Breaking Rank (2 page)

I was twenty, freshly married, working as a kennelman at the National City Pet Hospital. My eighteen-year-old bride and I lived in an apartment on the grounds. Dottie wasn't overjoyed with the arrangement—the barking dogs, the yowling cats, the odors. And the pet owners rapping on our bedroom window in the middle of the night: a woman to inform me that Mitzi's nose was warm, that she “just doesn't seem herself lately,” the owner of a kitten wondering if Tangerine needed her rabies shot before traveling to
Mexico, a party animal demanding to know why his new puppy, bloated and comatose, wouldn't wake up after being fed a bowl of Bud. It was time for a new home, a new job.

I passed each phase of San Diego's civil service testing, which took a couple of months. At the end of the process I was scheduled to meet with the chief of police himself.

I walked down the long, terracotta-tiled corridor of the old police headquarters on West Market to the “corner pocket.” The police chief, a white-haired, wrinkled man, squinted at me through rheumy eyes and thick horn-rimmed glasses. “Tell me, son, why do you want to be a policeman?” I'd been practicing for this all morning, I was ready.

“To help people and prevent crime and—and
mayhem
.” The word, which a lieutenant had scolded me for misusing during my civil service interview (think not chaos and disorder but split lips and slit ears), was lodged there in my brain, like a song you can't shake. The chief shook his head.

“That's what they all say. ‘I want to
help
people.' Tell me the real reason you want to be a policeman.”

“Really, sir. I've thought about it a lot. I really
do
want to help people. Like when they get robbed and so forth.”

“Do you know what a robbery is?”

“Sure. It's when somebody, like, breaks into your apartment and steals your things.”

“That's a burglary son. A robbery is a little more—personal. But you'll have plenty of time for all that in the academy
. . . if
I decide to hire you. Tell me, why should I hire you?”

“Because I'm a hard worker? Because I care about people? Because . . .”

“Are you asking me these things, or telling me?”

“
Telling
you, sir.” I tried to be emphatic but my voice cracked in the middle of “telling.” The assistant chief, a large man with a crew cut who'd been sitting in silence off to the side, laughed, explosively. I blushed. And fumed. I didn't need this shit. I could become a fireman. Or, God forbid, go back to working with Dad on his construction sites, something I'd done every summer from age eight to sixteen.

“Well, you've made it this far,” said the chief. “I guess I'll go ahead and take a chance on you. But you remember this.” He crooked a finger at me.
“You're on probation for a year. That means I can fire you just as quick as I've hired you. You understand?”

“Yes, sir.” My voice cracked again and the assistant chief laughed again, a little softer this time.

“Well, welcome aboard, son.” The chief stood up, wincing. Maybe he had a trick knee too; mine was from football. I'd lied about it on the application. The chief hobbled out from behind a prison-industries desk the size of a jury box and smiled at me as we shook on it. He seemed like a really nice guy.

Although I was thrilled, I honestly didn't get it: Why in the world would Chief Wes Sharp hire
me
? Later I learned that SDPD was hard up for cops at the time. It's a cyclical thing, police hiring. Three months later, the budget closing in on him, the city manager demanding “economies” for the rest of the fiscal year, Sharp never would have welcomed me aboard. But he was hurting for cops in the field.

I brought my new identity home from Albert's Uniforms in two brown paper shopping bags. As soon as Dottie left for work I tried it all on. I was jolted by the image in the full-length mirror on the back of our bedroom door. But I would be a
different
kind of cop, I told myself. Sensitive and compassionate, responsive and responsible. I would catch people who stole from or hurt other people. I would not write chickenshit tickets. I would never use the “N” word, or act unprofessionally.

I practiced a few quick-draws with my imaginary six-shooter and then pulled on my new raingear: rubber boots, a yellow coat, a yellow rain cap with a floppy visor. I looked like a 170-pound canary.

The police academy was a catalytic, values-jarring, life-changing experience. The staff and most of the instructors, cops all, were charismatic and sarcastic, comical and irreverent. I aspired to be just like them. And bowed enthusiastically to their authority.

What about all those accumulated grievances, all that fear and loathing of cops? They evaporated overnight. My top priority, my only priority, was to please or at least not piss off these cool new people in my life. To that end,
I spent hours studying the academy manual and spit-shining my new regulation plain-toed black shoes.

A few weeks into the academy I began to feel the rumblings of something I'd never felt before: self-confidence.

There was no greater confidence-builder than overcoming my fear of firearms. I'd performed dismally at the range, and had failed to qualify in our first “shoot.” The rangemaster, Sergeant A. B. Davis, who sounded a bit like Sean Connery but looked nothing like him, ordered me to take my six-inch .38 Smith and Wesson revolver home and “dry-fire” it, over and over. “An schqueeze that trigger, Schtamper. Schtop jerking it. Itch not your goddamn dick.” I got home that evening and unloaded the pistol (counting the six bullets in my hand at least half a dozen times). I picked a tiny smudge on the living room wall of our new apartment, took aim at it, and started dry-firing.
Click-click-click
.

My right hand was cramped, bruised, and cracked, but I went on to qualify. In fact, by graduation day I was the number-one shooter among SDPD recruits. (I would have been first overall but for an El Cajon cop who later got busted for pulling burglaries on his beat, on duty. I've always prided myself on being the number-one, non-felon marksman in the Forty-Ninth San Diego Police Academy Class.)

After twelve weeks at the academy I was out on the streets on my own, at last. I loved it. Chasing calls, writing tickets, wrestling drunks, pinching the occasional burglar or stickup man. And letting the bad guy know who was boss. Our instructors had drilled it into us: it was
us
against
them
, good guys versus bad guys. I knew which one I was, and set out to prove it.

I didn't give a moment's thought to how the job might be affecting me. Within months (was it weeks,
days?
) I was saying and doing things I'd never said or done before in my life. Not nice things, not proper things. But, oh my lord, was it fun! Screwing people around, laughing and joking about it after shift with my peers. My favorite stunt? Choking people out. I'd jab my right forearm against their throats, spin them around, hoist them up on my back, and squeeze with all my might. Then I'd whisper into their ears as they lost consciousness, “You're gonna
die,
asshole.”

I'd been on the job a little over a year when I pinched a nineteen-year-old
puke who'd had the nerve to question my authority.
*
I'd busted him for a violation of Section 647(f) of the California Penal Code—drunk in a public place and unable to care for himself or the safety of others. In those days people arrested on that charge pled guilty and paid their twenty-nine bucks. Not this kid (I was three years his senior). A month after the arrest I received a subpoena. No problem—I knew exactly what to do.

On the trial date I sauntered into the county courthouse, sidled up to the deputy prosecutor, and suggested with a wink and a poke that he dismiss the case.
Why?
he demanded to know. Because it was a skinny pinch, I told him. He asked if the kid had actually been drunk. What kind of a question was that? “No, not really. But he was a puke. He called me a pig.”

The attorney peered at me through his tortoiseshell glasses and said, “Does the Constitution of the United States mean anything to you, Officer Stamper?”

I was furious, as angry as I'd ever been in my life. But my rage quickly turned to embarrassment. How could I have come so far from my pre-cop views and values? By the time I slithered down the stairs of the courthouse and out into the bright sunshine, I was saturated in shame.

That slap-down in the courthouse, coupled with other developments in my personal life (such as junior-college classes that were leading me to question, at least tentatively, some of the things we did in police work) triggered an abiding commitment to reform. Of myself, initially. Then of everyone else, the whole rest of that tainted, unholy institution called American policing.

After a few years as a hydrophobic gasbag, haranguing my fellow cops and confessing our private sins publicly, I resolved to actually
study
my profession. My goal was to come up with more effective, more humane ways to get the job done.

The investigation was experiential: every shift on the streets was a learning experience. A couple of coworkers and I would regularly debrief the incidents we handled, including the almost nightly riots and mini-riots in the black community, plus all those civil rights and antiwar demonstrations. It wasn't always easy but we did learn things, and we applied the lessons to our practice.

I also studied my field academically, researching and analyzing our laws, police procedures and police administration, political science, leadership, social and organizational change, systems theory. Later, I attended and spoke at numerous national and international conferences on policing, and visited and consulted with several dozen police agencies, often conducting “organization development” and leadership workshops for them. I taught at the police academy, and at San Diego State University, the University of California at San Diego, and the University of Washington. I wrote a dissertation, later published, on the “professed values versus the observed behavior” of American big-city police chiefs.
*
I came to Seattle in 1994 as a police chief with a Ph.D. in leadership and human behavior.

With each new badge, each new phase of learning, I developed a deeper and keener understanding of this: the most intractable problems of my field—racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia and other brands of bigotry, fear, brutality, corruption, organizational ineptitude, even individual incompetence—are rooted in the
system
of policing, a system that includes the laws police are called upon to enforce.