Breaking Rank (27 page)

CHAPTER 13

THE POLICE IMAGE: SOMETIMES A GUN IS JUST A GUN

S
OME BELIEVE MY ENDORSEMENT
of social justice and my calls for police reform reflect a “soft” approach to law enforcement. They're wrong. In fact, if there's one thing I can't stand it's police agencies that act like PR agencies.

Yours might be such a department, its chief and the rest of the brass saturated in the ethic and the vocabulary of public relations. The impulse is understandable: These departments are attempting to sell a service most folks aren't interested in buying—such as a traffic ticket or a night in jail. Of course, the better agencies are also peddling prevention, community policing, the inclusion of citizens in advisory and review capacities, and other positive programs. Which is why chiefs (and other politicians) strive to “package” and “position” the local PD as a modern, “transparent,” “user-friendly,” “customer-driven” “partnership-based” institution.

But what good is a well-behaved, community-oriented police department if it can't catch a stickup man or stop a burglary series?

Reacting to subtle symptoms of strains in community relations—such as police beatings, racial insurrections, and snipers firing at cruising cop cars—chiefs in the 1960s searched for ways to “soften” the police image. Many traditions needed to go, obviously. But some of those guys tinkered and tampered with
useful
traditions. They banned “harsh” cop lingo in favor of more neutral or even stately terms, and tried their best to make their cops look like anything but cops.

My predecessor in Seattle refused to call Intelligence “Intelligence” so he
named it the “Criminal Information Section”—which made it sound like the place you go to get a report of your kid's stolen bike. The Gang Detail he labeled, I don't know, “Mischievous Youth” or something like that.

In San Diego in the early seventies Chief Ray Hoobler ordered politically correct name changes throughout the department. “Vice” sounded too hard-edged, so he changed it to the “Public Inspection Unit.” He or his predecessor also had our cars painted, from black-and-whites to all-whites: we motored about in a fleet of ghostly cop car facsimiles, replete with a slogan of our suddenly enlightened chief's own choosing:
Your Safety / Our Business.
*

At the same time, Hoobler rejected the plea of many, myself included, to change the color of our uniforms. We wore tan (SDPD blues having been abandoned in the late forties in a PR effort of
that
era to change the image of officers). Nor would Hoobler or his predecessors let us have K-9s, or shotguns, or semiautomatic pistols. Or patches on our sleeves, like every other police department in the country, to identify the city we served.

So there we were, generic beige cops looking like security guards for Sea World, and not a whole lot better equipped. It was all cosmetics, but, from where I stood, it marked the beginning of the end of
real
police work.

A confession: In my holy war to clean up policing, to eradicate all those embedded
isms
and put a halt to brutality and corruption, I lost sight for a time of why we were in business in the first place. In the early seventies it was more important that we “make nice” with our citizens than protect them. Defendants' rights took precedence over the pain and suffering of crime victims, even though the two goals were of equal importance. My biggest sin? I thought it would be cool to put our cops in blazers.
Blazers!
I wasn't a cop, I was more like a Fuller Brush salesman.

My drift into nonpolice police work didn't last long. It ended when I became an academy instructor, shortly after being promoted to sergeant. I'd been tapped to teach a class called “Patrol and Observation.” Taught previously by Sgt. A. D. “Brownie” Brown, a bigger-than-life heroic cop figure,
it was your basic how-to course. It covered everything from the patrol mission to the inspection of your car before each shift to stop-and-frisk, ticket writing, arrests, and crime scene protection.

I spent months preparing for my first class. I read three or four police texts and a fistful of journals from the community college library. I researched press accounts of major police incidents from throughout the country, and interviewed some of the best cops in the department, including Brownie. I went to the lab and checked out an ancient 5×5 box camera. For the next couple of weeks, several of my cops and I posed shots of arrests, field interrogations, traffic stops. I also snapped photos of actual accidents and real crime scenes. Then I rewrote the Patrol and Observation chapter, sprinkling it with full-page captioned photos. Finally, I fashioned a brand-new lesson plan—with penciled cues, inspired by Brownie's suspenseful, hilarious presentations:
pause for effect . . . raise eyebrows . . . wait for laughter to subside . . .

My voice broke as I introduced myself to the first class. I'd rehearsed an elegant opening but now couldn't remember a word of it. I stood there in flared Robert Hall polyester slacks, zip-up boots, print shirt, maroon knit tie, and tan corduroy sports coat with leather elbow patches. I'd intended to deliver a sermon on “social justice vis-à-vis the role of the police” as an introduction. When finally the words came tumbling forth they made little sense. Stage fright accounted for some of it. But mostly I'd walked into the classroom with an ill-conceived plan. I'd been a fool.

I went home to my apartment, poured myself a fool's portion of sour mash sippin' whiskey, and proceeded to get pickled. It was in the middle of the pickle that it occurred to me: The class I was teaching wasn't about
me.
Or how things
looked
, the “PR” of the presentation. It was about a roomful of anxious recruits, who, while they might appreciate a little entertainment, hungered most for
information.
They wanted, as I had when I was a recruit, a veteran's practical wisdom on how to catch crooks, solve problems, perform myriad other patrol tasks, and get home alive.

The next time I willed myself to reach out to the recruits with that in mind; to put myself in their spit-shined shoes. I brought entertainment, humor, a little pathos, but I stayed “on message.” What a difference it made—in their education, and in mine. It was one of the most unselfish
moments of my career, and it imbued in me a passion and a sense of duty to teach real-world cops real-world lessons.

It was at that time that I came to include in my definition of civil liberties the right of Americans to live free of crime, and of the fear of crime. I'd always taken it personally when a woman was beaten in her living room or raped in an alley or on a date. Or a child was thrown into a scalding tub. Or a home was burglarized, a car stolen, a school vandalized. My passion was to infect my students with a passion for social justice
and
effective crime-fighting, to mold them into the kind of cops who treated people decently but who also knew how to catch the bad guy.

Really crafty bad guys are a bitch to catch. Every once in a while one of them is nabbed “accidentally” (think of Eric Rudolph, the bomber of the Atlanta Olympics, abortion clinics, and gay nightclubs, who eluded a massive FBI manhunt only to be pinched by a rookie patrol officer; or Timothy McVeigh, who fell on a routine traffic stop). But the really smart bad guys, from embezzlers to serial killers, often elude capture for years if not a lifetime. I blame this mostly on “PR PDs.”

(And let's not overlook the feds: agents of the FBI, ATF, DEA, CIA, etc., and especially their brass, whose crime-fighting timidity is based on “PR” pressures borne of a new “professional class” of bureau leader—and of congressional oversight and strictures gone haywire. So haywire that we were caught sleeping on the morning of September 11, 2001.)

Even today, I make a point of observing the way modern police officers police their beats. It drives me bonkers. I watch them “patrol” at five miles over the speed limit, scanning neither left nor right, employing only a fraction of their peripheral vision, seeing nothing but the next latte stand, or traffic ticket. It's a conceit of mine that back in the seventies, coached by some of the best (Winston Yetta, Jack Mullen, Paul Ybarrondo, Ken O'Brien, and others), I taught at least one generation of cops
how
to police their beats—how to increase their chances of catching the bad guy. For evidence of deteriorating effectiveness in detecting and apprehending criminals, I invite you to compare your jurisdiction's burglary or auto theft or
homicide clearance rates today against what they were thirty years ago. Unless they're clearing crimes with an eraser, they're probably off by 20 to 40 percent.

In the classroom, we started with the act of
observation
—how to take in the physical world around you. To
train
yourself to focus your vision three to four blocks down the road; hone your peripheral eyesight; and to be alert for cues and clues that help distinguish suspicious from innocent activity, and safe situations from unsafe. We talked about the psychological “expectancies”—motivational, perceptual—that can cause a cop to see something that's
not
there.

We talked about driving with your windows down, no matter how cold it gets: If you're
patrolling and observing
you've got to employ all your senses. I once interrupted a stranger-on-stranger rape because I'd heard the muffled scream of a woman in the backseat of a parked car on a cold night in the 4100 block of Thirty-eighth Street. I wouldn't have heard it had the window been up, the heater pumping hot air in my face, an AM transistor radio blaring Led Zeppelin or the ball game. Or if I'd not been hypervigilant,
listening
as well as looking and smelling for evidence of crime. My partner, a recruit, hadn't heard a thing. He learned something that night.

I told my students the story of an L.A. area residential burglar who was good for over a thousand jobs (that's a lot of “B&Es,” as they like to call them on the East Coast). I required my students to study everything about the pro's modus operandi, how he'd been able to outsmart and hoodwink dozens of cops for years. The crook's success came from his own disciplined course of study: the habits of Los Angeles police officers.

He was there, the whole time, right under their noses, hanging out near neighborhood station houses, diving their Dumpsters, picking up their “hot sheets” (stolen cars, wanted persons, etc.), and studying their shift-change times and habits. He was also, of course, an adept on-scene burglar. Among his other “policies”: he wore a pair of shoes only once, buying them at thrift stores and purposely tramping around outside in the mud and leaving impressions everywhere he went. He'd burn the shoes after each job. Once
inside a house, he'd trigger the thermostat (up or down), then use the resultant crackling noise to cover any sounds he'd make. He made friends with neighborhood dogs by tossing them raw hamburger.