
Critical to the success of police recruitment is specialized training for the recruiters, as well as a modern, well-crafted, adequately financed recruitment or “marketing” strategy. Not to be overlooked in the campaign: officers out on the beat. They are an excellent source of new blood. I gave my cops a day off with pay when they recruited a successful candidate.
Today’s rookies are tomorrow’s sergeants, lieutenants, chiefs. Within four to six years of their hiring, police officers become eligible for promotion to sergeant. Which means, if they make it, they’ll move from doing the work to leading it—the most demanding transition in any upwardly mobile police career. Just as not everyone is cut out to be a cop, not every police officer is supervisory material. As a chief, I saw the picking of a new leader as one of the most important decisions I made.
Similar to most systems, Seattle’s public safety civil service commission gives its police chief and fire chief the authority to pick any promotional candidate who, at the time of an opening, is in the top 5 or top 25 percent of an eligibility list. My predecessor, like most chiefs, found it expedient to go right down the list. It made life easier for him, passing only those candidates widely known to be dipsticks. The Seattle Police Officers Guild certainly favored that approach.
They were most unhappy, by contrast, with my method. I picked, to the best of my ability, the best candidate certified—no matter his or her standing on the certification list. In other words I “collapsed” the vertical list of those certified, making of it a pool of equally eligible (though certainly not equally qualified) candidates. To the union (and to my own top staff, at least at the beginning) this was heresy, a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the civil service merit system.
Let’s examine that “merit” business. Say Mary and Betty take the civil service test for sergeant. It starts with a straightforward paper-and-pencil exam: department policies and procedures, law, hypothetical questions designed to assess knowledge and judgment on crime fighting, field tactics, cultural diversity, interpersonal relations, officer safety, ethical issues, personnel problems, and the like. Mary scores 85.34, Betty 85.35. Next they go before an oral board comprised of a couple of outside agency cap
tains and a representative of the local community. Each of the candidates spends forty minutes alone with the panel. Mary collects a 90.66. Betty opens her envelope to find a score of 91.
In Seattle, there’s one other element to the process: seniority, or “service credits.” (There’s no justification for this provision. Seniority ought to count for nothing when it comes to the selection of department leaders; it’s a terrific tie-breaker when, say, two candidates are otherwise evenly matched—but how often does that happen in the real world?) Since Betty’s been around long enough, she gets a service point. Mary doesn’t.
Even if these three elements—written, oral, service credits—are “weighted” (more points for the written, for example), Betty has clearly beaten Mary on the test. But does her sliver of a 1.35-point edge make her a better candidate than Mary? Is she more meritorious?
Of course not! Where are their scores, Betty’s and Mary’s, for on-the-job performance? Their respective track records, their relative worth to the community, to the organization? There is no better indication of a person’s future behavior than his or her past behavior. Yet, the exalted, century-old civil service focus on “merit” gives exactly zero points for that.
Let’s compare their track records. Betty is a slob, a nose-picking, assscratching, knuckle-dragging ne’er-do-well with lousy work habits, major body odor, and Jack’s secret sauce all over her tie. She walks into roll call at the last nanosecond. Her reports look like they’ve been written with a spoon. She doesn’t speak, she mumbles. She’s a lead-foot on patrol. Her favorite hobbies are washing out crimes in the black community, grousing about department policies and priorities, and working crosswords during SWAT missions. She takes more than the average number of sick days, which invariably fall just before or after her scheduled days off. She consistently pisses off her peers, and is a magnet for citizen complaints. Crime runs rampant on her beat but she has no interest in “partnering” with the community to prevent or solve it.
Mary is sharp, enthusiastic, demonstrably committed to professional police work. She gets to work early, reads up on suspects and incidents on and around her beat. She’s an excellent communicator, on paper and in person. She gets along with, and appreciates, all sorts of people. She’s a strong team player, collaborating with fellow patrol officers, detectives, and citizens. She’s an idea person, always coming up with better ways to get the job done. When she disagrees with the brass she expresses her dissent forcefully but with class, respect. She seizes the initiative, analyzes problems thoughtfully—and solves them. Whether fighting crime or rendering aid, Mary gets the job done. Unlike Betty, she is experienced throughout the organization—and on her beat—as a fine, natural leader.
Alas, none of that stuff counts—Betty’s stuff, Mary’s stuff. There’s not even a nod to this true test of one’s “merit” in Seattle’s Public Safety Civil Service Commission rules or procedures.
Shortly after I got to Seattle I assembled my staff and told them I wanted a report on each candidate certified for promotion. I then required our commanding officers to come in and present to my senior staff the strengths and limitations of each candidate who worked for them. Finally, I harvested the opinions of my senior leaders, asking each of them in turn: If this were your call, whom would you promote? And, why? Then I made my decision.
Not objective! shouted the union. Political! they howled. Unfair! they bellowed.
Bullshit! I countered, in calm, measured terms. I used my system (also used in San Diego and a few other cities) for the entire six years I was chief, the union fighting it all the way.
Funny, the guild was quiescent when I promoted one of their own, Don MacMillan. A white male member of the guild’s board of directors, MacMillan was clearly one of the good guys: smart, seasoned, hardworking, and an outstanding coach of younger officers. He happened to be fourth or fifth on that “vertical” list of “certifieds.” But he was clearly the best leader of the bunch so I made him a sergeant. The president of the guild had the temerity to whisper, unsarcastically, at a meeting, “Good choice, Chief.” Yeah? Where were you when I promoted a more competent woman or ethnic minority ahead of a less competent white male who happened to have a higher civil service score? I’ll tell you where you were. You were clinging to the ceiling of your office, nails planted in the tiles, screaming like a banshee and vowing to haul my ass into to court.
Which you did. In June 2004, the Washington State Supreme Court handed down a ruling against the guild saying, “Chief Stamper always had the discretion to select” from within the pool of certified candidates. An attorney for one of your clients had the extreme poor taste to question my right to promote MacMillan. Don, who’d performed superbly as a sergeant and who’d won the hearts of his squad and many others, died of cancer shortly before I retired. Call me sentimental, but I feel good about having given the man the job, and the recognition, he deserved.
Police unions complain that an assessment of an individual’s on-the-job performance is “subjective.” My response? You bet it is, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
You’re not assessing a lawnmower or a computer. You’re evaluating human beings, men and women engaged in sensitive work that involves other people. Look at men and women in other lines of work: No matter what the field (if it’s not too esoteric), you can usually pick them out, the ones who are really good at what they do.
Police departments must be representative of the communities they serve, and their leaders representative of the PD workforce. The black community, for example, needs to see similar faces, hear familiar voices in order to believe that the local law enforcement agency belongs to them as well as the white community. Black faces in leadership convey the message that the higher echelons are not the exclusive province of white leaders. That means women and ethnic minorities and gay cops on the front lines, women and ethnic minorities and gay cops all the way up to the executive suite. It does not mean promoting a candidate who’s not up to the task.
As much as I fought for women and ethnic minorities and gays and lesbians to make it in our straight, white male–dominated police culture, I would never, ever promote a person I thought would fail.
It’s this philosophy that led the city of Chicago to call me as an expert witness in defending against an anti–affirmative action suit filed by white detectives and supervisors. Unlike California and Washington State, Illinois, to its credit, still allows affirmative action in order to achieve true equal employment opportunity. The city won its case.
Picking and promoting the right person has implications far beyond the moment. An individual cop, an individual supervisor has the power to crush or to affirm life, to tarnish or add luster to the reputation of a police force—for up to twenty-five or thirty years.
That is why I make no apologies for approaching the picking and promoting of people in a fundamentally political way. When would-be cops and would-be leaders ask how they can make themselves more hirable or more “promotable” I tell them: Study the qualifications and requirements first, and work to meet or exceed those requirements. Then study the politics of hiring, the politics of promotion. And master the political as well as the technical aspects of the job.
SDPD’s decision to take a chance on me in 1965 was political. Mayor Norm Rice’s decision to hire me as his police chief in 1994 was political. Everything about policing is ultimately political. Who gets which office: political. Which services are cut when there’s a budget freeze: political. Who’s going to fill the next homicide vacancy: political. Who gets hired, fired, promoted: political, political, political. The challenge for the honest police administrator is to make sure the politics of picking and promoting people is as fair as possible. And as mindful of the greater good of the organization and of the community as possible.
I hire my brother-in-law’s cousin, a certifiable doofus, because he’s got a bass boat I wouldn’t mind borrowing—bad politics. I promote a drinking buddy because he’s a kick in the ass, or becau
se he’s got something on me—bad politics. I pick an individual because he or she will add value to the organization and will serve the community honorably—good politics. It’s the kind of politics I tried to play—even if the best person sat fourth not first on the list.
* A couple of years later I’d sit with polygraph operators in the Coffee Shop where’d they’d regale the booth with tales of torrid affairs between cop wannabes and the Golden Retrievers who loved them, of sexual liaisons with members of the melon family, of Playboys, nooses, masturbation, and . . .
CHAPTER 18
STAYING ALIVE IN A WORLD OF SUDDEN, VIOLENT DEATH
LOGGING IS MORE DANGEROUS. So is fishing (if you value your life do not go crabbing on the Bering Sea in the dead of winter). Meatpacking is more perilous, as is piloting or navigating a plane, constructing or roofing a building, installing electrical power, plowing a field or harvesting crops or driving a truck. All of these occupations, and others, are less safe than police work. In fact, policing doesn’t come close to cracking the Top Ten List of the country’s most dangerous jobs. There are even two other municipal civil service jobs, fire fighting and refuse collection, that experience higher mortality rates than police. With over a million federal, state, and local law enforcement officers, the annual average for cops slain in the line of duty from 1990 to 2000? Sixty-four. Not a bad safety record.