Breaking Rank (38 page)

If police work isn't the most stressful job on the planet, it comes close. Creating a schedule that gave our cops an extra day off each week (in exchange for extending the workday an additional two hours) had become a personal crusade with me. I agreed with my cops who said they needed an extra day to decompress, to come down from the demands of the job. The “10-Plan” was a family-friendly step that could only help in building
morale
, a factor often overlooked in the search for causes of a department's poor safety record. A demoralized force is an unsafe force—risky for the cops, and risky for the citizens they serve.

Taking that last point into account, soon after the task force had completed its work the command staff met in a daylong workshop to consider other ways to boost department morale. Ours was a force of men and women who clearly believed, with ample reason, that they were underappreciated—and understaffed.

I'd been saying for months that San Diego was a “dangerously under-policed city,” that we had too few cops to get the job done effectively, and safely. My statement won nods from the cops, of course, and from most in the community. But when I made it to a reporter I got a call the next day from the city manager. “Did he quote you accurately?” said Jack McGrory.

“Yep.”

“Do me a favor,” he said.

“What's that?

“Don't say it again.”

“10-4.” It was okay, he said, for me to tell folks we were “understaffed.” Euphemisms in politics are not only ubiquitous, they're actually understandable. But they sure suck sometimes.

One of the outcomes of the command staff workshop was a decision to assert San Diego's commitment to all things excellent, in officer safety and in service to the community. How? Ken Moller and Dick Toneck, a couple of veteran captains, suggested we announce to the world that we were the
best
police department in the country. A short time later the entire fleet sported
America's Finest
signs.

Much more administrative work was needed, of course, in order to keep the phrase from being turned into a source of derision rather than pride: We had to sell our sweeping, costly changes in officer safety to the city council.

It was Bill Kolender's finest hour. He and Burgreen pored over the officer-safety task force report. Burgreen put his number-crunchers to work, then had a series of sit-downs with Kolender, helping the super-chief polish his presentation to the city council. At the meeting in council
chambers Kolender gained and held the attention of the elected officials from start to finish. Not that they weren't already motivated—San Diego police officer mortality had become a hot political issue. One council member in particular, Mike Gotch, a liberal Democrat, had made officer safety his top priority. The result? Not a blank check, but damn near. From a notoriously stingy city council.

Within months we had painted our insipid all-white police cars black-and-white, and purchased a slew of other equipment. There was even money (though not nearly enough) in the budget for new police officer positions. With 1.6 officers per thousand citizens versus NYPD's six per thousand or LAPD's 2.6 or Seattle's 2.5, San Diego remains to this day a
dangerously under-policed
city.

Edward Conlon in
Blue Blood
, a riveting first-person account of life in the NYPD, paints a sharply contrasting picture of workplace pressures and demands of patrol officers. In patrol, Conlon would get three or four calls a shift. I remember shagging twenty-four calls in a single eight-hour shift, and averaging twelve or thirteen. Conlon had time to read the paper or a book on the job. His backup, which when summoned would show up in droves, was usually half a minute to a minute away. In San Diego, a city of four hundred square miles, you were lucky, working any of its outlying beats, if your backup arrived within fifteen minutes. Comparing officer mortality rates, which adjusts for department population, it's far more dangerous being a cop in sunny San Diego than in New York City.

Even with a woefully understaffed force, those improvements in officer safety really paid off. The number of officers slain in the line of duty since 1985? Three, including one killed, deliberately, in a traffic incident. (Several other San Diego officers have been killed in traffic accidents both on-and off-duty.)

That's three too many, of course, but it does show that a police administration that cares about its cops can have a powerful, positive effect on officer mortality rates. And given San Diego's enviable record of steady crime reductions since that era, I think we can infer a positive relationship
between officer safety and crime fighting (not to mention the effects of authentic versus “PR” versions of community policing). So, it's not just the cops and their families who benefit when police officers' health, safety, and morale are scrupulously attended to. Everybody wins.

Having been for years too laid back and ignorant about the issue, I vowed that the safety of my officers would be forevermore my number-one internal priority. (I took this attitude to Seattle where I found cops still packing .38 revolvers, an administrative laxity quickly remedied with .40-caliber Glock semiautos.)

I forbade myself from ever again uttering something you hear all too often from police brass, as if it's a cost of doing business: “It's not a question of
if
but
when
another officer gets killed in the line of duty.” That's a fatalistic, passive way of thinking. It feeds rank-and-file fears of the “inevitability” of on-the-job mortality.

Most
police officer deaths can be prevented, but it's got to start with excellent training—and a confident attitude. Cops who believe they're going to get shot, or who believe they're going to die if they do get shot, need reprogramming. Their outlook should be:
Somebody takes a shot at me, I'm going to drop, roll, and fire back.
And:
If someone is lucky enough to put a bullet in me, I will not die of it.
That's not an expression of “hope.” It's a
survivor's mentality.

Officer Johnston, the task force cop who instructed me on the need to
think
safety,
talk
safety,
deliver
safety, was absolutely right. But he was wrong on one important point: He assumed it wasn't possible to fight crime, be safe,
and
honor civil liberties.

I ended that first session of the philosophy committee with an “ethos statement,” that would quickly reverberate throughout the department. I could have put it more delicately, I suppose, but it seemed to work magic with the cops:

            
I am a police officer. I'm not here to hurt you, or to embarrass or demean you. Or to violate your rights. I'm here to help. Whether I'm returning your lost child or arresting you for harming a child, I'll treat you with dignity and respect.

            
But know this: I was not placed on this earth to be your victim. I don't care if you're the police chief or the mayor or the biggest shot in town, I am not your victim. I don't care if you “know the chief personally,” I am not your victim. I don't care how big you are, how menacing you are, I am not your victim. I don't care if you file a complaint with Internal Affairs, I am not your victim. I am
nobody's
victim. So don't even
think
about pulling that gun, or that knife.

            
I will do you harm only in my own defense or the defense of another. But if it comes to a physical or armed confrontation I will not lose to you.

            
In other words, I am not to be fucked with.

*
Jacobs survived, though he was permanently disabled. His justification for the traffic stop and his conduct at the scene were challenged at two separate murder trials. According to eyewitnesses, he had screamed at Penn as he straddled him, raining down blows, “You think you're bad, nigger? I'm gonna beat your black ass.” (Jacobs acknowledged on the stand using a racial epithet, and it was shown that he'd been counseled for racial insensitivity back in the academy.) Penn's lawyer claimed his client's actions were in self-defense, and said of Jacobs that he was an “ideal candidate for the Ku Klux Klan,” a “Doberman pinscher of a cop” whose conduct had sullied the good name of the San Diego Police Department. Jacobs went on to study law during a six-year run of light-duty assignments after the incident. He became an attorney representing police officers in personal injury, wrongful termination, defamation, and discrimination suits.

*
The suspect had been released on bail earlier that same day. The charge: attempted murder of a police officer.