Breaking Rank (70 page)

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.

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.