Breaking Rank

by Norm Stamper

  Others weren’t so happy. On Monday morning the phone started ringing and wouldn’t stop. Letters poured in for days (my favorite: a man informing me that I was a “dried up, useless scrap of scrotum”). Straight cops lit into me. Who did I think I was, disgracing the uniform like that? What message had I conveyed to upstanding, God-fearing, law-abiding citizens? Cal Thomas, the syndicated right-wing swill-pitcher, devoted an entire column to my reprehensible act. One of the local dailies ran a cartoon of the city’s new chief dressed as a drum majorette—I’ve thrown my baton into the air and it’s come down and landed in my eye.

  There was more parade fallout: Two days before the event, one of my assistant chiefs, with my blessing, turned down a request for Christian police officers to participate, in uniform, in that Saturday’s “March for Jesus.” When word about that got out, hellfire rained down like a late-summer lightning storm.

  I spent a good part of my first year as Seattle’s chief fielding questions, asserting the principle of separation of church and state, and reassuring my cops that I was neither the Antichrist nor a sodomite—although I did let them know that my sexual orientation, like theirs, was nobody else’s business.*

  I also told my cops that as proud as I was to be their chief, I was also the community’s chief of police. And, yes, as I clarified to a particularly testy lieutenant, “community” does include leather-clad, chain-dragging, bare-butted men and topless dykes on bikes.

  What did I mean when I said gays were “my people”? It wasn’t meant condescendingly. I simply felt great warmth and affection for the gay community, a fondness derived, in part, from my own years of prejudice and bigotry. It was a reflection of my admiration for those who live courageously in the face of so much hostility in our society, and of gratitude for the way the gay community had embraced me in San Diego and in Seattle. Also because, yes . . . some of my best friends are gay.

  As I battled my homophobic demons I must have, along the way, replaced an old stereotype with a newone. Today, I believe that openly gay women and men are generally more “real” than straight folk, more honest with their emotions, easier to talk to, more likely to understand, care about, and confront the oppression of others. And, all in all, they’re a hell of a lot more fun to be around.

  When I retired from SPD in 2000 a party was held in my honor at an upscale conference center on Seattle’s waterfront. My whole senior staff was there, but only a smattering of rank and filers. In any event, the police presence was swamped by hundreds of community members, black, white, Latino, Asian, American Indian. And gay.

  Judy Osborne walked up and gave me a hug just before the program began. “Happy?”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “Good,” she said. “No sadness at all?” Tears had formed in her eyes.

  “Oh, sure. A little. Mostly I feel . . . finished, complete.” She knew what I meant. We’d come a long way together.

  At the beginning of my last year as chief, Osborn, a member of my Sexual Minorities Advisory Council (we’d tried for a better name but “Chief Stamper’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Polyamorous, Queer, and Questioning Advisory Council” wouldn’t fit on the business card) asked to talk to me after one of our regular meetings. “You’re not comfortable with me, are you? With us?”

  I was taken aback. My lord, hadn’t I reached out to her community? Aggressively confronted bigotry, discrimination, hate crimes? Made SPD a whole lot more hospitable for gays and lesbians? “What are you talking about, Judy?”

  “The transgender community. Me, Suzanne, Barb . . .”

  “Oh, come on. You know me better than that. You . . . you . . .” I didn’t know what to say. I thought of Suzy. I looked into Judy’s eyes—the first time I had allowed myself to really look at her. “Ah, shit. How did you know?”

  “We know these things. We can tell.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t know.”

  “I know.”

  * Federal law does not specifically prohibit interview or polygraph questions about sexual orientation, but more than a dozen states and many cities have banned the practice.

  * Nor is it the business of Supreme Court Justices Rehnquist, Thomas, and Scalia, who voted against the majority in the Lawrence case striking down Texas’s sodomy law–a decision which, if there is a God, will pave the way for full gay rights, including legal marriage.

  CHAPTER 27

  THE FOURTH ESTATE: A CHIEF’S LAMENT

  HERMAN “HERM” WIGGINS WAS one of the least gifted cops in the San Diego Police Department. How do I know? I was his sergeant. Night after night I had to kick back his reports which contained ten or twelve spelling errors, and not just those tricky words like surveillance or defendant but kidnap, car, knife. His verbs waged war with his nouns. Not once did he write an acceptable report on the first try. A hulking man, the kind you love to see in the apex slot in a riot formation, Wiggins was friendly, outgoing, respectful. We were all rooting for him. But there was no way the guy was going to make it, not with his inability to write a report. (The real puzzler was how he’d ever graduated from the academy. Or junior high school.)

  But Herm Wiggins was desperate to be a cop. He spent hours on his own, reading, studying the rules of grammar, applying himself to the task of writing an acceptable report. He schlepped around a log, which he labeled his “Dumb Book” and into which he dutifully recorded each word he’d misspelled.

  His diligence paid off. A year later, working for a different sergeant, it still took him twice or thrice the time it took others, but he was finally able to turn in a satisfactory report. Wiggins made his probation. A few years later he won a Burglary assignment.

  His superiors in Investigations were impressed with him from day one. He carried a huge caseload. He made more arrests than several of his peers combined. He won numerous convictions, and earned many commendations.

  Then someone discovered a discrepancy. Then another, and another. An internal investigation was opened. Wiggins, it turned out, had been writing fiction. He invented and planted evidence (his specialty was phony fingerprints). He perjured himself in arrest reports and on the stand. He sent innocent people to jail.

  Herman Wiggins was a liar. Just like Pulitzer Prize–winner Janet Cooke of the Washington Post, Jayson Blair (felony-level liar) and Rick Bragg (misdemeanor-level liar) of the New York Times, Jack Kelley of USA Today, Stephen Glass of The New Republic, Daniel C. Hartman of the Iowa State Daily, Angele Yanor of the Vancouver Sun, Christopher Newton of the Associated Press . . .

  How many reporters fudge facts, manufacture news, steal from their colleagues? Ten years ago I would have guessed, naϊvely, a handful, a negligible number. Today? Today I ask, how many don’t lie? In fact, I’m convinced that reporters are just as likely as police officers to fake or fudge the truth. Often with equal if not greater harm to the public.

  I used to see the press as a pesky but honorable watchdog over my own institution: Were we behaving effectively, responsibly? Even after the Los Angeles Times muddied my image, deservedly, when I used a light-duty San Diego police officer as my personal valet, I retained positive feelings about the fourth estate. I was happily invested in Jefferson’s belief that the purpose of the press was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Even if I happened to be the haplessly “comfortable” one being afflicted.

  Then I moved to Seattle.

  For the first five years I could do little wrong in the eyes of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (a certain political cartoon notwithstanding) and Seattle Times. Sixty months is a hell of a long honeymoon in my business, and I never took it for granted.

  My predecessor, a former NYPD assistant chief, had maintained tight control over “media relations,” dictating who could speak for the department—and what they could say. I turned that approach, common to most police agencies, on its head. My policy, imported from San Diego, was that any SPD employee could speak to any reporter at any time on any subject. The homicide detective, communications
dispatcher, precinct captain, beat cop—each could speak for himself or herself.

  I even went so far as to encourage my employees to tell the truth to reporters. If my cops were unhappy with something I’d done (like marching in the gay pride parade), they were free to say so. If they choked on my policies (such as affirmative action) they were free to say so. I believed that openness and honesty were good, in and of themselves, but also essential to my campaign to “demilitarize” and “democratize” the police department.

  There were restrictions: My cops couldn’t speak for the entire agency and they weren’t permitted to release information barred by law. (Nor could they choose to ignore policies they didn’t like.) But, repeatedly, I told them: You’re free to talk, just tell the truth as you see it.

  Every six months, my senior staff and I met with representatives of the local print and electronic media to field questions and complaints, of which there were many. Reporters griped about access to people and crime scenes and reports, the timeliness with which we furnished information, and police staffers who failed to return calls. Not once was I at odds with these concerns. (This was the meeting that had so incensed my chief of staff, who felt we were altogether too open to the press.) I instructed SPD’s chiefs, directors, and media relations officers to be responsive, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to reporters in the field.

  It was a policy borne, in part, of my empathy for working stiffs in any line of work.

  Like us, reporters had a job to do. I’ve never understood the attitude, pervasive in police work, that it’s okay to jerk reporters around—make ourselves scarce when they need a quote, refuse to return their calls, purposely withhold information, or delay answers until after the reporter’s missed a deadline. That’s just plain rude.

  I think I can claim an “enlightened” approach to police-media relations in Seattle. But my views and values would be put to the test, big time, in my final year as police chief.

  1999 was the year I recalibrated my high opinion of the integrity and the motivations of the press and joined the rest of the world.

  The year had begun propitiously for the department. Fueled by the region’s smoking-hot, hi-tech, dot-com economy, SPD was no longer taking it in the shorts at budget time; in fact we’d just received additional funding for more cops and for crime prevention and victims’ services. We’d made tremendous progress, developing one of the nation’s best responses to domestic violence, working to institutionalize community policing, building positive relations with communities of color, with the gay and lesbian community, with (most of) our own cops. We’d recently adopted a new system of internal accountability that melded personal responsibility with a bracing software package that would soon improve the overall quality of just about everything we did. And the World Trade Organization had not yet seen fit to bless our city with its presence.

  Yes, things were looking rosy that cold, wet winter. And compared to many of my colleagues across the country, I was still engaged in a veritable love-fest with the local media.

  Then in the spring, Dan Bryant, one of my assistant chiefs, asked to see me privately following a staff meeting. “You’re really going to love this,” he said. It seems one of our senior homicide detectives, Sonny Davis, a thirty-year veteran, had lifted $10,000 from a homicide scene. His junior partner, Cloyd Steiger, who’d witnessed the theft, pointedly suggested that the evildoer put the money back where he got it. Davis refused, though he did offer half the loot to his partner. Steiger snitched Davis off to their sergeant, Don Cameron. The next day Cameron took Davis back to the scene where he oversaw the replanting of the dough, the rediscovery of the dough, and the eventual impounding of the dough.

  Oh my! Was that how the supervisor, a legendary thirty-eight-year veteran with more than a thousand homicide investigations to his credit, thought he should handle a felony? Would he have allowed a burglar or a stickup man or an embezzler to return the next day to the scene of the crime, put the loot back, and waltz away without penalty?

  With the money safely, legally accounted for, Steiger began jawing about the incident to several cops, including “informally” and “confidentially” an Internal Investigations sergeant—who sat on the information for months.

  I took stock: I had a slam-dunk felon working homicide; a sergeant who swept the crime under the rug; a right-minded detective who, once he’d properly blown the whistle, did everything wrong; an internal affairs investigator who’d imprudently promised confidentiality then inexcusably refused to breach it; and several employees plugged in to the whole thing, none of whom had come forward to report it.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised—the cop culture is notorious as a festering breeding ground of silence and complicity. It just is. But I was surprised; I thought we’d come a lot farther than that.

  Residents of big East Coast and Midwest cities laughed at our version of police corruption: Let me get this straight. A cop takes something, gets caught, puts it back—and you label that “corruption”? What you got is a crooked and/or stupid cop. And a sergeant, though misguided, who tried to do the right thing. Corruption? I don’t think so.

  Richard Pennington, now chief in Atlanta, told me that on his first day on the job as New Orleans’s chief in the mid-nineties, he added yet one more dirty cop (who’d stolen a ten-thousand-dollar Rolex) to a long list of Big Easy officers who were under investigation, under indictment, or in jail or prison for crimes ranging from extortion to murder. Other major cities’ chiefs chuckled over the contrast between our two departments. But, to me and to Seattle, a city that had battled back from decades of systemic police and political corruption, and which prided itself on its squeaky clean reputation, this was no laughing matter.

  But neither was it, as the Seattle Times suggested, the Crime of the Century! Bigger than O. J.! Bigger than Rodney King! Bigger than Pee-wee Herman! Not only that, to hear the Times tell it, the theft was just the tip of the iceberg. There had to be, lurking below the calm surface of our increasingly progressive, community-oriented PD, a churning ocean of venal and mortal sins. And, by God, their ace investigative reporters would fish until they reeled those sins to the surface.

  Thus began a transparent, clumsy hatchet job—on me. I witnessed sole-source reporting, references to ancient history, the invention of nonexistent “patterns” of police misconduct, and yes: a reliance on the proverbial “disgruntled employee”—including individuals I’d disciplined, refused to promote, or fired. A couple of ace investigative reporters from the Times gave voice to cops who were too lazy, too incompetent, too bigoted, or too dishonest to warrant promotion, or retention. Now, they were elevated to “informed sources.” And, given my own press philosophy and policy, utterly free to talk to reporters. Maybe my chief of staff had been right?

  For months, cops and ex-cops who were unhappy with my policies dished and dissed: I cared more about community policing than catching crooks; I delegated too much; I hired an “outsider”—a female! a civilian!—to run the Community Policing Bureau;* I made “affirmative action” appointments, passing over more deserving white male candidates; I was aloof; I spent too much time in the community; I didn’t know what the hell was going on in the department; I, too, was an outsider.

  This indictment, presumably symptomatic of why none of us at the top had learned about the Sonny Davis theft, was offered up, according to the Times, “by more than a dozen” sources, most of them tapped over and over. Yet, the steady drip-drip-drip, splash-splash-splash of “revelations” took its toll.

  The Times was in full feeding frenzy, and I couldn’t figure it out. Why were they not even trying to be “fair and balanced”? Why did it feel so—so personal?

  Because it was personal, according to an “informed source,” a mole deep within the bowels of the newspaper. The Times had made a decision to target the police and was deliberately “beating up” SPD, me in particular.

  The newspaper had just announced it was moving from an afternoon
to a morning paper. That signified nothing less than mortal combat with the city’s existing morning paper, the Seattle Times, also known as the PI. No informed observer believed the Puget Sound area could or would support two morning papers. (The two newspapers have been warring in the courts for several years now, the Times striking first but losing a recent case to the PI—which is hanging on by a thread.)

  It’s funny: in a more innocent day I would have pooh-poohed the mole’s “scoop,” chalked it up to a conspiracy-happy theorist . . . or one of the paper’s own disgruntled employees. But I accepted its veracity the second I heard it. It made perfect sense: I’d been caught in the crosshairs of a newspaper shooting war.

  But was it true? It didn’t matter. Any casual misgivings I’d had about the basic truthfulness or fairness of reporters had ripened into a mordant distrust of “the media.”

  Within a couple of months, with some genuine as well as cosmetic PD reforms in place, the whole thing blew over. I regained my emotional resilience (it’s hard not to buy in to the characterizations when you’re constantly referred to in the press as “beleaguered” or “embattled”) and reclaimed my sense of humor. But the experience left me deeply concerned about the effects of “campaign journalism.” And not just on policing.

  The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that the “believability” of the daily newspaper has dropped from 80 percent in 1985 to 59 percent in 2002. The Project for Excellence in Journalism reported in 2004 that the press’s “credibility crisis” is part of a “cultural divide.” “Journalists think they are working in the public interest. The public thinks they sensationalize and report articles to make money . . . This sense of a lack of professionalism and sensationalizing to sell papers was clearly seen following the scandal in 2003 at the New York Times, particularly the news that the reporter Jayson Blair had engaged in extensive fabrication. But one of the saddest revelations to come from the scandal was that many people thought such unethical conduct was typical of newspapers.”