Breaking Rank

by Norm Stamper

  WMHH pulls up to his place of business. An employee jumps up, rushes over to push open the ten-foot cyclone gate. WMHH pulls in, parks in his designated space. Another safe trip into the heart of the jungle. In the evening, before dark if he can manage it, he reverses the journey. And sighs deeply, relieved, as Sammy the Guard opens then shuts the gate behind the S-Class. WMHH clicks open the garage door to his palace, drives in, punches the security code to the house, strides into the kitchen, shakes and pours himself a martini, walks out to the deep aqua pool in the backyard, and decompresses.

  “Wouldn’t it be swell,” I concluded, “if each of us took responsibility for improving conditions in the communities where we work as well as where we live? Questions?”

  The first came from a tan, balding, decidedly rich-looking man who’d been giving me the stinkeye from the moment I started my talk. He didn’t have a question but he wanted me to know that he pays taxes, a lot of taxes, for police protection, and that it is the job of the police to protect him and his family. The Gates offense. He was afire with anger (and only in part because I’d unknowingly described the man to a T, all the way down to the make and model of his automobile).

  We made zero progress, WMHH and I. I just wanted to eat my free lunch and get back on 1-5 as soon as possible.

  What would I have liked WMHH to do in his community? Simple. Turn over the deed of his faux-Tudor mansion to a battered women’s shelter and grant them his fleet of luxury vehicles—or sell them and donate the proceeds to charity or give one each to his gardener, housekeeper, nanny, and personal trainer. I’d have him, his spouse, and their 2.5 children move into the inner city, to within a few blocks of his business. Think of the convenience! They wouldn’t need a car; they could take the bus, like so many of their neighbors—sometimes transferring as many as three or four times to get to work in the morning then home again at night. They could rent an apartment or a house, perhaps one formerly used as a meth lab (they could get it for a song). They could send their kids to the neighborhood school where the average eighth grader reads at third-grade level, and the whole family could take advantage of the community health clinic for all their medical needs. Oh, and I’d have him sell his boat and his vacation home in Palm Springs, cash in his stocks, bonds, annuities, and other paper assets, then transfer the money directly into the accounts of organizations like the Boys and Girls Club and Big Brothers, Big Sisters.

  Okay, that’s fantasy. But what if Mr. WMHH—motivated by guilt or genuine concern for his community decided he wanted to get involved? He’d be limited only by his imagination.

  He could introduce himself to the neighbors around his business, get to know them. Let them get to know him. He could slip into his grubbies on a Saturday and pick up litter, paint over graffiti. He might even organize a work party to paint that decrepit old house on the corner—the one occupied by the elderly woman whose arthritis is so advanced she can hardly pour herself a cup of tea, much less wield a paintbrush. Maybe the plumbing or the wiring or the heating or the yard needs work. WMHH could create a neighborhood/business watch program, invite neighbors into his conference room, serve refreshments, launch a citizens patrol. He could donate time to the school’s or the library’s reading program (few things brought me greater joy as a chief in Seattle than reading stories to schoolkids in poor neighborhoods). He could become a Big Brother. Or a mentor, teaching some lucky kid how to become a thriving capitalist. He could walk a couple of blocks over to the Boys and Girls Club, volunteer his services, write them a shockingly big check. He could do the same for the battered women’s shelter and/or the little league and/or the neighborhood health clinic and/or the center for services to immigrants and/or the ex-offender reentry program and/or the city’s rec center and/or . . .

  The point is that community police is really community building. And community building is character building.

  There are understandable reasons why some people don’t want to get involved in policing their own communities. Families are busy. They spend their days and nights juggling multiple and colliding priorities—Sarah’s soccer, Mark’s orthodontia, Lucy’s clarinet lessons, choir practice, PTA meetings. Both parents, or the solo parent, work long hours, often at more than one job. The last thing they have time for is patrolling the streets or volunteering at an after-school program for teens or hosting a neighborhood watch program.

  Or, like me—they simply don’t want to get involved with neighborhood watch or citizen patrols. Personally, I’ve had enough of it. I guess I’ve overdosed on crime. The less I have to think about it, the less often I see a police car (as a reminder of crime—or, depending on my mood, of government oppression), the happier I am. I live in a cabin on a mountain on an island. I neither see nor hear my neighbors. My “community” is the woods, its diverse wildlife, and Gunther, my long-haired miniature dachshund. This is a painful confession, coming from a lifelong advocate of community organizing, and a man who still loves big-city diversity and amenities. But it is what it is.

  Yet, if someone steals my street sign down by the main road one more time . . .

  Most of us have, I suspect, an “involvement threshold” which, if crossed, would motivate us to get involved. A series of home-invasion robberies the next block over. Your car stolen out of your driveway. The rape or murder of a neighbor’s child. The theft of a sign. Whether we stick it out for months, years, a lifetime, or merely until the immediate threat has ended, we’ll come together as community. Organizing, mobilizing, and working with one another and with the police to make our homes, schools, workplaces, and streets safe.

  No matter how much money we make, how steep our police-supporting taxes, how busy our lives, or how “alone” we prefer to be there are times when we just must act—together.

  That citizens patrol we formed to help catch the murdering skinheads? Well, they did it! Trained by some outstanding police officers (and having been vetted by voluntary criminal records checks), they reported for duty at our command van. They received their assignments, donned orange vests, and patrolled Hillcrest and North Park in VWs, Camrys, and Ford Fiestas. Armed with cell phones, suspect information, and instructions on how to avoid recklessly endangering themselves or violating the rights of their fellow citizens, they worked night after night, observing and collecting information. They prevented (simply by their highly publicized, conspicuous presence) untold crimes. And they caught, in the act, several muggers—which is to say they got on those cell phones immediately, followed the suspects, and called us to swoop in and make the arrests.

  And it was information provided by the citizens patrol that led to the arrests and convictions of the suspects who killed that kid.

  * A term with unfortunate implications today. To the project, it meant police officers becoming increasingly, systematically more well educated about demographic, socioeconomic, crime, traffic, and other community issues, particularly the trends and patterns in their assigned communities. To guard against understandable fears that our “profile cops” would build dossiers or otherwise pry into the private lives of individual citizens, we formed a citizens’ advisory group of university professors, a student activist, a business representative, and an ACLU attorney—and gave them complete access to everything. They read profile reports, had unfettered access to the officers’ daily journals, rode along with the cops, and without supervision questioned individual project officers. Their report at the end of the project was glowing: not a single abuse of police authority did they find.

  * Fogelson, Robert M. Big-City Police. Harvard University Press, 1977.

  * I was fortunate to inherit O. W. Wilson’s personal library, and kept it in my office in San Diego for years. It was full of his and others’ writings on these cutting-edge management theories. (It also contained a first edition of LeMoyne Snyder’s classic Homicide Investigation [1945], replete with page after page of the most gruesome murder scenes you’d ever want to see.)

  * Embraced by most states and cit
ies, and many other countries, the code was written in the late 1950s by a former San Diego police captain. Gene Muehleisen, who later became the first executive director of the California state commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training.

  * A dear friend, Joe Brann, insists that Santa Ana beat San Diego to the punch in institutionalizing community policing (he’s been wrong before). I’d met Brann when he was a lieutenant in Santa Ana. We’ve maintained our friendship through his work as Hayward (Calif.) chief of police and in his role, during the Clinton years, as director of the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services (the “COPS Office”) in Washington, D.C. A consultant these days, Brann is much in demand not only because he knows community policing inside and out but because he backs the theory with dozens of real-world success stories culled from hundreds of on-site visits.

  * It has invested over $3 billion in 1,700 local “community development corporations” in forty-one cities. It’s helped build or rehabilitate 100,000 affordable homes, and created over eleven million square feet of commercial and community space.

  * The work can be privately financed but usually involves mandated community service. Street and graffiti cleanups, restoration of watersheds, filing and other clerical work for social service agencies, building homes for Habitat for Humanity are but a few examples of the kind of work performed by ex-offenders.

  CHAPTER 30

  CULTIVATING FEARLESS LEADERSHIP

  YOU’RE A POLICE CHIEF. You want to move your department from where it is today to a better place. What do you do? You surround yourself with good people, set the agency on the right course, and establish and enforce tough standards of performance and conduct. Then you do everything in your power to make sure that, when your time comes, you are replaced by someone who’ll do the job better than you.

  This means promoting the personal growth and professional development of each and every employee. (That’s why you delegate responsibility and authority, not because it’s the fashionable thing to do.) You want your cops, and all your employees, to make the right decision, for the right reasons—when you’re not around.

  In one of the all-time best books on the subject, Leadership (1978), James MacGregor Burns draws a distinction between transactional and transformational leadership.* The transactional form, common in political and corporate leadership—and pervasive in policing—is all about “brokering” deals, e.g., vote for me, I’ll rezone your property; do a good job for me, I’ll recommend you for dicks; lie for me, I’ll lie for you . . . . Transactional leadership is efficient, and it’s often enough to get the job done—if you’re satisfied with barely adequate (or barely ethical) performance, and the preservation of the status quo.

  Transformational leadership, on the other hand, promises profound change “. . . so comprehensive and pervasive . . . that new cultures and value systems take the place of old” (emphasis added). It sets out, consciously and deliberately, to transform followers into leaders and leaders into moral agents.

  “Moral agents”? Individuals who are deeply, demonstrably committed to liberty, justice, and equality. A police department that embraces these values would, by definition, reject racism, sexism, homophobia, and every other brand of bigotry. It would work with the community to achieve safe streets and social justice. It would nurture a workplace in which diversity of opinion is appreciated, and whose employees treat one another with dignity and respect, regardless of rank or status.

  It should be apparent why this kind of leadership is so arresting to me, given my conviction that American policing—its culture, value system, and structure—is in need of “comprehensive and pervasive” change.

  In Seattle, I taught these and other leadership principles in classes open to all employees, as well as members of the community. The theory of transformational leadership was embraced enthusiastically. In fact, my cops hungered for such a workplace—even as they acknowledged the gaping chasm between classroom theory and the real world. What then, stood in our way? In a word, fear.

  Fear (or at least the expression of it) is a socially unacceptable emotion in the police culture, something you learn the first day on the job. It’s okay to tell your buddies in the cop bar how you almost peed your pants when you came face-to-face with the gunman. But that’s just a figure of speech. Your peers must experience you as the ass-kicking, fearless hombre you’ve worked so hard to personify. It’s the same persona that many cops bring along with them as they ascend the promotional ladder, thereby creating a police leadership culture of fake fearlessness.

  Looking back, I wouldn’t trade my own fears for anything. I hurt people because of them, and I feel shame for many of my actions. But the struggle to understand my behavior taught me, as it continues to teach me, that most abuses of power flow from fear.

  I’ve talked about the need for police officers to be tough and gentle at the same time. They can’t do that if they’re living and working in a state of perpetual fear. In my leadership class I diagrammed how fear works in the body.* To develop fearlessness you have to lean into your fears. You have to become a warrior.

  When I picture warriors I don’t see the “jarheads” described in Anthony Swofford’s 2003 chronicle of the Gulf War. I see: Nelson Mandela, Joan of Arc, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Harriet Tubman, Vaclav Havel, Eleanor Roosevelt, Viktor Frankl, Sojourner Truth, Branch Rickey, Rosa Parks, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Mother Teresa, Anne Frank. Men and women who who went into battle armed only with a moral compass and a passion for justice. They changed the world, these warriors.

  As have warriors armed with more conventional weapons of war—and the requisite skills, tactical wisdom, and capacity for physical violence: the samurai of Japan who fought valiantly, without regard for personal glory. Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota chief who, with the Oglala Sioux chief Crazy Horse, prevailed at the Battle of Little Bighorn. (“Hoka Hey,” said Chief Sitting Bull, appropriating the Sioux war cry—“It is a good day to die.” Which I take to mean: I’ve lived honorably, told the truth, taken a stand against evil and injustice. I am at peace.) I think of E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: the “band of brothers” who in darkness parachuted into Normandy and fought their way through France, including an implausible stand at frigid Bastogne (where, according to Stephen Ambrose, the rallying cry was, “They got us surrounded, the poor bastards”), all the way to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest atop Obersalzberg.

  Common to these armed warriors is uncommon grace. Gentle of spirit, but capable of astonishing ferocity. Peace-lovers, but not pacifists. Some warriors fight out of love of humanity, for social justice, for human rights. But many fight and die not for their “homeland” (and certainly not for pusillanimous politicians who, over the centuries, have sent them to fight unwise or immoral wars), but for the love of their fellow warriors.

  Police officers in Japan are modern-day samurai. Carefully selected for their interpersonal competence as well as their physical prowess, Japanese cops receive instruction in Confucianism, Bushido (the way of the samurai), and psychology to promote their “social skills and moral judgment.”* It is the tradition of the samurai to learn flower arranging before swordsmanship.

  How do we get American cops, and police chiefs, to abandon fake fearlessness—bravado and/or cruelty—in order to achieve genuine warriorlike courage? It begins, I believe, with a decision to think about and to experience fear in a fundamentally different way, a conscious choice not to dread fear, but to embrace it. An illustration from “Meeting the Demons,” from No Enemies Within by Dawna Markove:

  Once upon a time, a long time ago, and very far from here, a great Tibetan poet named Milarepa studied and meditated for decades. He traveled the countryside, teaching the practice of compassion and mercy to the villagers he met. He faced many hardships, difficulties, and sorrows, and transformed them into the path of his awakening.

  Finally, it was time to return to the small hut he called home. He had carried its memory in his
heart through all the years of his journey. Much to his surprise, upon entering, he found it filled with enemies of every kind. Terrifying, horrifying, monstrous demons that would make most people run. But Milarepa was not most people.

  Inhaling and exhaling slowly three times, he turned towards the demons, fully present and aware. He looked deeply into the eyes of each, bowing in respect, and said, “You are here in my home now. I honor you, and open myself to what you have to teach me.”

  As soon as he uttered these words, all the enemies save five disappeared. The ones that remained were grisly, raw, huge monsters. Milarepa bowed once more and began to sing a song to them, a sweet melody resonant with caring for the ways these beasts had suffered, and curiosity about what they needed and how he could help them. As the last notes left his lips, four of the demons disappeared into thin air.

  Now only the one nasty creature was left, fangs dripping evil, nostrils flaming, opened jaws revealing a dark, foul, black throat. Milarepa stepped closer to this huge demon, breathed deeply into his own belly, and said with quiet compassion, “I must understand your pain and what it is you need in order to be healed.” Then he put his head in the mouth of the enemy.

  In that instant, the demon disappeared and Milarepa was home at last.

  To my comrades in blue: Whether facing peril on the streets, untoward peer pressure in the squad room, a bully of a boss, or tough political choices at headquarters, lean into your fears. Strengthen your skills, build emotional resilience, keep your sense of humor, strive for balance in life. As Anne O’Dell, of domestic violence prevention fame, appends to her e-mails, Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like you do when nobody’s watching.