by Norm Stamper
“And that would be . . . you?”
He laughed. A big, honest laugh. Not a politician’s laugh.
“You got it.” He went on to talk about his need to be kept informed, not surprised by his chief, and a number of other commonsense boss-subordinate stuff. All of it sounded reasonable, not micromanagerial—or megalomaniacal. When he finished, I asked him if he wanted to hear my expectations. Of him.
He stared at me, eyebrows raised. But I figured if he didn’t want to hear what I had to say, as much as I hungered to be Seattle’s chief, it just wouldn’t be worth the trouble. Every subordinate has expectations of his or her boss—it’s just that these expectations are so rarely communicated, and when they are it’s usually after a blowup, and in angry, passive-aggressive ways. I waited for his answer.
“Well, sure,” he said. He sat back and listened.
I told him that if I were his chief I would expect him to: (1) keep his mitts off my vice, intelligence, and narcotics sections; (2) let me handle all internal discipline, no matter how hot it got for him (or for me); and (3) let my staff and me decide who got promoted and where they got assigned.
He nodded, then laughed again, something he would do often throughout our relationship. “I think I can meet those conditions, boss.”
It was my turn to laugh.
“I’ve got one more,” I said.
He rolled his eyes. “Go for it.”
“I’d prefer not to get blindsided by some policy from the twelfth floor of city hall, or some big decision that affects the PD.”
He nodded. The look on his face suggested that he was able to picture himself in the role of police chief. “Agreed.”
I was on a roll, but decided against asking him if I could turn in the retiring chief’s baby blue Buick LeSabre for a new company car. “Your expectations make sense,” I said. “If you make me your chief I’ll meet or exceed every one of them. And I’ll make you proud that you picked me.”
Our relationship began inauspiciously. At a meeting with the editorial board of the Seattle Times, I was asked if I favored citizen review boards. I said yes. Seated to my right, the mayor said, “No, he doesn’t.” It was our first disagreement, but far from our last. We disagreed often on budget issues. I wanted more cops, he wouldn’t give them to me. I wanted a new work schedule for my cops, he wouldn’t hear of it—not without union concessions. But Rice was absolutely true to his word, right down the line.
He gave me feedback on the performance of my chiefs and precinct commanders, word he’d heard from the street. But he never “recommended” anyone for promotion. He never asked me to put this captain here or that one there. He monitored vice, narcotics, and intelligence operations but never once interfered.* He held his tongue on internal discipline.
While we warred over budgets and work schedules, Rice came through for me when he provided (unbudgeted) funds that allowed me to equip my cops with semiautomatic weapons, bulletproof vests, and, with council support, computers for detectives. Time and again he ended touchy conversations with, “You’re the chief.”
Put everyday mayor-chief tensions in the context of “differential” press attention (between egos like Giuliani’s and Bratton’s, for example) and you get a clear picture of the enormity of the challenge. Who gets the credit when things go well? Who gets the blame when they don’t? With Rice, it was something I never thought about.
And he never blindsided me. I couldn’t have asked for a better boss. We were a team, he and I. Seattle’s public safety team.
It was not a happy day for me when Norm Rice decided not to run for a third term, but instead to throw his hat in the ring for governor (he lost in the primary to Gary Locke, the nation’s first Chinese-American governor). To this day, my former boss and I get together for dinner a couple of times a year. It’s always a treat, no matter who’s buying.
Rice’s decision to leave the mayor’s office left me dangling. Who would be my new boss? How would we get along? One thing became clear during the primary: Jane Noland, a three-term city council member, saw herself as the next mayor, and she’d made it abundantly clear that, if elected, she’d replace me. Had she won, I’d have saved her the trouble.
The woman didn’t care much for Rice, and for that reason alone had little use for me. It didn’t look good. She had the strong backing of the police union, had raised a ton of money, and was considered the frontrunner. But she came in fourth in the primary, with 15.8 percent of the vote.
Paul Schell, a wealthy developer-architect-attorney, became my new boss in January 1998. He was brilliant. A deep thinker, well-traveled, a true visionary with plans to upgrade the city’s infrastructure, add amenities, and solve Seattle’s horrendous traffic congestion. He was a likable sort. We’d crossed paths a few times when he was on the campaign trail. I think we had a good feel for each other, and a good feeling about each other.
Between his victory and his inauguration we met for an “expectations” conversation similar to the one I’d had with Rice. Our first year together went well, each of us abiding by the terms of our unofficial contract. But in his second year things began to happen that would damage our relationship.
It started when he created a citizens panel to examine department policies in the wake of that “unfortunate incident” I mentioned earlier (the $10,000 theft by a homicide detective). The mayor was already populating the panel when he bothered to inform his police chief. Blindsided.
In a nod to “bipartisanship,” Schell appointed Mike McKay, George W. Bush’s Washington State campaign chair, to head the panel. Although the panel’s “investigation” produced several solid recommendations (including one that at least marginally strengthened citizen review), it was badly handled from the beginning. Confidences were breached, files lost, inaccurate information leaked to the press, reputations damaged.
We got through the “scandal” but in November of ’99 Schell poured a bucket of salt into my healing wounds. The “Battle of Seattle” over the WTO meeting was brewing. Y2K was threatening to halt transportation, paralyze ATM machines, cut heat to homes and businesses, freeze public and private payrolls, and generally create massive chaos. It was a tough time for the two of us, but the mayor made it worse for everyone by publicly insulting my colleague, Sheriff Dave Reichert, and in the process damaging relations between the mayor’s office and city and county law enforcement.
Schell became the first incumbent mayor since 1938 to lose a reelection bid in the primary. You don’t have to be genius to conclude that he lost it because of WTO.
And “Mardi Gras.”
A year after I retired, the city’s annual Pioneer Square celebration turned violent. I read about it, almost dispassionately, as a citizen at large. As usual, the streets were clogged, youthful knuckleheads using the opportunity to ogle and grope bared breasts. But on the last of four nights of celebration, following steadily escalating troubles, “Fat Tuesday” erupted into a full-scale riot. Gil Kerlikowske, the city’s new police chief, pulled his cops out—much to their dismay. Whether he made that decision because it was “too dangerous” for his officers or because the police would have “further inflamed” the crowd, both of which theories were tossed around in the aftermath, it was a fatal mistake. Twenty-year-old Kristopher Kime witnessed a young woman being trampled by the crowd. When he went to her assistance he was struck in the head with a bottle, then kicked and stomped to death. While the cops watched, and the mayor slept.
Despite our philosophical differences, power struggles, and personality conflict, I took no pleasure in Paul Schell’s downfall. He always wanted what was best for the city, and he had an exciting vision for Seattle’s future. But he learned the hard way that the shortest route to failure in the mayor’s office is to mishandle—or to be perceived as mishandling—public safety.
As Schell’s experience proves, even mayors have bosses. Norm Rice and Paul Schell had 530,000 of them. Rudy Giuliani had eight million.
Prior to September 11,
2001, many New Yorkers entertained significant doubts about their mayor. Sure, he’d cleaned up the city, but at what cost to civil liberties? Crime was down, but citizen complaints were up. Giuliani used his clout, and the city’s treasury, to censor art and needlessly antagonize liberals and civil libertarians. He fired a respected police commissioner who’d made tangible crime-fighting progress—and who’d shown firmness in curtailing unlawful police practices.
With Bratton gone, the mayor installed at One Police Plaza a safe, acquiescent commissioner. Former fire commissioner Howard Safir was blindly obedient to Giuliani, a puppet, according to many NYPD cops. When Safir stepped down Guiliani replaced him with his former driver. Bernard Kerik was a hell of narcotics detective in his day, and his life story is gripping, truly inspiring. But what organizational or administrative skills led Guiliani to believe that Bernie Kerik was qualified to become, first the mayor’s chief of corrections, and five minutes later, the head of the NYPD, the largest law enforcement agency in the country? In light of the hugely embarrassing, near disastrous appointment of Kerik as President Bush’s director of Homeland Security, quickly withdrawn for “character” reasons, it’s apparent that the mayor had also failed to vet his pal for either job. The mayor, with compliant commissioners in place, continued to jump to the automatic defense of police officers during a run of “tragic” incidents involving people of color—Louima, Diallo, Dorismond, et al.*
Who knows? Had Giuliani been eligible to run for a third term, he very well may have lost. Remember, this was before 9/11.
Like so many others throughout the world, I was extremely impressed and deeply moved by Rudolph Giuliani’s leadership in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in 2001. Giuliani earned his day in the sun, and his own picture on the cover of Time, as “Person of the Year.” But we shouldn’t lose sight of a painful, indisputable fact that speaks to Giuliani’s failures in overseeing public safety in the years leading up to 9/11.
Had the mayor provided adequate budgetary support, particularly in radios and other communications equipment—and had he insisted that his police and fire departments develop reliable means of communicating with one another—it is likely that lives would have been spared on 9/11. The former mayor’s livid response to criticism and questions of his handling of these issues is unseemly: Over four hundred firefighters, police officers, and other emergency service providers perished on 9/11.
In Giuliani’s hubris, he believed he knew best how to run NYPD and FDNY. Only the most egotistical public official thinks he can be both mayor and police commissioner. Giuliani would have done himself a service by swallowing his pride and congratulating both himself and Bill Bratton for making New York glisten.
I’ve been a chief-watcher for years, long before I joined their ranks in 1994. I’ve seen superb police executives, decent men and women, get chewed up and spit out by rank politicians, mayors who fail to understand their value. Some of these top cops, burned out and fed up, leave of their own accord. Some get the boot. Some, like James Jackson in Columbus, Ohio, sue their mayors. And some decide to run for mayor. Frank Rizzo (Philadelphia), Frank Jordan (San Francisco), Carlos Alvarez (Miami Dade), and Lee Brown (Houston) are just a few of the many police chiefs, good and not so good, who have morphed into big-city mayors—for better or worse. Tom Potter, former chief of the Portland Police Bureau, was just elected mayor in that city. He’ll be a good one. (Potter’s a fishing buddy, but I won’t let that stand in the way of the truth: I’d have voted for him if I could.) Hell, even ex–middle managers have a shot, witness Tom Bradley, a former LAPD lieutenant who served three terms as mayor of Los Angeles. It’s common among police chiefs to think they can do a better job of running the city than their bosses.
There is little that citizens can do to directly influence the relationship between a mayor and a police chief. The relationship is largely private, carried out by phone calls, e-mails, and office visits. Yet the public has a huge stake in the way these two officials behave. The best way to ensure that the relationship is not characterized by ego trips, bickering, and backstabbing but by mutual respect, is to elect self-confident mayors. Like Norm Rice.
* I happened to be in New York, to officiate at the wedding of friends. The incidents in Central Park were, if anything, even more disgusting than the media’s accounts. I saw men in blue, riding around on a kid’s motorized scooter, and laughing as sexist louts sprayed water on passing women, and called them names. Just yards away from their “post,” which the cops told alarmed witnesses they couldn’t leave, women’s blouses were being torn off, their breasts fondled, their crotches groped.
* A smart move on his part. Politicians who intercede, for example, on behalf of pals or contributors whose names crop up in connection with a vice raid almost always get burned, sooner or later.
* New York currently has, in Raymond W. Kelly, a Michael Bloomberg appointee, a commissioner who is no one’s lapdog. Serving for the second time as head of NYPD (Giuliani fired him in 1994 to make room for Bratton), Kelly is one of the most respected leaders in the field. He’s as tough on police corruption and misconduct as he is on crime. One can only hope that the public’s impression of the relationship between Kelly and Bloomberg, that of mutual respect, holds true in private.
CHAPTER 26
MARCHING FOR DYKES ON BIKES (AND AGAINST JESUS)
HOMOPHOBIA CAME NATURALLY TO me. At the time I hired on as a San Diego police officer, the only gays I assumed I’d met were the wheezing adolescent in engineer boots and leather jacket who’d unzipped my pants in the front row of the Bay Theater when I was six, and Johnny McGowen, a neighborhood boy who preferred to be called Suzy, wore poodle skirts, and twirled a baton after school.
In the seventh grade I asked Dad about Suzy. He mumbled something about odds and ends and queers and rears, and how guys in the navy took care of fairies like that. His explanation wasn’t helpful, and I let it go.
Then I became a cop and was introduced to nonstop gay-trashing humor—in the classroom, the coffee shop, the locker room, everywhere cops gathered. I was also introduced to life on San Diego’s lower Broadway, where everyplace you looked there were grown-up Suzies: she-he’s strutting up and down neon-splashed streets, laughing in high-pitched voices, playfully slapping one another, picking up sailors and marines. When you’d arrest one—usually on the complaint of a serviceman who’d stuck his tongue down the throat of a hooker, reached for her pudendum and found something altogether unexpected—they’d tell you how they were only trying to earn money to swap out their sexual equipment for a new, improved model.
I was still a rookie, less than two years on the job, when Lt. Ed Stevens of Robbery–Sex Crimes called me into his office. “The chief wants the fags cleaned out of Balboa Park. That’s a job for the Pink Berets. You’re now officially a Pink Beret.” Fags? Pink Berets? What did I know about that stuff? My patrol lieutenant had recommended me for the job, Stevens had picked me. Did they think I was one of them? I felt my face flush.
“Wear tight clothes,” said Stevens. “You can smile but don’t raise your eyebrows and don’t lick your lips. That’s entrapment. Just wait for them to start gobbling each other or go for your dick, then badge ’em.” He handed me a typewritten list of relevant penal code sections: soliciting, indecent exposure, oral cop, sodomy. A conviction meant you had to register as a sex offender, for life.
That was it then, my mission. Hang around the toilets, grin at the degenerates, witness their abnormal sex acts, then bust them. “A word to the wise,” said Stevens, shifting a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “You’ll be working alone out there. You won’t be packing and you won’t have a radio.” The radio I could live without. “There’s nothing more vicious than a cornered queer, so don’t go doing anything stupid. Better to let one get away than get yourself hurt. Got that?” I gulped, nodded. “And try not to pinch too many at one time.” Too many at one time? How many of these depraved, violent savages would I end up ar
resting?
Almost sixty, it turned out. But they didn’t seem all that depraved, or even abnormal. In fact, they seemed like everyday people. And only one guy turned violent. It was late on a Friday afternoon.
I’d told myself I’d make one last sweep through the head in Alcazar Gardens, across from the Old Globe Theatre. My “clientele” were always reaching through the metal cages to unscrew the bare bulbs, so it was pretty dark inside. And dank, reeking of piss. I spotted Willie Brown, a downtown cross-dresser by night, and shook my head: I’d already busted him once that week. Now he was paired off with a bruiser half again his size. Two stalls away a man was on his knees, swallowing another. A four-banger. I’d need the extra set of cuffs I had started carrying the day I’d been forced to bind a second pair with my belt, escorting all four of them down a tourist-clogged Presidents Way, past the statue of El Cid and the Organ Pavilion, to a waiting police car.
I shot Willie a keep-it-cool look and announced, “San Diego Police!” Willie grinned, gave me a here-we-go-again roll of the eyes. “You four are under arrest. You, you, you, and you.” The announcement flushed another three men from the on-deck circle and out the door. You could see why the chief’s office was getting all those complaints. I cuffed the ones closest to me and told them to stand by, then turned to Willie and the Bruiser. “Okay, you two: Turn around and put your hands against the wall.” The command was a signal for Willie to resume beating off, and for Bruiser to jump me.
“Willie!” I yelled. “Put that thing away. Come over here and grab this guy.” The guy wasn’t trying to escape, he was trying to hurt me. My first clue? He told me he was going break every bone in my body and stuff my head down the toilet. He had me in a bear hug, never a good position for a cop to be in. Rookie mistake.