Breaking Rank

by Norm Stamper

  The UC Santa Barbara “assassins” were a no-show—if in fact they had ever existed. Had they shown up, locked and loaded, they would have found SDPD hopelessly ill-prepared. This was during the pre-SWAT era of policing. It was before PDs wised up and started meeting, doing joint planning with those affected by threats such as these. It was a time when kids didn’t get shot on a college campus, or at a high school or a day care center.

  I was happy that the only damage done that day was to the pride of a handful of cops. To this day, I can still hear a spindly little white guy in a Trotsky beard cackling about the one he pulled on some goofy undercover cop.

  Toward the end of my assignment the People’s Park issue exploded in Berkeley, largely the product of Governor Reagan’s impatience and intransigence. The effects of the street rioting reverberated up and down the state and, like the free speech movement before it, all across the country.

  At UCSD, weary of marathon teach-ins, SDS and like spirits were preparing to take over the university’s administrative offices. There was no way I could not be a part of it.

  About a hundred of us entered the provost’s complex. Leaders of the takeover had done their intelligence gathering. They’d passed out copies of the floor plan of the warren of offices and corridors, and they knew the provost would be present at that moment. We charged into his inner office. The leaders of the pack penned him in. They jacked him around for several hours, haranguing him for the university’s role in everything from the war in Vietnam to apartheid in South Africa. The university’s secretaries and other staffers were by turns intimidated and entertained by the radical proselytizers. But nobody got hurt.

  Then again, nobody’s worldview got changed either. Certainly not mine. I was still more philosophically aligned with the protestors than with my fellow cops. But the way my “comrades” treated the provost and his staff left me nauseated. A couple of them got in his face, spittle flying, doing their best to browbeat and filibuster their ideology into the guy. Michael Moore would have been much more respectful. One student pushed the provost because he’d asked them to “cool your language.” Who did they think they were, this minority of protesters? Who gave them the right to bully others?

  It was wrong, and inaccurate, however, for my police colleagues to write off all antiwar protestors and civil rights demonstrators as rich spoiled brats or social misfits. As individuals, some of them may have been just that, but most of the people I befriended and spied upon were among the most dedicated, hardworking, and morally upstanding I’ve ever met. They applied themselves to a study of our world: what was wrong with it, what needed to be done to put it right. And they acted.

  Somebody in one of the dorms was playing, for all the world to hear, Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride.” I applauded the selection, as well as the fog that had crept up the hill and through the pines from the shores of La Jolla. It was a Friday, late in the afternoon. The square was empty but for a small knot of laughing nerds and preppies near the fountain. No demonstrations, no screaming speeches or chanting to drown out Steppenwolf.

  The quarter was over, library books turned in, grades handed out. The dorm dwellers—those not already headed home to New York or San Francisco, or India, Lebanon, Mexico, Germany, Japan—had the place to themselves and they were in a party mood. I was probably the only commuter on campus that afternoon, and I had no real purpose there. My undercover assignment was over, my own magic carpet ride ended. The results of the sergeants’ exam had just been posted. My name sat at the top of the list. Soon, I’d be debriefed, write a manual on this different kind of undercover work, shave off my beard, trim my hair, and sew on the stripes.

  For most of my thirty-four years as a cop I kept a journal. I saved photos, newspaper clippings, commendations, evaluations, disciplinary actions, major-event reports, notes and memoranda, calendars, audiotapes, videos of key events. I was driven to do this, in part, because I’m a packrat but mostly because of a vague notion that at some point in my life I might want to write of my experiences. As I assembled those materials for this book I came face to face with a large crater in my recorded history.

  Two months into my new job as a sergeant, recently divorced and crying myself to sleep over having left my three-year-old son, I came home to my apartment and pulled from the closet a big cardboard box, its contents overflowing. I slung it onto the sagging bed. One by one I removed every item: weekly reports; campus and underground newspapers; stacks of photographs. One photo is of me. It had appeared in The Triton, UCSD’s student paper. I had no idea it had been taken, and was shocked when it showed up on page one. I’m at my hairiest, sitting on a concrete bench next to the square, smoking a Schimmelpennick cigar, peering forlornly through my granny glasses, and waiting on a cold morning for the demonstration du jour. The caption contained words like dwelling . . . gut . . . soul. I was probably thinking I’d like another cup of coffee right about now but then I’d have to piss and the demonstration is just getting under way so if I drink another cup now I’ll really have to pee and I might miss something and it could be important, so, all things considered, I’d better pass on the coffee. David, the “Trotskyite Marxist,” had seen the paper, called it to my attention. “Lookin’ très artistic there, my man.”

  Also in the box was the manual I’d written to help guide the work of future undercover agents. It contained a brief history of criminal violence that had stemmed from radical political movements in the city, the most violent of which dated back to the early part of the twentieth century when city fathers directed San Diego cops to wade into IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) demonstrators; I forget how many were killed. I offered tips for infiltrating radical groups: how to position and insinuate oneself into a trusting relationship with a variety of personalities, how to carry out the work artfully.

  I put the manual down and picked up other memorabilia: political flyers, programs for “radical” plays in local theaters, pins and buttons . . . Staring down at the mound on the bed I was mortified. I had lived a lie for a year.

  I stuffed everything back into the box and headed for the kitchen where I layered aluminum foil into the bottom of the sink and burned everything that could be burned. I trashed the rest. It was only mildly cleansing.

  I resolved to keep my own counsel about that year, volunteer nothing about it, furnish deceitful answers to the inevitable questions. At least there would be no physical evidence of my spying.

  For years I lied to people like Larry Remer, publisher of one of the underground papers and contributor to San Diego Magazine. And friend. “Tell the truth Norm,” he said, some seven years after the assignment. “You worked the Red Squad that year, didn’t you?” He knew. Of course he knew. He was a freaking journalist. But I lied, hiding behind a technicality.

  “Nope. I worked O.C. that year.” Organized crime. Hey, if students decide to block a recruiter, take over a building, trespass on private property, well then, they’re “organized criminals.” Aren’t they? Besides, why should I tell a journalist, friend or foe, about what I really did? Isn’t the idea to keep undercover work . . . under cover?

  This is my first public telling of the story. I spied. I lied. There you have it.

  In light of violence at recent antiglobalization and antiwar demonstrations, shouldn’t local police departments, and the FBI, for that matter, get back into spying on political activists? No. Absolutely not.

  Although I was never burned as an undercover operative, one of my successors was, and he was soon implicated in a variety of nefarious activities, such as pouring glue into university locks, and other conduct of “agents provocateurs.” His exposure produced San Diego’s “Red Squad” scandal. Similar such scandals broke out all across the country in the seventies as local officials learned of the scope and nature of police spying in their own backyards.

  In Portland, Oregon, Winfield Falk, a former police intelligence detective, sneaked into his own agency and “stole” thirty-six boxes of materials, the
product of police spying during the sixties and seventies. The materials had been earmarked for the shredder under that city’s restrictions on police spying. In the boxes were dossiers on city council members, a grape-boycotter who would go on to become Portland’s mayor, and even an Oregon governor. There were intelligence reports on food banks, voter registration organizations, a rape crisis agency. In Denver, as recently as 1999, files were discovered on 3,200 Colorado citizens representing 208 organizations, ranging from the League of Women Voters to American Friends Service Committee to Amnesty International.

  San Diego, Seattle, and most other big cities now have local “intelligence ordinances” designed to halt police spying abuses. Preambles to these laws state more or less the same thing: Police intelligence on criminal and terrorist activity is invaluable, in fact essential to the mission of public safety. But spying on noncriminal activists is abhorrent—and illegal.

  How to prevent abuses? Seattle’s ordinance, the first in the nation, passed in 1979, has, among other provisions, three that make sense—and one that I question. The ordinance (1) bans spying (absent evidence of criminality) on political, social, or religious activities or affiliations; (2) requires the signature of the chief of police authorizing any investigation into “private sexual information” as well as inquiries into political or religious organizations; (3) employs a civilian auditor, nominated by the mayor and confirmed by the city council, with complete access to all intelligence files and a mandate to conduct random inspections, review the chief’s authorizations, and enforce all provisions of the ordinance. It’s a strong ordinance, and I support it.

  The provision that creates heartburn for me? The one that allows the auditor (a position held by a succession of experienced, respected local attorneys with unimpeachable integrity) to inform the subject of intelligence gathering that he, she, or it (in the case of an organization) has been (1) spied upon, (2) unlawfully. Damages for “substantial” violations of this provision may be assessed against the spy and his or her supervisor, and paid to the unwitting victim of the abuse. My concern is over the chilling effect the provision can create. Detectives afraid to do their jobs. Snitches afraid to come forward. Other agencies reluctant to share information. The feds, for example, withheld important information from my department for three days, pondering whether it would get anyone in trouble in the lead-up to the protests surrounding the meeting of the WTO in Seattle, November 29–December 4, 1999.

  The challenge is to achieve a balance between appropriately aggressive crime fighting (including the prevention of crimes and acts of terrorism) and rigorous protection of citizens’ rights to privacy (the Fourth Amendment) and free speech and assembly (the First). It’s a delicate balance and, all things considered, I guess I can live with my mild case of heartburn.

  On February 18, 2003, Seattle joined hundreds of other U.S. cities condemning certain provisions of the USA Patriot Act (October 2001). The resolution, passed unanimously, is an eloquent statement on the need to combat terrorism and to curb the impulses of law enforcement that, however understandable in times of war and terrorism (and noisy protests), would make America a country less worth defending.

  * Davis was, in fact, a member of the Black Panther Party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the American Communist Party.

  POLICING THE POLICE

  CHAPTER 20

  TREATING COPS LIKE KIDS: POLICE DISCIPLINE

  You’re the chief. What do you do with a cop who:

  1.Uses profanity while ordering a suspect to the ground?

  2.Sideswipes a fixed object, causing major damage to a brand-new police car?

  3.Smashes his heavy flashlight into the skull of a suspect?

  4.Runs a records check on the new boyfriend of his ex-wife?

  5.Fires a warning shot, in direct violation of department policy?

  6.Drives her police car into the back of a semi?

  7.Shoots and kills an unarmed man?

  IN SCENARIO ONE, OFFICER Dana Jackson is attempting to arrest an auto thief. Ignoring her warnings, the suspect advances, threatening to knock her on her ass. The man is not armed but Jackson has no doubt about his intentions, and his ability to carry them out. She shouts, “I told you to get your fucking ass on the ground! Now!” Not exactly proper language, and you’ve made it clear to your cops that that kind of talk is unacceptable. But the man drops to the ground, spread-eagles himself, and presents his wrists for cuffing.

  In Scenario Two, it’s one in the morning, foggy, quiet, not another car on the road. Officer Rob Brown has been out shaking doors, flashing his light around some of Balboa Park’s most popular attractions: the Old Globe, the Aerospace Museum, the Museum of Modern Art. A nighttime arsonist has been torching combustibles in the vestibules of these civic treasures and Brown is eager to nab the guy before he burns one to the ground. The officer returns to his car and glides out onto El Prado. A second later he hears a loud explosion—followed immediately by the sound of glass shattering. Thinking he’s been shot at, he ducks down in the seat, cuts the wheel sharply to the left, and hits the accelerator. His car sideswipes one of those aggregate-stone, concrete-encased trashcans. His shiny black-and-white Crown Vic, delivered just that day, has a long, ugly crease in its side. It’s going to cost a thousand bucks to repair it. (The shot? Turns out Brown ran over a pop bottle.)

  The man Officer David Ruiz has just arrested in Scenario Three—a fugitive with several out-of-state warrants, is sitting atop the officer’s chest. He’s already knocked Ruiz to the ground and pummeled him with his fists. Now he reaches for the cop’s gun. Ruiz gets a hand free, grabs his weighted flashlight, and smashes it against the guy’s skull. The suspect slumps, dazed. Ruiz handcuffs him and hauls him off to jail via County Hospital.

  Scenario Four: Officer Jonathan Davies uses the mobile data terminal in his car to run a check on his ex-wife’s boyfriend. He discovers the man has been convicted in the past of theft and disturbing the peace. He provides this information to his ex-wife.

  Surrounded by a hostile crowd bent on lynching his prisoner,* Officer Kevin Stuart in Scenario Five pulls his gun and cranks off a round into the air. Insupportable, states your policy: Warning shots are dangerous (bullets that go up tend to come down). The crowd scatters long enough for Stuart to shove his prisoner into his police car and fishtail it out of the area.

  In Scenario Six, Officer Deborah Clancy drives out of the Eastern substation at dawn to begin her shift. She turns east onto Aero Drive. As she crests a hill, traveling well under the posted speed limit, she’s met by a big orange orb, bright enough to temporarily but completely blind her—and an eighteen-wheeler, stalled in the middle of the traffic lane. The collision puts Clancy in the hospital for weeks.

  Edward Anderson had been beating his girlfriend off and on throughout the day. Now, in Scenario Seven, he’s threatening to kill her and their baby. Officer Bill Edwards shows up at the house in response to a 911 call, just after midnight. It’s cold and blustery, the rain coming down in horizontal sheets. Edwards sees Anderson jump from a first-floor window of a house and flee across a rubble-strewn backyard. The officer bails out of his car and gives chase. Aware of the suspect’s threat to kill, and not knowing whether the man is armed, Edwards pulls his .40 Glock. He gains ground on Anderson, and is only a second or two behind when the suspect suddenly trips and falls. Edwards reaches for Anderson to lift him to his feet. The officer’s gun “goes off.” Accidentally. The bullet enters the suspect’s throat, exits the back of his head. He’s DOA at Harborview Medical Center. (Edwards is white, Anderson, black. The suspect had no gun. It’s Martin Luther King Day, and you’re scheduled to speak to a thousand people at Garfield High later that day.)

  These are not hypothetical cases. They all happened on my watch as a patrol chief in San Diego or as chief of the Seattle Police Department. With the exception of the last incident, a well-publicized Seattle case, I’ve used fictitious names. So, if they were your cops, what wo
uld you do? Should they all be disciplined?

  Only one of these cops deserved to be punished. If you picked Jonathan Davies in Scenario Four you picked right. Without official justification for prying into the lives of private citizens, Davies is hanging out a mile. He should be (and was) fired. The rest of the cops were doing their jobs, under trying if not dangerous circumstances. A couple of them could have wound up dead but for their quick thinking and decisive action.

  Sadly, most chiefs would have punished the cops you just read about. They regularly and systematically penalize police officers based not on the cops’ intentions, or their state of mind, or even their actions, but on the impact—the unhappy or tragic or politically embarrassing effect of their actions.*

  I’ve seen it in police departments across the country, large and small: police administrators acting like bad parents when it comes to internal discipline. They treat their cops like dependent or misbehaving children—then puzzle themselves silly trying to figure out why some cops act like juvenile delinquents.

  One of the major reasons police misconduct is so common and so predictable is because of administrative misconduct. Inappropriate, overly harsh discipline creates a paranoid, angry, childish police force. And it’s the community that pays the stiffest price.

  The theory that leads to such hypercritical, draconian discipline is seductive: If you punish cops who screw up, you’ll (1) prevent bigger problems; (2) hold officers “accountable” for their mistakes; (3) send a message to other cops that policy violations will not be tolerated; and (4) satisfy the public (and your boss, the mayor or the city manager) that you’re the kind of chief who “takes care of business.” It’s a pretty theory, one that animates the philosophy of many “accountability-oriented” chiefs, but it’s hogwash.