by Norm Stamper
Community policing was an idea whose time had not come.
It had worked wonderfully in a hothouse environment, with a mere twenty-four cops and a sizable, dedicated staff to teach, encourage, challenge, and support the officers around the clock. But in the hostile, often toxic, culture of the department at large, community policing—San Diego–style—rolled up into a little ball and went to sleep.
We continued for years to assert that we were a community-oriented police agency, and for years visitors from around the country and around the globe streamed into the city for canned pitches on the marvels of “community policing.” But it wasn’t until 1988 when a woman named Nancy McPherson showed up on our doorstep that community policing was roused from its slumber.
Hired by the Police Executive Research Forum (Washington, D.C.) to help us implement a pilot program in “problem oriented policing,” McPherson came from a background in political science and public administration. Smart, skillful, and respectful, she’d had no experience working with the police. But she worked tirelessly, first to educate herself about the history and culture of our institution, then to help individual police officers learn how to become better problem solvers.
In 1989, Bob Burgreen was named SDPD’s top cop. A more enlightened, risk-taking chief you’d not find anywhere. McPherson, Burgreen, Captain Jerry Sanders, and City Manager Jack McGrory led the process of institutionalizing community, or “neighborhood,” policing in San Diego. As Burgreen’s new assistant chief, in charge of all day-to-day operations, I was generally confined to the role of cheerleader.
The city manager, in particular, was critical to the success of neighborhood policing. McGrory understood that only through the purposeful, collaborative, and sustained involvement of all city departments could true community-based policing become a reality. From cleaning up graffiti to shutting down crack houses, from providing recreational facilities and programs for the city’s youth to filling potholes in the street (another metaphor for “broken windows”), every city employee needed to understand his or her role in helping the community police itself.
It was never radical enough for my blood, those late eighties initiatives. It never really achieved the promise of legitimate, grassroots community direction and oversight of police practices. But it sure beat the hell out of everything else out there. And it reestablished San Diego as the preeminent community-policing city in the country.* This time, when visitors showed up to be educated SDPD actually had something to teach them.
As did Seattle in the late 1990s.
On a cold, wet day in 1996 I walked a beat in Seattle’s International District with Tommy Doran and his partner. I was there to observe “improvements” over what I’d seen just months before. I did see progress, mostly in the form of modest cosmetic changes to storefronts. But I also saw conditions that made me wonder whether Chinatown, in the heart of the ID, would ever become a model of “community policing” success.
Chinatown had had a recent history of drive-by shootings and other youth gang violence, street muggings, and car prowls. Aggressive panhandlers and passed-out drunks ruled Hing Hay Park on South King Street. The police and the community, historically, had been unable or unwilling to break through cultural stereotypes to build a durable peacekeeping partnership. Further, the “Wah Mee Massacre” was still on the minds of many cops and residents—and in the thoughts of would-be tourists and investors.
On February 18, 1983, three young Chinese-American men had stormed the Wah Mee, a Chinatown nightclub that hosted big-stakes illegal gambling. Armed to the teeth, the suspects hogtied the fourteen people present, shot them all (only one survived), and fled with tens of thousands of dollars. (Two were captured immediately, and the third was extradited from Canada two years later. All three were convicted and received life sentences.)
Our hope was that a 1995 “Community Safety Initiative” grant from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) would help us turn things around in Chinatown–International District. Headquartered in New York and chaired by former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, LISC “helps resident-led, community-based development organizations transform distressed communities and neighborhoods into healthy ones—good places to live, do business, work and raise families.”* It sounded perfect, just what Chinatown needed. But months into the project I was beginning to despair that Seattle’s “CSI” could do much more than put a better face on the ID. I saw little evidence that Doran’s work with the community, to that point, would ever transform it into a permanently safe, “good place to live, do business, work and raise families.”
Under and adjacent to Interstate 5, and close to the center of Chinatown, was the “Jungle.” Home to a small army of the homeless, the Jungle spawned continuing waves of crime and other conduct that terrorized and demoralized the community: belligerent begging, public urinating and defecating, robberies, assaults, rapes, murders. I’d been pestering Doran to take me there. With an hour left in the shift, he said, “You ready?”
We walked east up Jackson Street, a broad four-lane that if taken west would put you in Pioneer Square, a block from the King Dome. Follow it a few blocks more to Elliott Bay and you can board a ferry for Bainbridge or other lovely wooded islands in the Puget Sound. It was daylight as we started under the massive freeway overpass, but it seemed more like midnight—dark, dismal, foreboding. The dozens of parked cars jammed into a makeshift lot on the south side of Jackson seemed to be shivering, as if they were cold, or afraid. Doran had asked the Department of Transportation to light the place up, but they had other priorities.
We walked across the street and started up the steep bank to the heart of the Jungle. “Careful,” said Doran. “That’s not mud.” We slipped and slid our way to the top of the bank where a homestead had been established in the crease between turf and concrete bridge abutment. The camp was deserted, its inhabitants scurrying off in response to an early-warning system activated when we’d been observed crossing the street below. Strewn everywhere were used syringes and condoms, mud-encrusted blankets, cardboard boxes, some used for storage, others flattened out and used for beds, filthy articles of clothing, and a treasure trove of crime evidence, most of it the empty cases of cameras and binoculars and other personal belongings lifted from the cars—and the persons—of Chinatown tourists.
Over the next three years I heard clashing accounts of what was happening in the district. Lisa Belsky, New York director of LISC’s CSI projects, and her colleague Bill Geller of Chicago were optimistic, but they saw problems. Mostly with us, the police. Doran’s captain, Tag Gleason, and his sergeant, Mike Mehan, were extremely supportive of their cop. But some of Doran’s fellow officers were resentful of the time he spent in “non-cop” activities—when he was out there organizing and mobilizing and attending meetings, when he was off forging partnerships with nontraditional partners, when he was walking his beat, his fellow patrol officers had to pick up the slack on 911 calls. Certain others in the chain of command were no happier. I asked Belsky and Geller, “Do you want me to intervene?” No, they suggested. “Just keep supporting the project but let Tommy and Tag and Mike work it out.” They’d let me know if it got bad enough for the chief of police to start dictating. Our goal was to institutionalize community policing, not order it.
During those three years I made numerous visits to the ID, taking lunch or dinner in one of the many tasty Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese restaurants, walking long stretches of the district, attending and/or speaking at community meetings. The “cosmetic” changes I’d noted on my first tour with Doran? I watched them become irreversible and, in the process, inspire other improvements. Storefront by storefront, block by block. But the biggest change of all was to the Jungle.
Tommy Doran and his CSI allies (Belsky, Geller, and from the community Michael Yi and Aileen Balahadia, and from the local Community Development Corporation, Tom Lattimore, et al) spearheaded a movement to put a permanent end to the dangerous, unhygienic jungle. Th
ey started by enlisting as partners homeless agencies, other city departments, private enterprise, and, yes, the Washington State Department of Transportation.
Phuong Le, a reporter for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, joined several of us on a tour in November 1999. Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government had just published a case study on our project. Here is part of what Le wrote:
To see how a partnership between police and community can change a neighborhood, hit the streets of the International District. . . . Start at Hing Hay Park, where the aromas of roasted duck and steamed dumplings have replaced the pungent odors of urine and booze that once dominated . . . . Seattle police and community members got merchants to voluntarily stop selling high alcohol wine and fortified beer. They put in tree lights, a restroom and game tables in the park and reduced public boozing, brawls and urination. These days, the park is a place where children come to skate, where the elderly play Chinese chess and residents practice tai chi . . . . The tour . . . started at Hing Hay Park and moved to the Phnom Penh restaurant where [the project] helped owner Kim Ung negotiate to buy the property about three years ago. Under previous owners the restaurant had been a trouble spot where drive-by shootings and gang activities were so common that gang unit officers were there on most weekends.
Doran then led the tour up to where the Jungle used to be. The concrete columns under the freeway had been clad in bright red with yellow Chinese characters. The parking lot was lit up to make the darkest days and nights bright and cheery (was that a smile on that Nissan?). Across the street and up the bank? The Jungle had been graded, making the bank even steeper. And it was paved over, in a not unattractive sandstone color. Its former occupants had been linked up to homeless agencies (where some of them would actually take advantage of the proffered assistance). And immediately to the east, where the Jungle had begun to encroach, construction was under way on the Pacific Rim Center, a multistory combination of affordable housing and small commercial businesses.
As Le wrote, “In the International District, community policing isn’t a buzzword. It’s a creative way of doing business.” To end the article, she quoted Doran: “I love the energy, this is a great community. So many things have happened so gradually that all of a sudden you see [the neighborhood] has changed.”
Like each of the eleven agencies that made up Seattle’s CSI project, Nancy McPherson grasped the true meaning of community policing. Along with her mentors, John Eck at the University of Cincinnati and University of Wisconsin professor Herman Goldstein (the “Father of Problem Oriented Policing” and the author of the 1977 classic, Policing a Free Society), McPherson recognized that three conditions must be present in order for an agency to proclaim itself a genuinely community-oriented PD: (1) a problem solving orientation (Eck’s “SARA” model—scanning, analysis, response, assessment—provided the most widely accepted approach to the discipline of problem solving); (2) an authentic partnership with the community; and (3) a demonstrable commitment to organizational transformation.
That last one is crucial because without such a commitment it’s simply not possible to conceive of community policing taking root in any city. The structure and culture of policing must change, fundamentally, for that to happen. All bureaus, divisions, sections, units—all members of the department must be on board. A handful of specialized patrol officers, a pontificating police chief, an idealistic lieutenant running some demonstration project—that’s not community policing, no matter what the propaganda claims.
In San Diego and Tallahassee, in Milwaukee and Brooklyn, in Seattle and Santa Monica, neighborhood “justice centers” have opened in recent years. Created, among other reasons, to help disputants resolve differences not with fists or guns out in the street but in a safe environment, these geographically dispersed centers are involved in conflict resolution, mediation, and sometimes arbitration. Some of the centers embrace a “restorative justice” concept, which means that the suspect in a crime is often brought face-to-face with his or her victims. Stolen articles are returned or replaced. The feeling of having been “violated” is addressed, apologies rendered, restitution ordered. Sometimes the wrongdoers are forgiven, sometimes they’re not. But the driving force behind restorative justice is just that: the restoration of fairness, of safety, and of that which has been lost to crime—tangibly or psychologically.
Staffed variously by attorneys, trained mediators, magistrates, and volunteers, justice centers operate in the community. The centers don’t replace the centralized courthouse or jails or prisons—those components of the criminal justice system must remain available for cases that can’t or ought not to be handled within the community. Major crimes, including sex offenses, domestic violence, and other violent and/or repeat offenses are best handled by the more formal system.
San Diego has pioneered a remarkable “one-stop shop” for dealing with the entire range of family issues, from DV safety planning to nutrition to pregnancy services to counseling.
Often community-driven, these initiatives, along with their public-private partnerships, are extremely promising. But there’s a big problem looming—and too many jurisdictions are ignoring it.
Just about everyone convicted of a crime and serving time in prison today (short of a capital or aggravated murder case or a “third strike” offense) will be “de-incarcerated” soon enough. Six hundred thousand of the two million people in jail or prison at this moment will be returning to the streets over the next year.
According to an October 2004 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (citing reports of the National Recidivism Reporting Program and the Survey of Inmates in State Correctional Facilities), the average number of ex-offenders who will be rearrested within three years of their release is 69.1 percent. On this basis alone, not to mention the moral duty, our police and other social institutions have a major stake in helping ex-offenders successfully reenter the community. If over two thirds of all ex-offenders return to the habits that put them in jail in the first place they will do serious damage to the best-laid plans of community policing.
Jeremy Travis, formerly of the Urban Institute, the Department of Justice, and now president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, offers a novel proposal: require that the sentencing judge preside over the community reentry process, convening all stakeholders—community and family members, police, parole officers, et al. The judge, familiar with the case, would lay down the law to the ex-offender and at the same time see to it that all appropriate resources are marshaled to help the ex-offender’s reentry.
Dennis Maloney, president of Community Justice Associates, and former director of Deschutes County (Oregon) Community Justice (note that it’s “community” not criminal justice), writes and speaks compellingly on the need for “earned redemption.” In his capacity as director of both adult and juvenile correctional facilities, Maloney developed some of the most innovative programs in “balanced and restorative” justice. Graduates of his program, who are required to work their way back to freedom—and responsibility—recidivate at dramatically reduced levels.* Maloney’s graduation ceremonies, in which a key, symbolizing the community reconstruction work of his ex-offenders, is passed from one graduate to the next. The moment is dramatic, the audience often reduced to tears. Among those in attendance at most graduations? The cops who’d busted the offenders, and many of the victims of those offenders.
Community policing is not for everyone. Just ask Daryl Gates. As the two of us debated the concept in Seattle, the ex-LAPD chief stunned the audience with one of his frequent outrageous remarks. “Community policing, my friends,” he said to the roomful of wealthy businessmen and businesswomen of the Young Presidents Organization, “is a sham, a hoax. You have absolutely no obligation to your neighbors. Your duty is to yourself, and no one else.” His rationale? You pay taxes for police service, so let the cops do it all. “Your responsibility for public safety ends at the sidewalk in front of your house. Take care of yourself, your family, and y
our home, and leave the rest of it to us—the police.”
I don’t know, maybe Gates was playing to the audience, those wealthy, youthful presidents of corporations, CEOs, chairs of corporate boards, managing partners, publishers. Gates may have thought he was preaching to the choir, but he couldn’t have gotten it more wrong—and the audience let him know.
But Gates is far from alone in the belief that policing should be left to the police.
In 1993 I spoke to a business group in Orange County, California. I’d given what I thought was an inspired, rousing talk on community policing, denouncing particularly the mentality behind guarded and gated communities.
I’d told a hypothetical story of a “wealthy male head of household” (whom we’ll call WMHH) who every morning slides behind the wheel of his silver Mercedes S-Class, pulls out of his four-car garage, waves goodbye to Sammy the Guard as Sammy the Guard salutes him and raises the gate. WMHH then motors toward his manufacturing business in the inner city.
The streets he travels undergo a striking transformation: from broad, winding, and shaded to clogged, treeless, smog-filled. Now, they’re bordered by apartment buildings and small stores, some shuttered, most sporting bars over the windows, all awash in graffiti. WMHH passes youngsters on the way to school, drunks passed out in doorways, homeless people with their shopping carts, their cardboard pleas for spare change. Crack houses abound. Bangers and drug dealers control the streets. Hookers cover all three shifts, syringes and used condoms at their feet. Knots of seniors sit outside mom-and-pop grocery stores in plastic and aluminum lawn chairs, shaking their heads, clucking their teeth, telling each other how it didn’t use to be like this.