Breaking Rank (37 page)

I'd written myself a one-word note before the meeting and stuffed it in my pocket.
Listen!
it said. Throughout the meeting I fingered the scrap of paper nonstop, willing the word to travel up my arm and into my brain. I did listen. Empathetically, if not always sympathetically. I heard cops making complete sense, from their point of view. They were bone honest. They were “open” in their communication.

Until the very end I was doing fine, honoring my pocketed admonition, gaining insights into certain policy changes we
might
need to make. But when “Larry Johnston,” a patrol officer, informed the group that SDPD was inferior to the National City Police Department, I almost lost it. I knew the cops in my old hometown. I knew, as did everyone else in the room, that their chief had recently boasted of hiring San Diego's rejects—cops we'd fired for documented cases of racism and brutality! This was just too much.

“That's a crock of shit, Johnston, and you know it. You can't really believe National City's a better police department.”

“Let's just say their chief's got balls.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. The man lets his cops be cops. He backs them when they take action. He doesn't apologize when they generate a little heat.”

“Such as?”

“You know, when they have to get a little rough out there. He doesn't get all bent out of shape about people's ‘civil rights.' ”

“So he looks the other way when his cops break the law?”

“No!
Well . . . yeah. Maybe. I don't mean
break
the law. I'm just saying sometimes you have to
bend
it out there in the real world. Get creative. Let the pukes know who's boss. We shouldn't have to live in fear that if some asshole beefs us for doing our jobs the chief won't back us. That's all I'm saying.”

I gave him a short, faintly condescending lecture on the Bill of Rights. He shot right back, “That's all fine and dandy, Chief. But you're not out there getting your ass shot at. Are you?”

“Touché.” In fact, I'd never had my ass shot at (neither had he, for that matter) but his statement did bring us back to the subject: namely, cops dropping like flies in our town, and how to put a stop to it.

I remembered a conversation we'd had in the chief's office just weeks before the Ruopp-Tonahill killings. Another deputy chief mentioned he'd been a cop for over thirty years and couldn't remember the last time he'd pulled his gun, if in fact he'd
ever
pulled it. The damn thing might as well have been superglued inside his holster. “You'd probably be dead today,” I'd said, reflecting on all the guns I'd seen and heard about in recent years.

By the mid-seventies it seemed that every other car our officers stopped had a gun in it. And every other family beef, too. And every interaction with bangers and drug dealers. But I understood where my colleague was coming from. Hell, when I went through the academy it had been thirty-seven years since a San Diego cop had been slain in the line of duty. No wonder we were “out of touch.” Our world had been different, certainly far less deadly, from the world of today's beat cops.

“Look,” I told Johnston. “There's no way we're going to ignore the Constitution. And we're not about to stop taking citizen complaints, or investigating them. That said, what
can
we do to back you, to help you make it home safely?”

“Easy,” he said. “Make safety a goddamn priority around here. Make it as important as PR. You guys are always talking about ‘professional conduct,' and ‘treating people with dignity and respect,' and, like you said, ‘encouraging community feedback.' Hell, you even cooperate with the
media
.” He spat out the word. “You tell
them
more than you tell us. Well, how about talking to
us
more? How about
thinking
and
talking
and
doing something about
officer safety? And when it comes to training and equipment, how about putting your money where your mouth is?”

He couldn't have been more correct in his analysis. We'd created an appalling imbalance in our administrative philosophy, and in our priorities. In our noble, concerted effort to “humanize” both the workplace and relations between cops and citizens, we'd paid criminally insufficient attention to the most primitive imperative of our cops: the need to survive. We had taken officer safety for granted.

Part of my personal failure on this front was borne of a belief that we had too many paranoid cops (in the popular, not the clinical meaning of the term)—police officers who failed to do the job because they were
excessively
fearful. Obsessed with personal safety, they put their own well-being above that of the citizenry. My thoughts on the topic have not changed.

One unavoidable aspect of the job, no matter how much attention the agency pays to safety, is
risk
. It galls me to hear of a police officer who observes, say, a man beating a woman—and who refuses to drive forty feet down the block and stop the guy unless he's got backup. By the time backup arrives that woman could be dead. A police officer who lets that happen is a lousy, yellow-bellied, chickenshit excuse of a cop.

(Years later, one of my staunchest Seattle detractors, a grizzled detective, seemed to agree with me on this point. During a brief lull in the World Trade Organization [WTO] riots we passed each other in the police garage.
With a look of genuine disgust on his face, he told me he was sick and tired of cops pissing and moaning about taking rocks and bottles on the streets downtown. “Hell, we faced a lot worse in my day [a time when antiwar riots occurred regularly in Seattle, when banks were being bombed to smithereens, when violent demonstrators were taking it out on cops]. It was just us against them. We didn't have all this ninja shit—ballistic helmets, shields, vests.
Shin guards
, for chrissakes . . .” I reminded him how bad it was out there on the streets. “Ah, they're still a bunch a pussies,” he said as got into his car and drove off. As usual, he'd overstated his case. As usual, he couldn't resist a sexist allusion. As usual, there was a kernel of truth to his rant.)

Our safety task force, under the skillful direction of Commander Mike Rice, researched
everything
that had to do with officer safety. Members traveled to numerous other police agencies, including those in Los Angeles and L.A. County, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Phoenix, Oklahoma City, and most other San Diego County departments including, yes, National City. They visited the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training and returned with several officer-safety nuggets.

They also spent time in San Quentin. As executive director of the mayor's crime commission a few years earlier, I'd witnessed prison inmates buffing up physically, as they do in most prisons. But these guys were also drilling one another endlessly on how to disarm and kill cops. (I couldn't believe it when prison officials told us they'd been ordered by the courts to allow it. It was the inmates exercising their First Amendment rights.)

When we were finished, some twenty-two weeks and 235 committee and subcommittee meetings later, we had produced 119 recommendations for improving officer safety. One hundred and two were quickly approved. Within a year all but thirteen had been fully implemented. Not bad for a large, sluggish, political, paramilitary bureaucracy like ours.

Indirectly related to the task force effort, I'd assigned John Morrison, a bright, sharp-tongued lieutenant, to reenact on video the Grape Street Park shootings. Using police employees (including in the “starring” role a beat cop who looked uncannily like Joselito Cinco), Morrison and his crew made a remarkable film. Hard to watch for its graphic reminder of the tragedy, it showed clearly what went wrong that foggy night in September 1984. Out of the project came a new department policy, new training, and a new method for handling such “routine” interactions. We called it “Contact & Cover,” and insisted that every officer follow its dictates. Law enforcement agencies all over the country requested and received a copy of the video. I would bet my own life that “Contact & Cover”
*
has saved the lives of police officers and citizens.

Three other task force—inspired improvements stand out: (1) the development of an intensive eighty-hour block of officer survival training at the academy—realistic “experiential” instruction that far surpassed the traditional “defensive tactics” and “arrest and control techniques” taught previously; (2) the burial of the “low-bid” mentality that had characterized city purchasing to that point, and the naming of a new safety officer whose sole responsibility was to search for, purchase, and oversee the maintenance of the finest possible safety equipment—without regard to cost; and (3) the adoption of a four-day workweek.