Breaking Rank

by Norm Stamper

  But those numbers don’t tell the real story. Police work is a very risky business. One that records over 57,000 assaults on police officers each year, resulting in thousands of injuries. It is also the most “emotionally dangerous” occupation in the country. Air traffic controllers might mount a good case, but when’s the last time you heard of one of them getting shot on duty? Tree cutting may produce a higher death rate, but mortality on the job is less “personal”—like falling from seventy feet up (and hitting the ground at forty-six miles an hour) versus being shot to death.

  Police officers live with the possibility of sudden, violent death every moment of their working lives.

  On a Sunday afternoon, six and a half months after slain police officers Timothy Ruopp and Kimberly Tonahill were buried (see chapter 4), a San Diego patrol officer stopped several young black men in Encanto, a neighborhood in southeast San Diego. A scuffle broke out between Officer Donovan Jacobs and twenty-three-year-old Sagon Penn, a martial arts expert. The two fell to the ground. Jacobs jumped on the suspect’s chest. Moments later, SDPD agent Tom Riggs, in the company of a civilian ride-along, Sarah Peña Ruiz, showed up to help. Penn, flat on his back, wrestled Jacobs’s pistol from its holster, knocked the officer back, and fired at Riggs who was approaching from several feet away. Riggs fell to the ground. Penn then turned and shot Jacobs. As both officers lay wounded, Penn walked to Riggs’s car where he saw Peña Ruiz seated on the passenger side. He reached into the car and shot her. He then got into Jacobs’s police car, drove over Jacobs’s wounded body, and sped to his grandfather’s house.

  I was having dinner with a friend in North Park when I got the page. Twenty minutes later I was at the scene. The life-flight helicopter had just landed, its blades still rotating. Firefighters and medics hovered over Riggs. They gave him CPR, bandaged him, filled him full of tubes, lifted him onto a gurney. As they made their way past me, I brushed my hand over his head. “Tommy” was the son of Charlie Riggs, one of my sergeants at the academy back in the seventies. Charlie’s boy did not look good.

  Appearances can be deceiving, I told myself. But years of observing near-dead bodies offered little hope. Still, I prayed and prayed for him to pull through.

  I was about halfway to the hospital when I got word that Riggs was DOA. I changed direction and headed toward the east county hospital where Jacobs lay in critical condition. One officer was already gone, there seemed to be little hope the other would make it. I stood by Jacobs’s bed for hours, making somber small talk with the cops who penetrated, one or two at a time, the hospital’s protocol. Sometime after midnight the officer’s condition improved. Doctors were guardedly hopeful.

  I drove home to Solana Beach, heartsick once again. The day’s toll: one cop deceased, another in critical condition, run over by his own car and left for dead, an innocent observer who, while she would survive her flesh wound, would never be the same.*

  Three days later I met with my captains in a sun-drenched conference room in Qualcom Stadium. I hadn’t slept much in the past seventy-two hours. I was anxious, afraid that Tommy’s death would not be the last, that the next was just around the corner.

  The city was in the middle of a long run of officer fatalities: ten killed in the line of duty in eight years, the highest mortality rate for any police department in the country. Privately, I’d come to the conclusion that too many of our cops were simply unfit for the job. That’s not a judgment you announce to your officers, but deep in my heart I knew it to be true. And I felt personally responsible. I was the patrol chief during the time that three of those cops went down. And I’d taught all ten at the academy.

  In truth, several of the officers hadn’t stood a chance. Ron Ebeltoft and Keith Tiffany were ambushed in 1981 when they responded to a neighborhood dispute. They’d just gotten out of their cars when they were dropped in their tracks by a mentally disturbed man with a high-powered rifle (who’d been warring with a neighbor over a rosebush and a property line). Kirk Johnson had pulled up next to a parked San Diego sheriff’s vehicle for a friendly, cross-jurisdictional chat when without warning he was shot in the face. Behind the wheel of the sheriff’s car: the joyriding seventeen-year-old stepson of a sheriff’s sergeant who’d dressed up in his stepdaddy’s uniform, including a .357 magnum revolver. The kid had panicked when the PD unit pulled up alongside him.

  But what of the others? Patrol Officer Dennis Allen had been fooled into thinking a suspect was armed with only a knife when the man pulled a handgun from the back of his waistband and shot him dead.* And Ruopp and Tonahill in Grape Street Park? Had those two officers been adequately trained? Were they guided by sound policies and procedures? Were they equipped properly? Were they sufficiently alert? Had they practiced sound safety procedures that awful night? No. No to each question. Their deaths could easily have been prevented. I was certain of it. I took it out on my captains.

  “Look, goddamn it, these officers work for you! Are they trained and equipped and able to do the job? Do you know them? Do you know their strengths, their weaknesses? Do you have confidence in them?” Their blank expressions only made me angrier. “Consider this an order: Every cop who works for you will have the street smarts, the mental toughness, the physical fitness and upper-body strength for this job. Your job is to see to it that each and every one of your cops makes it home at end of shift. Understood?”

  Upper-body strength? What else was that but a reference to women officers? It was, in fact, an implicit reference to Kimberly Tonahill. (A lot of our people never knew what the chief and I had learned the night we went to the Tonahill residence to give her mom the news. Kimberly had been to two funerals within a week’s time, the second on the day of her own death, two of her dearest friends having committed suicide. Don’t let anyone tell you a cop can just “shake off” something like that and hit the streets fully alert. Cops are human, like everyone else.) Was Tonahill strong enough and tough enough to be on duty that night? Was she strong enough and tough enough to be a cop? I had my doubts.

  I bow to no one in my support for women police officers. But I wanted my captains to understand that under no circumstances was it okay to put a cop out there who couldn’t pull his—or her—own weight.

  After the meeting Winston Yetta, my central division captain, approached me. Yetta was one of my favorite people. We’d worked the same beat on overlapping watches when I was a rookie. He’d taught me a lot about good police work, especially how to talk to people. He evidently thought it was time for remedial training.

  “You’re not the only one hurting, you know.”

  “What?”

  “We’re all hurting.”

  I apologized to Yetta, and later to my other captains. But, this was no time for a pity party—or a guilt fest. It was time to stop our cops from getting killed.

  Bill Kolender accepted my proposal for an officer safety task force. A big one, with dozens of police officers, defensive tactics and firearms instructors, civilian analysts, legal experts—a total of eighty-five members. We would break down into groups and examine in detail every facet of officer safety and survival: the department’s philosophy of policing; policies and procedures; whom we were hiring, and why and how; staffing levels and scheduling; safety equipment; training; safety inspections and controls; and critical incident critiques. We all took the pledge in our search for truth: no sacred cows; no getting defensive; egos and ranks checked at the door.

  Every subject was critical, but none raised more hackles than “department philosophy.”

  Shortly after Kolender became chief in the mid-1970s, the senior staff went off for a retreat. They affirmed, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, their commitment to a “humanistic” approach to policing, to “community-oriented” and “participatory” management of the department, to an “open” style of communication and decision making.

  Even though as a captain I hadn’t been invited to the Big Boys’ retreat, I’d worked closely with Bob Burgreen, a deputy chief at
the time, and with Kolender. Kolender was my “patron.” I was his unofficial speechwriter, composing eulogies for fallen officers, and his not very secret confidant. We three were among the most “liberal” cops in the country. Our enlightened philosophy had found its way into training syllabi, department policies and procedures, just about everything official. And our open, humanistic, progressive worldview had become the “company line.” What did the rank and file think of all this? They thought it was all a bunch of happy horseshit.

  It was no surprise when the first meeting of the philosophy committee exploded into angry denunciations of department policies—and of those of us who wrote or promoted them: We were more interested in “PR” than officer safety; we automatically took the side of citizens who beefed cops for aggressive crime fighting; we bent over backward to protect the civil liberties of pukes, assholes, hairballs, and assorted other lowlifes—even as we would sell out a cop in a heartbeat; we handcuffed our officers with restrictions on use of force, and on force-reporting requirements; we deadened their enthusiasm with nitpicking discipline; we mortified them in the eyes of their peers in other agencies with all our non-cop fancy talk of “community” this and “humanistic” that. Daryl Gates—now there was a real police chief. And LAPD—there was a real police department.

  I’d written myself a one-word note before the meeting and stuffed it in my pocket. Listen! it said. Throughout the meeting I fingered the scrap of paper nonstop, willing the word to travel up my arm and into my brain. I did listen. Empathetically, if not always sympathetically. I heard cops making complete sense, from their point of view. They were bone honest. They were “open” in their communication.

  Until the very end I was doing fine, honoring my pocketed admonition, gaining insights into certain policy changes we might need to make. But when “Larry Johnston,” a patrol officer, informed the group that SDPD was inferior to the National City Police Department, I almost lost it. I knew the cops in my old hometown. I knew, as did everyone else in the room, that their chief had recently boasted of hiring San Diego’s rejects—cops we’d fired for documented cases of racism and brutality! This was just too much.

  “That’s a crock of shit, Johnston, and you know it. You can’t really believe National City’s a better police department.”

  “Let’s just say their chief’s got balls.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. The man lets his cops be cops. He backs them when they take action. He doesn’t apologize when they generate a little heat.”

  “Such as?”

  “You know, when they have to get a little rough out there. He doesn’t get all bent out of shape about people’s ‘civil rights.’ ”

  “So he looks the other way when his cops break the law?”

  “No! Well . . . yeah. Maybe. I don’t mean break the law. I’m just saying sometimes you have to bend it out there in the real world. Get creative. Let the pukes know who’s boss. We shouldn’t have to live in fear that if some asshole beefs us for doing our jobs the chief won’t back us. That’s all I’m saying.”

  I gave him a short, faintly condescending lecture on the Bill of Rights. He shot right back, “That’s all fine and dandy, Chief. But you’re not out there getting your ass shot at. Are you?”

  “Touché.” In fact, I’d never had my ass shot at (neither had he, for that matter) but his statement did bring us back to the subject: namely, cops dropping like flies in our town, and how to put a stop to it.

  I remembered a conversation we’d had in the chief’s office just weeks before the Ruopp-Tonahill killings. Another deputy chief mentioned he’d been a cop for over thirty years and couldn’t remember the last time he’d pulled his gun, if in fact he’d ever pulled it. The damn thing might as well have been superglued inside his holster. “You’d probably be dead today,” I’d said, reflecting on all the guns I’d seen and heard about in recent years.

  By the mid-seventies it seemed that every other car our officers stopped had a gun in it. And every other family beef, too. And every interaction with bangers and drug dealers. But I understood where my colleague was coming from. Hell, when I went through the academy it had been thirty-seven years since a San Diego cop had been slain in the line of duty. No wonder we were “out of touch.” Our world had been different, certainly far less deadly, from the world of today’s beat cops.

  “Look,” I told Johnston. “There’s no way we’re going to ignore the Constitution. And we’re not about to stop taking citizen complaints, or investigating them. That said, what can we do to back you, to help you make it home safely?”

  “Easy,” he said. “Make safety a goddamn priority around here. Make it as important as PR. You guys are always talking about ‘professional conduct,’ and ‘treating people with dignity and respect,’ and, like you said, ‘encouraging community feedback.’ Hell, you even cooperate with the media.” He spat out the word. “You tell them more than you tell us. Well, how about talking to us more? How about thinking and talking and doing something about officer safety? And when it comes to training and equipment, how about putting your money where your mouth is?”

  He couldn’t have been more correct in his analysis. We’d created an appalling imbalance in our administrative philosophy, and in our priorities. In our noble, concerted effort to “humanize” both the workplace and relations between cops and citizens, we’d paid criminally insufficient attention to the most primitive imperative of our cops: the need to survive. We had taken officer safety for granted.

  Part of my personal failure on this front was borne of a belief that we had too many paranoid cops (in the popular, not the clinical meaning of the term)—police officers who failed to do the job because they were excessively fearful. Obsessed with personal safety, they put their own well-being above that of the citizenry. My thoughts on the topic have not changed.

  One unavoidable aspect of the job, no matter how much attention the agency pays to safety, is risk. It galls me to hear of a police officer who observes, say, a man beating a woman—and who refuses to drive forty feet down the block and stop the guy unless he’s got backup. By the time backup arrives that woman could be dead. A police officer who lets that happen is a lousy, yellow-bellied, chickenshit excuse of a cop.

  (Years later, one of my staunchest Seattle detractors, a grizzled detective, seemed to agree with me on this point. During a brief lull in the World Trade Organization [WTO] riots we passed each other in the police garage. With a look of genuine disgust on his face, he told me he was sick and tired of cops pissing and moaning about taking rocks and bottles on the streets downtown. “Hell, we faced a lot worse in my day [a time when antiwar riots occurred regularly in Seattle, when banks were being bombed to smithereens, when violent demonstrators were taking it out on cops]. It was just us against them. We didn’t have all this ninja shit—ballistic helmets, shields, vests. Shin guards, for chrissakes . . .” I reminded him how bad it was out there on the streets. “Ah, they’re still a bunch a pussies,” he said as got into his car and drove off. As usual, he’d overstated his case. As usual, he couldn’t resist a sexist allusion. As usual, there was a kernel of truth to his rant.)

  Our safety task force, under the skillful direction of Commander Mike Rice, researched everything that had to do with officer safety. Members traveled to numerous other police agencies, including those in Los Angeles and L.A. County, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Phoenix, Oklahoma City, and most other San Diego County departments including, yes, National City. They visited the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training and returned with several officer-safety nuggets.

  They also spent time in San Quentin. As executive director of the mayor’s crime commission a few years earlier, I’d witnessed prison inmates buffing up physically, as they do in most prisons. But these guys were also drilling one another endlessly on how to disarm and kill cops. (I couldn’t believe it when prison officials told us they’d been ordered by the courts to allow it. It was the in
mates exercising their First Amendment rights.)

  When we were finished, some twenty-two weeks and 235 committee and subcommittee meetings later, we had produced 119 recommendations for improving officer safety. One hundred and two were quickly approved. Within a year all but thirteen had been fully implemented. Not bad for a large, sluggish, political, paramilitary bureaucracy like ours.

  Indirectly related to the task force effort, I’d assigned John Morrison, a bright, sharp-tongued lieutenant, to reenact on video the Grape Street Park shootings. Using police employees (including in the “starring” role a beat cop who looked uncannily like Joselito Cinco), Morrison and his crew made a remarkable film. Hard to watch for its graphic reminder of the tragedy, it showed clearly what went wrong that foggy night in September 1984. Out of the project came a new department policy, new training, and a new method for handling such “routine” interactions. We called it “Contact & Cover,” and insisted that every officer follow its dictates. Law enforcement agencies all over the country requested and received a copy of the video. I would bet my own life that “Contact & Cover”* has saved the lives of police officers and citizens.

  Three other task force—inspired improvements stand out: (1) the development of an intensive eighty-hour block of officer survival training at the academy—realistic “experiential” instruction that far surpassed the traditional “defensive tactics” and “arrest and control techniques” taught previously; (2) the burial of the “low-bid” mentality that had characterized city purchasing to that point, and the naming of a new safety officer whose sole responsibility was to search for, purchase, and oversee the maintenance of the finest possible safety equipment—without regard to cost; and (3) the adoption of a four-day workweek.