Breaking Rank

by Norm Stamper

  If police work isn’t the most stressful job on the planet, it comes close. Creating a schedule that gave our cops an extra day off each week (in exchange for extending the workday an additional two hours) had become a personal crusade with me. I agreed with my cops who said they needed an extra day to decompress, to come down from the demands of the job. The “10-Plan” was a family-friendly step that could only help in building morale, a factor often overlooked in the search for causes of a department’s poor safety record. A demoralized force is an unsafe force—risky for the cops, and risky for the citizens they serve.

  Taking that last point into account, soon after the task force had completed its work the command staff met in a daylong workshop to consider other ways to boost department morale. Ours was a force of men and women who clearly believed, with ample reason, that they were underappreciated—and understaffed.

  I’d been saying for months that San Diego was a “dangerously under-policed city,” that we had too few cops to get the job done effectively, and safely. My statement won nods from the cops, of course, and from most in the community. But when I made it to a reporter I got a call the next day from the city manager. “Did he quote you accurately?” said Jack McGrory.

  “Yep.”

  “Do me a favor,” he said.

  “What’s that?

  “Don’t say it again.”

  “10-4.” It was okay, he said, for me to tell folks we were “understaffed.” Euphemisms in politics are not only ubiquitous, they’re actually understandable. But they sure suck sometimes.

  One of the outcomes of the command staff workshop was a decision to assert San Diego’s commitment to all things excellent, in officer safety and in service to the community. How? Ken Moller and Dick Toneck, a couple of veteran captains, suggested we announce to the world that we were the best police department in the country. A short time later the entire fleet sported America’s Finest signs.

  Much more administrative work was needed, of course, in order to keep the phrase from being turned into a source of derision rather than pride: We had to sell our sweeping, costly changes in officer safety to the city council.

  It was Bill Kolender’s finest hour. He and Burgreen pored over the officer-safety task force report. Burgreen put his number-crunchers to work, then had a series of sit-downs with Kolender, helping the super-chief polish his presentation to the city council. At the meeting in council chambers Kolender gained and held the attention of the elected officials from start to finish. Not that they weren’t already motivated—San Diego police officer mortality had become a hot political issue. One council member in particular, Mike Gotch, a liberal Democrat, had made officer safety his top priority. The result? Not a blank check, but damn near. From a notoriously stingy city council.

  Within months we had painted our insipid all-white police cars black-and-white, and purchased a slew of other equipment. There was even money (though not nearly enough) in the budget for new police officer positions. With 1.6 officers per thousand citizens versus NYPD’s six per thousand or LAPD’s 2.6 or Seattle’s 2.5, San Diego remains to this day a dangerously under-policed city.

  Edward Conlon in Blue Blood, a riveting first-person account of life in the NYPD, paints a sharply contrasting picture of workplace pressures and demands of patrol officers. In patrol, Conlon would get three or four calls a shift. I remember shagging twenty-four calls in a single eight-hour shift, and averaging twelve or thirteen. Conlon had time to read the paper or a book on the job. His backup, which when summoned would show up in droves, was usually half a minute to a minute away. In San Diego, a city of four hundred square miles, you were lucky, working any of its outlying beats, if your backup arrived within fifteen minutes. Comparing officer mortality rates, which adjusts for department population, it’s far more dangerous being a cop in sunny San Diego than in New York City.

  Even with a woefully understaffed force, those improvements in officer safety really paid off. The number of officers slain in the line of duty since 1985? Three, including one killed, deliberately, in a traffic incident. (Several other San Diego officers have been killed in traffic accidents both on-and off-duty.)

  That’s three too many, of course, but it does show that a police administration that cares about its cops can have a powerful, positive effect on officer mortality rates. And given San Diego’s enviable record of steady crime reductions since that era, I think we can infer a positive relationship between officer safety and crime fighting (not to mention the effects of authentic versus “PR” versions of community policing). So, it’s not just the cops and their families who benefit when police officers’ health, safety, and morale are scrupulously attended to. Everybody wins.

  Having been for years too laid back and ignorant about the issue, I vowed that the safety of my officers would be forevermore my number-one internal priority. (I took this attitude to Seattle where I found cops still packing .38 revolvers, an administrative laxity quickly remedied with .40-caliber Glock semiautos.)

  I forbade myself from ever again uttering something you hear all too often from police brass, as if it’s a cost of doing business: “It’s not a question of if but when another officer gets killed in the line of duty.” That’s a fatalistic, passive way of thinking. It feeds rank-and-file fears of the “inevitability” of on-the-job mortality.

  Most police officer deaths can be prevented, but it’s got to start with excellent training—and a confident attitude. Cops who believe they’re going to get shot, or who believe they’re going to die if they do get shot, need reprogramming. Their outlook should be: Somebody takes a shot at me, I’m going to drop, roll, and fire back. And: If someone is lucky enough to put a bullet in me, I will not die of it. That’s not an expression of “hope.” It’s a survivor’s mentality.

  Officer Johnston, the task force cop who instructed me on the need to think safety, talk safety, deliver safety, was absolutely right. But he was wrong on one important point: He assumed it wasn’t possible to fight crime, be safe, and honor civil liberties.

  I ended that first session of the philosophy committee with an “ethos statement,” that would quickly reverberate throughout the department. I could have put it more delicately, I suppose, but it seemed to work magic with the cops:

  I am a police officer. I’m not here to hurt you, or to embarrass or demean you. Or to violate your rights. I’m here to help. Whether I’m returning your lost child or arresting you for harming a child, I’ll treat you with dignity and respect.

  But know this: I was not placed on this earth to be your victim. I don’t care if you’re the police chief or the mayor or the biggest shot in town, I am not your victim. I don’t care if you “know the chief personally,” I am not your victim. I don’t care how big you are, how menacing you are, I am not your victim. I don’t care if you file a complaint with Internal Affairs, I am not your victim. I am nobody’s victim. So don’t even think about pulling that gun, or that knife.

  I will do you harm only in my own defense or the defense of another. But if it comes to a physical or armed confrontation I will not lose to you.

  In other words, I am not to be fucked with.

  * Jacobs survived, though he was permanently disabled. His justification for the traffic stop and his conduct at the scene were challenged at two separate murder trials. According to eyewitnesses, he had screamed at Penn as he straddled him, raining down blows, “You think you’re bad, nigger? I’m gonna beat your black ass.” (Jacobs acknowledged on the stand using a racial epithet, and it was shown that he’d been counseled for racial insensitivity back in the academy.) Penn’s lawyer claimed his client’s actions were in self-defense, and said of Jacobs that he was an “ideal candidate for the Ku Klux Klan,” a “Doberman pinscher of a cop” whose conduct had sullied the good name of the San Diego Police Department. Jacobs went on to study law during a six-year run of light-duty assignments after the incident. He became an attorney representing police officers in personal injury, wrongful term
ination, defamation, and discrimination suits.

  * The suspect had been released on bail earlier that same day. The charge: attempted murder of a police officer.

  * The task force talked a lot about the need to keep safety procedures confidential, for fear of compromising them. I think a lot of cops go overboard on this issue, but not in this case. Which is why you won’t find an explanation of the actual procedures here.

  CHAPTER 19

  UNDERCOVER

  WHAT DO YOU PICTURE when you think of police undercover work? Narcs, right? Long-haired, unshaven dudes in foul-smelling Harley T-shirts who talk the talk of the streets, work informants, sidle up to dealers, score drugs, and pop the sellers. Indeed, most undercover cops are narcs. But there’s a different breed out there, one that became virtually extinct during the seventies: the police spy who infiltrates political groups, befriends social activists, and reports his findings back to HQ. That’s the kind of spy I was in the late sixties, at the height of antiwar protests, campus uprisings, and civil rights demonstrations.

  Shame being an effective muzzle, I’ve never made this story public until now. But now is an important time to tell it. With antiwar, antiglobalization, antigovernment sentiments and demonstrations nearing a fever pitch, pressures are building to put “narcs” back into the political mix.

  Having resolved in 1967 to mend my evil ways, and having accepted exclusive personal responsibility for transforming American policing, I expanded my crusade to include the rectification of the way my colleagues saw the world—not just their work. They were wrong about Vietnam, gun control, capital punishment. They upheld imperialism, ethnocentrism, fascism, racism, classism, sexism, elitism—and every other flaw I could attach an ism to. They were, I was, part of an occupational army, the oppressive arm of a repressive establishment. We, the police, were “running dogs” of corporate Amerika, defenders of an insidious military-industrial complex, foot soldiers in the war against minorities, the poor, the disenfranchised.

  Reading is a dangerous thing, and I’d been doing a lot of it. When I’d started my studies at Southwestern Community College I didn’t know Schopenhauer from Eisenhower, Aesop from Alsop. But now I was reading everything I could get my hands on, not just sociology, psychology, politics, and criminology but literature: Barth, Grass, O’Connor, Bellow, Hesse, Kafka, and the Russians Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Yevtushenko. I was making up for lost time. Early on, I’d not been a good student.

  My elementary school report cards spoke of my “potential”—and how I was in no immediate danger of realizing it. My reading, writing, and arithmetic skills were all “below standard.” But my biggest problem was behavioral. “Norman continues to be a disruptive influence in class,” wrote Miss Weir, my sixth-grade teacher. She could have saved herself a lot of time if she’d bought a stamp. Every other day, it seemed, she handed me a note to take home to my parents.

  Years later, I was a disruptive influence in the workplace. I remember laying my newfound political consciousness, in all its manifest glory, on a dazed rookie as we drank coffee and he feasted on a chocolate doughnut with sprinkles at the Winchell’s at Fortieth and Meade. I was halfway through my lecture when he got a routine call. “Well, back to work,” he said. “Thanks for the information.” He dumped his coffee and took off.

  “Don’t forget what I said,” I yelled after him.

  The next morning I got a call at home. I was to meet my C.O., Lieutenant Jay Helmick, at Louie’s drive-in in National City. So this is how they do it, I remember thinking. They believe I’m a communist. They’re going to fire me. After only two years on the job. At Louie’s.

  The new Louie’s had just opened at the north end of town. It was indistinguishable from a Denny’s. The old one, a hangout during the days of our R&B band, had looked like a 1930s national park lodge—except for the giant neon faces of a cow and a pig, one pink, the other blue, atop its sweeping dormers. It was open 24/7, served breakfast around the clock, and played host to our countless philosophical / political / musical raps.

  I walked into Louie’s and saw the back of Helmick’s shaved head in a corner booth. Seated in the cop’s spot, facing the entrance, was Ken O’Brien. I’d met O’Brien when he flitted in and out of the Sex Crimes office during my Pink Beret days in Balboa Park (see chapter 26). He was the chief of Intelligence. One look at him and you knew O’Brien didn’t follow orders, he gave them. His passions, known to all, served a view of the world jarringly out of alignment with mine. What was he doing here? What was I doing here? It had all the makings of some kind of an IA investigation.

  “Sit down, Stamper.” Helmick nodded toward the empty space next to him. I slid in. “Here’s the deal,” said O’Brien. “I’m putting you in a deep cover assignment.” His leg was aquiver under the table; he was one of those compulsive leg bouncers who made you think earthquake! if you sat next to him at a poker game. “This isn’t about busting fags. Or sucking up martinis in Mission Valley.” O’Brien had done his homework. (Three other patrol officers and I had just finished a week of undercover at the Hanalei Hotel, dining high on the hog, guzzling upscale booze, smoking Cohibas in the hot tub, and getting careless with our room keys and the “flash rolls” the department had given us. We were looking to bust a prolific room prowler, but all we’d been able to nab was a sixteen-year-old panty burglar who’d fled security from the Motel Six next door.) “You’re going to infiltrate the commies and pinkos at UCSD, and wherever else you find them.” He tried to take me out in a stare-down. Surely he knew my politics, was testing me. I held his stare. “We need to know what they’re up to, their every move.”

  Did he make a distinction between that fringe of lefties who bombed buildings or derailed trains, and those of us who opposed the war, who thought America could do better by its poor and its minorities? Apparently not. “They’re thugs,” he said. “Two-bit thugs hiding behind their goddam ‘ideology.’ Or, they’re daddy’s little rich kids, bored and spoiled rotten. Either way, you’re going learn what they’re up to, whether it’s the Panthers or the long-haired pukes out in La Jolla.” He was particularly scornful of “that commie creep, Marcuse,” which he pronounced Marcoosey.

  Herbert Marcuse, author of One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization, among other works, was born in Berlin in 1898. He left Germany soon after Hitler’s rise to power and lived briefly in Switzerland before coming to the U.S. He became a citizen in 1940, and worked for a time in the government’s Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA. He taught at Columbia, Harvard, and Brandeis before joining the faculty at the University of California at San Diego in the mid-sixties.

  I’d never heard of the guy. I didn’t know he was widely regarded as the Father of the New Left, that his writings had influenced generations of Marxists, and that Angela Davis, also at UCSD, was a protégé.

  The meeting over, Helmick told me I would report to Patrol/third watch (P3) that night, my last shift before disappearing from the department. The “official” word was that I had, indeed, been fired from SDPD.

  Truth is layered, I think. There are the cheap surface truths, an extrinsic layer of declarations we make to others and to ourselves that are accurate—but incomplete, or irrelevant or unimportant. Below these surface truths are other truths, more meaningful but sometimes painful to acknowledge. Below them, buried deep in the unconscious, is the final layer of truth. Real Truth. That’s how I see it, anyway.

  Real Truth still scares me, sometimes. I like to pretend it doesn’t but it does. Especially if it hits me at a bad time, leaving me stuck with more information than I want.

  How could I possibly infiltrate the radical left in San Diego? How could I spy on my ideological allies? As I drove home I considered ways to get out of it. O’Brien would be pissed, Helmick embarrassed. But that would be their problem. By the time I pulled into our driveway, though, I’d found enough in the surface truths to justify the assignment. Some of these “idealists” were, as O’Brien had put it, ru
thless, single-minded zealots bent on criminal violence as a means of political expression. Some were wingnuts along for the ride, happy to pitch Molotov cocktails for the sheer fun of it. And hadn’t Deputy Chief Gore’s son, Lieutenant Larry Gore, almost been taken out by a sniper’s bullet during our last riot? Terrorism in the name of “the Movement” was morally reprehensible, and stupid. Someone needed to sneak in there and disrupt those bastards.

  But had the Real Truth revealed itself in ’68? Would I have turned in my badge before taking the assignment? I think so.

  This is what the Real Truth would have announced to me as I prepared to tell Dottie about the big change coming up in our lives: O’Brien’s like your old man, isn’t he? When you were a kid he beat feelings of unworthiness into your flesh. But now? He respects you, has confidence in you. He’s entrusting you with a job that’s never been done before, a dangerous, sensitive job. You want to take the assignment because it represents another nail in the coffin of doubts you’ve had about your adequacy as a human being.

  The next morning I drove out of the POA parking lot in a “cool car,” a ten-year-old Ford station wagon that had been chopped or raked or whatever it’s called when you drop the front end a foot and raise the back three. It had been painted a deep metallic green and fitted out with moon caps. Not exactly befitting a campus radical but it was the best of the seized stock on hand.

  I’d just been briefed, exhaustively, by O’Brien. Again, an assignment with no gun, no radio. And this time, unlike my work as a “Pink Beret” there would be no badge. There would be no visits to the station. I would not be wired unless absolutely necessary, and O’Brien would see to it that it would never become absolutely necessary. This was deep cover, pure intelligence gathering. I’d make no arrests, or do anything that would make me as a cop. For at least a year.