Breaking Rank

by Norm Stamper

  The Police Foundation gave us our money, and with it an opportunity to usher in a “third wave” of police reform. Hoobler was ebullient. He slapped me on the back and upgraded my ticket for a boozy, shoulder-to-shoulder, first-class return trip to San Diego.

  A few months later we kicked off the “community policing” training program for twenty-four randomly selected cops—whose view of and approach to police work would never again be the same again. They worked beats north of Interstate 8, from upscale La Jolla on the west to the Wild Animal Park in the northeast corner of the city. They patrolled Mission Valley, with its long strip of hotels, golf courses, car dealerships, and sprawling shopping malls; Linda Vista, an economically depressed, densely populated community and home to the division’s only significant black population; the wall-to-wall industrial parks of Sorrento Valley; a part of Clairemont known for its intractable landlord-tenant problems at huge low-income apartment complexes; Rancho Bernardo, a sprawling suburban retirement community; and Mission Beach, where hordes of “Zonies” descend each summer from Phoenix and Tucson to escape the heat, guzzle beer by the keg, fight with the locals, and throw rocks and bottles at the police. The vast, diverse area gave us a superb lab within which to test the theory of community policing.

  The officers discovered on the first day of training that they were in for something quite different from their academy days. I’d hired research associates who, while amiable and sociable and able to get along marvelously with cops, were unyielding political progressives. They were wary of the authority of the police and critical of many department practices. (It was from one of them, Rubén Rumbaut, a brilliant sociologist, that I picked up the term “people’s police.”) Together, we’d spent months designing an exceptional educational experience that we believed would capture the imaginations of our officers and challenge them to rethink some of the most basic preconceptions of their work.

  It was critical that our cops question the assumption that policing was something you do to the community, rather than with it. We wanted them to challenge the notion that their superiors knew better than they what to do about problems on their beats, that they had to raise their hands for permission to try something different in order to fight crime or solve a problem.

  If we were to attack these assumptions in a training setting, we knew we’d have to make that setting comfortable and nonthreatening, and populate it with extraordinary instructors armed with persuasive ideas—and an ability to relate to cops.

  We brought in some of the finest minds, and most approachable teachers, in the country. Among them were Professor Egon Bittner of Brandeis University (who spent a day talking with our cops about the unsustainable role of police officers as “soldier bureaucrats”) and Professor Nicos Mouratides of San Diego State (who talked about the “sociology of work,” helping our officers see that theirs was a truly noble calling, and not “shit work,” as many of them had come to view their craft). We did the initial training in a weeklong session—morning, afternoon, and evening blocks each day—in a “residential retreat” format at a resort (directly across the street from the Del Mar racetrack).

  Our cops appreciated being treated with respect, living like the “big boys” in the corner pocket, and being given an opportunity to reexamine their daily work, and to make it more productive, more satisfying. It was one of those transformative, “mountaintop” experiences. The kind that leaves you praying that reentry into the real world won’t be too jarring for the cops.

  At the end of the week Gene Chouinard, our most senior police officer with more than thirty years on the job, shared with me privately what the experience had meant to him. We’d just finished the last evening session and were sitting in the bar. “Unbelievable!” he said, shaking his head. “Unbelievable.”

  “What’s that?”

  “This is what I hired on to do, over thirty years ago.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. But I’ve spent my whole career chasing calls and collecting numbers. And thinking all that time I was doing police work. But this is police work—what we’ve been talking about all week. It’s almost like a dream come true. The chance before I retire to actually make a difference in people’s lives. And to think for myself.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way, Geno. But everyone knows you’re a hell of a cop.”

  “Yeah? Well. Thanks. But I’ve always done police work in spite of the system, not because of it. What this project is telling me is that I can get out of my car, work with people, solve problems—and not have to worry about my five-two-and-one.” (The five shakedowns, two traffic citations, and one criminal arrest beat cops were expected to produce during an eight-hour shift.)

  “That’s right,” I said. “And, if there’s a God we’ll put a permanent end to the numbers game. You’ll never have to worry about your sergeant hounding you for ‘activity,’ so long as you’re out there fighting crime and solving problems—with the community.”

  “Amen,” said Gene Chouinard.

  Fueled by a couple of drinks, we took our conversation outside. It was raining hard but that didn’t stop us. We walked the grounds for an hour or so, talking shop, jawing about what was in store for him and the other project officers.

  For the next year our project cops did things they’d never done before. They studied their beats, systematically. (At least two of the officers had been unable to tell us their beat boundaries at the beginning of the training. Their attitude was, what difference did it make, so long as they continued to shag their numbers and stuff them into the PD’s centralized “productivity” machine?) They analyzed demographic and socioeconomic and crime and traffic and called-for-services data. They researched “institutional patterns of life” on their beats, examining the various services of community-based organizations and introducing themselves to agency employees. They devoted hours to “mapping” their beats, identifying key geographical and topographical features, and where the neighborhoods’ biggest problems were.

  They didn’t just study their beats, of course. They worked them according to a new set of values, strategies, and tactics (which included traditional approaches well worth preserving). While they didn’t encourage direct citizen patrols (I wouldn’t have allowed it in those days), they did work intimately with the community to develop joint approaches to solving problems and fighting crime. And because they were allowed to use their own discretion in coming up with innovative strategies, they invented several new approaches to police work. And not once were they pestered for numbers.

  It’s old hat today, but in the early seventies patrol officers didn’t carry walkie-talkies (ours did); they didn’t put citizens in the passenger seat to let them ride along and see police work up close and personal (ours did), and to strategize together how best to solve problems (ours did); they didn’t attend, much less host, community meetings (ours did); they didn’t take up advocacy of safety around schools or speak at school board sessions (ours did).

  We had one officer who, at the beginning of summer, took paint to paper and created a colorful poster which he then plastered all over Mission Beach. “So, You Want to Have a Party?” it read. Below that: a cartoonish picture of a young hippie grasping a beer can in one hand and flashing the peace sign in the other. The poster acknowledged the fun that beach parties promise, as well as the downside for residents (and for the cops), and it extended an invitation to meet with the self-same officer/artist to do a little “pre-party planning.” It turned out to be a wildly successful intervention. Meetings were held all over the neighborhood, and not a single bash got out of hand that summer. That had to be some kind of a record.

  We had another cop who worked with tenants and landlords in a neighborhood notorious for conflict. He spent hours researching the law and relevant policies and programs. Then he held joint meetings with all parties at which he provided training—and during which he mediated conflicts. Result? Dramatic reduction in calls, dramatic improvement in landlord-tenant relat
ions.

  Most of our project officers worked with groups, numbers of people. One, however, a rookie, singled out an individual as his beat’s biggest problem.

  Officer Ray Pulsipher made a project of “Robbie Hawkins.” Pulsipher, a cherubic, soft-spoken man who looked even younger than his twenty-two years, had struggled during the training. Not only was he one of the cops who didn’t know his beat boundaries, he’d guessed wrong on just about every demographic or socioeconomic characteristic of his beat, including this: Beat 122, the Linda Vista area of San Diego, was not, as he believed, “ninety percent black.” It was eight percent black. Nor did Beat 122 generate the “highest crime rate in the city”; it had the second lowest crime rate of the twenty-eight Northern Division beats.

  What these misconceptions revealed was that in his short time on Beat 122 Pulsipher had spent most of his nights patrolling a tight circle within the Linda Vista community. A circle of black faces. Sure, there was crime in that neighborhood, too much of it. But Pulsipher had made the same mistake most rookie white cops make while patrolling black communities. He equated “black” with “crime” and he ignored those parts of his beat that he assumed were “safe,” or at least relatively so: the vast white residential areas of Linda Vista.

  Pulsipher confessed to his ignorance. He also copped to “having trouble speaking to ‘the blacks.’ ” He told a story during a training session of taking a teenage shoplifter home to her mother. Pulsipher couldn’t understand it when mom lit into him; he thought he’d done her a favor by bringing the kid to her and not to Juvie (Juvenile Detention). We pressed him. What had he said to the woman? How had he said it? He told her he’d arrested lots of teenagers and that “not all of them are black.” “I swear I’m not prejudiced,” he told the class. Then he paused. “At least I don’t think I am. And if I am, I need to know it. I just can’t seem to stop putting my foot in my mouth.”

  Back on the streets after the training, Pulsipher radically changed his approach to patrolling Beat 122. He studied the numbers, the census and crime data. He discovered his biggest (i.e., the community’s biggest) crime problem: daytime residential burglaries committed by truant white kids in white neighborhoods. Pulsipher teamed up with the cop working days, went out in plainclothes, on a bicycle, with a walkie-talkie in his backpack, and solved that problem in two days.

  And he acted on his vow to learn to talk with people in the black community. Every night, after taking a quick survey of his beat by car, he’d park the vehicle, get out and start walking. And talking—and listening—to people, white and black. Some of these conversations were field interrogations, but most were merely friendly chats. He attended numerous community meetings in black neighborhoods, honing his listening skills, sensitizing himself to “hot button” words, searching for ways to make a human connection with African-Americans, people he was beginning to see as no different from himself—except in “positive ways.”

  It was early in this real-world tutorial that he came across the black youth, Hawkins. Sullen and snarly, Robbie Hawkins was a member of one of the most notorious families of offenders and ex-offenders in the city. Every one of them, Robbie especially, had a rap sheet that went to multiple pages and included burglaries, robberies, thefts—and assaults on police officers. I hadn’t even graduated from the academy when I first heard the family name. San Diego cops from the Tijuana border to Del Mar knew of the rabidly “anti-police” family in Linda Vista.

  Having left a party one night, Hawkins was walking up Linda Vista Road. Pulsipher spotted him and pulled over. “Hey, Robbie. How you doing?”

  “None of your fucking business.”

  “Okay.”

  “Why you always jacking me?”

  “I thought I’d offer you a ride. If you want one, I mean.”

  “Why, man?”

  “No reason, I guess. Just seemed a little chilly tonight. Looks like you got a long walk ahead of you.”

  “Yeah, it is a ways.”

  “Well, hop in if you want to.”

  “I guess.” Hawkins reached for the back door of the cage car.

  “No, no,” said Pulsipher. “Up here.” He reached over and opened the front seat passenger door. Hawkins slid in. Our police officer had just violated every officer-safety rule in the book. But he was willing to take the risk.

  “Never rode up here before,” said Hawkins.

  “How come you’re walking?”

  “No reason.”

  “Where’s your car?”

  “Home.” Pulsipher knew Hawkins had lost his license, but he didn’t want to rub it in. At least the kid was obeying the law tonight.

  “Well, I’m glad I came along. Happy to give you a lift.”

  “They took my motherfucking license,” said Hawkins. Pulsipher saw his opportunity and took it.

  “Well . . . maybe I can help you get it back.”

  Which he did. He got Robbie Hawkins his license back. Why? Because he had concluded that Hawkins was redeemable, and that he might be able to make a difference in the young man’s life. If nothing else, maybe this gesture would neutralize some of the ill will Hawkins felt toward the PD. Pulsipher understood that people, even neighborhood hoodlums, are less likely to attack the few cops, or the one, they know and trust.

  Hawkins never thanked Pulsipher for going out on a limb for him. But he never forgot it. How do I know?

  Because of an armed 211 (robbery) call at L.V. Liquor in the 7100 block of Linda Vista Road. The clerk had been shot through the shoulder. Pulsipher was one of the first officers to arrive at the scene. The suspect was long gone, but as he drove onto the lot Pulsipher spotted Hawkins standing by a car. Another unit was across the parking lot, broadcasting suspect information. Hawkins gestured to Pulsipher, a motion so slight that no one else would have picked up on it. Then he walked behind the liquor store. Pulsipher waited a moment then followed, into a pitch-dark recess. Hawkins was standing on the other side of a Dumpster. Had the kid set him up? Pulsipher wouldn’t let himself believe it but the thought crossed his mind. He walked up to Hawkins.

  “What’s up, Robbie?”

  “I saw it, man.”

  “The stickup?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who was it?” said Pulsipher. Hawkins told him. Then he told him where the robber would likely be found.

  Pulsipher still had a nagging feeling that the whole thing might be a setup—cops in black communities were taking a fair amount of rocks, bottles, and, on occasion, sniper fire in those days—but he called for backup and drove to the location Hawkins had given him. Four units were in place, sitting on the house when the suspect pulled up moments later. Pulsipher and another cop took him down. Within forty minutes of the robbery, they’d impounded the gun, the money, the getaway car, and the stickup man. Score one for the value of community policing, and of building positive relationships on the beat.

  This incident, though, paled by comparison to what would happen a couple of months later, a deadly incident involving Pulsipher and his new pal.

  Pulsipher got a call to an apartment complex, a loud stereo complaint. He pulled up to the curb, having asked radio for a “call back” to the complainant, sometimes an effective anti-ambush tactic. The din of the stereo suggested it wasn’t a trap. He walked up a flight of outdoor stairs and down a walkway to the offending apartment where he knocked on the door and announced himself to a collection of young black men. Without warning, a man bolted through the screen door, grabbed Pulsipher, and pushed him across the landing to the wrought-iron railing. Taken by surprise and teetering over the railing, Pulsipher was sure he was a goner. He pictured himself falling, his head splitting open on the concrete below. Then, as quickly as it had happened, he felt the man being jerked off him. “Nah, man,” said the familiar voice. “This dude’s okay.” Hawkins may not have thanked Pulsipher in a conventional way, for the officer’s positive intervention in his life, but his gratitude was conveyed unambiguously that night.

 
By the end of our “demonstration project,” we’d proved that cops, freed of the numbers game (both psychologically and operationally) and other bureaucratic nonsense, can make a difference. Our project cops arrested more felons and answered as many radio calls, but wrote fewer traffic citations, as their control-group counterparts. Our analysis, and that of an independent on-site evaluator, found that the increase in arrests was the result of greater citizen confidence in the police, a willingness to come forward with suspect tips and other important information.

  Those fewer traffic tickets? Chalk it up to a refusal on the part of our project cops to write “wobblers,” or chickenshit citations. Our officers worked to build relations with the community, not tear them down.

  At project’s end, we brought three of the cops into Hoobler’s office to talk about what the experience had meant to them. Over lunch a couple of days earlier, I’d cautioned them to avoid certain trigger words with Hoobler, but they used them anyway: partnership with the community, collaboration with social workers and others, sharing information, and credit for successes. The chief sneered a couple of times, but took it all in. On the strength of the statistical results and some splendid anecdotal accounts of the success of the project, he accepted our recommendation to implement community policing citywide.

  Hoobler’s stock had been dropping steadily during the yearlong project, confidence in his leadership plummeting by the day. The man had to be seen as far more sensitive to the community and quick. It was Hoobler who coined the now-common phrase community-oriented policing, although he continued to stick with “orientated.”

  I’d like to say that citywide, departmentwide implementation of community policing was a smashing success. But it wasn’t. Far from it.

  Within two years the thing was dead—or as I preferred to put it, dormant. We’d tried hard, our small band of advocates and True Believers, putting on some of the best departmentwide training the agency had ever seen, devising systems to help ensure accountability in the absence of the numbers game, and so on. But we just couldn’t keep it together, even when Hoobler got the sack (for lying to his boss) and Bill Kolender, his young assistant chief with impeccable community credentials, took over.