Rise of the Warrior Cop (19 page)

“I
STARTED TO BECOME MORE AND MORE CONCERNED
about potential abuses with the no-knock raid,” says Don Santarelli. By 1971, he had been appointed director of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, the federal agency that doled out grants and gear to police agencies. But it was more than just the no-knock raids. Some of the police chiefs he worked with, he noticed, had an increasingly gung-ho mentality. Under the 1970 federal crime bill, the annual budget for Santarelli’s agency jumped from $75 million to $500 million. It seemed like every police department in the country wanted a piece. That wasn’t so unusual. But it was
what
they wanted that Santarelli found concerning. “They didn’t value education or training. They valued hardware,” he says. The city of Birmingham asked him for an armored personnel carrier (APC). Other chiefs wanted tanks. Los Angeles asked him for a submarine. “Anything the police chiefs could dream up to make themselves look more fearsome, they wanted,” Santarelli says.
²⁷

They were also requesting the gear and military training to start their own tactical teams, like the one quickly becoming famous in Los Angeles. “I was always hesitant about that. There were certain supervised, tightly controlled circumstances where that kind of force was appropriate. But law enforcement has never been good at self-discipline. Once they had that sort of capability, it would be difficult to limit it to those circumstances,” Santarelli says.

In Detroit, for example, a new police commissioner took over in 1971 and began implementing a more Nixonian approach to illicit
drugs. Chief John Nichols doubled up the personnel on his narcotics unit and started arresting and imprisoning heroin dealers instead of merely chasing them off, as the city had done in the past. The result was an impressive stat sheet on the enforcement side: 1,600 arrests. But cracking down on dealers opened the city up to turf wars. In one ten-day stretch in June, Detroit logged forty murders.
²⁸
It was one of the first examples of the sort of self-perpetuating, self-escalating feedback loop created by the modern drug war. Crackdowns upset the established black markets. That created lucrative new opportunities for rising dealers and those who weren’t caught in the crackdowns. They’d then wage war to claim the new markets, with most of the victims being low-level pawns and the occasional bystander. The resulting bloodshed would spur outrage and anger, giving law enforcement and political officials more reason to order more crackdowns and to ask for more authority to use more force. The pattern would repeat itself for decades in US cities, in Latin America, and on a tragically large scale in Mexico in the 2000s.

But in DC, Nixon’s model city, events unfolded differently, and the results were intriguing.

W
HEN
R
ICHARD
N
IXON APPOINTED
J
ERRY
W
ILSON TO HEAD
the District of Columbia’s Metro Police Department (MPD) in 1969, it didn’t sit well with the city’s black population. Civil rights leaders and black militants wanted a black chief. Wilson was a white Southerner. But Wilson would surprise them and just about everyone else—even himself.

Wilson initially joined the MPD in 1949 after stints in the Marines and the US Navy, where he had enlisted at the age of fifteen. His communication skills got him a job analyzing and reporting on crime statistics in the city, a position he held while getting a bachelor’s degree in the administration of justice from American University. His last position before he was appointed chief was field operations commander, a post from which he directed the police response to the 1968 riots after Martin Luther King was assassinated.
That assignment didn’t win him much favor from blacks in DC either. But he had been appointed to that position by the Johnson administration, where his intellect and openness to innovative approaches to crime had won him supporters.

Wilson’s first priority upon taking office in August 1969 was to improve the department’s relationship with the people it served. Already, this was a marked departure from the more aggressive style of his predecessors. “We are working for the people,” Wilson explained in a 1971 interview with the
Washington Afro-American
. “We have to have the confidence of the citizens.”
²⁹
Previously, the MPD had primarily recruited outside the city—even outside the region. While seven in ten DC residents were black, three out of four DC patrolmen were white. Wilson focused his recruitment efforts on getting blacks who lived in the District to join the department. His first class of recruits was half black. Marion Barry, who just a year earlier had encouraged DC residents to take up arms against any cops who broke into their homes, told the paper that there was “a growing sense among blacks that the police department really is working with the people.”
³⁰
After the
New York Times,
just a year earlier, had compared black residents’ lack of cooperation with DC police to the relationship between native Vietnamese and American soldiers, the city’s leading black advocacy newspaper was now reporting that DC cops were once again getting tips and cooperation from black residents.
³¹

Instead of setting up roadblocks, employing stop-and-frisks, and implementing similarly confrontational policies in high-crime areas, Wilson instituted high-profile patrols in those neighborhoods. He adopted what at the time was an innovative use of computer software and radio communication to increase response times to citizen complaints, one of the more proven ways of both deterring crime and improving relations between police and citizens. Police departments in other cities were reluctant to take on college graduates as recruits. Wilson embraced them. He set a goal of putting fifty Ivy League grads on MPD patrols by the end of his first full year on the force.

During the often heated antiwar protests of the early 1970s, Wilson believed that an intimidating police presence didn’t prevent confrontation, it invited it. That didn’t mean he didn’t prepare, but he put his riot control teams in buses, then parked the buses close by, but out of sight of protesters. Appearances were important. In general, instead of the usual brute force and reactionary policing that tended to pit cops against citizens—both criminal and otherwise—Wilson believed that cops were more effective when they were welcomed and respected in the neighborhoods they patrolled. “The use of violence,” he told
Time
in 1970, “is not the job of police officers.”
³²

At the same time, when it
was
time to use force, Wilson put himself on the front lines. He made a point of being the first cop to confront protesters and, if it was necessary, to lob the first canister of tear gas. This won him respect from rank-and-file DC cops, even if they weren’t wild about the close supervision. As
Time
reported, when Wilson publicly criticized his own officers for their aggressive response to protest a couple months after he took office, the police union passed a resolution criticizing Wilson for not backing his men. His response: “I don’t stand behind my men, I stand in front of them.”
³³

That approach to policing carried over to Wilson’s use of no-knock raids—or more accurately, his refusal to use them. As soon as the federal government gave him permission to use the tactic more freely, Wilson concluded that he didn’t need it. “I never really bought into the idea that police were getting gunned down while serving warrants,” Wilson says. “Drug pushers sold drugs to make money. They might run. But there weren’t many drug dealers who were in the business to get into shootouts with narcotics officers.” Wilson didn’t find the destruction of evidence exception convincing either. “We called that the ‘no-flush rule.’ Again, I just didn’t think that warranted breaking down a door. There were better ways to do it,” he says, referring to serving drug warrants. “You couldn’t flush much pot down a toilet anyway. Cocaine or heroin, you could flush a good amount. But then it was gone—off the
street. They [no-knock proponents] wanted to make sure the evidence was preserved to get a conviction. But a drug conviction just wasn’t worth the risk of a no-knock raid.”
³⁴
By the one-year anniversary of the DC crime bill, Wilson had removed the no-knock raid from the MPD manual. The department made spare use of the preventive detention measure as well.

Wilson’s tenure as MPD chief ran nearly concurrently with Nixon’s tenure as president. (Wilson took office five months after Nixon and left a month after Nixon resigned.) Under Jerry Wilson, violent crime in DC dropped 25 percent and property crime dropped 28 percent. Under Nixon, violent crime in the country as a whole went
up
40 percent and property crime
rose
24 percent.
³⁵
There are obviously countless variables at work in that sort of comparison. And even under Nixon, crime was still primarily a local issue. But while Nixon may not have had a direct effect on local crime policy, he did set the tone. State legislatures across the country passed get-tough-on-crime bills that gave cops more power, more authority, and more heavy-duty equipment. The country as a whole moved toward Nixon’s get-tough policies, and crime continued to soar. Washington, DC, moved away from the aggressive approach over the same period, and its crime rate dropped.

At the time, Wilson credited the DC crime drop to the one thousand additional police officers Nixon had given him funding to hire, the methadone program, and seemingly mundane changes like improved street lighting. Others credited some of the less controversial parts of the DC crime bill pushed by Don Santarelli, like reorganizing the city’s courts. But much of the credit undoubtedly belonged to Wilson himself and his less confrontational, community-oriented approach to policing.

Hard-line Nixon officials didn’t know quite what to make of the fact that their model city had passed on the two most controversial, high-profile provisions in the DC crime bill, and crime had gone down anyway. So they spun. Mitchell said that Wilson’s work in DC was proof that the press had overhyped the dangers of preventive detention and the no-knock raid.

Wilson’s reluctance to utilize either law didn’t hurt his reputation with the administration in the least. “They didn’t really pressure us to use the no-knock raid at all,” Wilson says. “We told them we didn’t need it, and from what I can remember, they never brought it up again.”
³⁶
Nixon and Mitchell were more than happy to tout and take credit for the results in DC. However, they wouldn’t go out of their way to publicize just which parts of the crime bill were being used and which ones weren’t.
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I
N
1971
TWO POSITIONS OPENED ON THE
US S
UPREME
C
OURT
with the retirements of Justice Hugo Black and Justice John Harlan. Nixon now had an opportunity to move the Court significantly to the right, especially with respect to how it would handle the law-and-order issues he’d run on. He had already made some progress with his first two nominations, replacing the much-loathed Earl Warren with “strict constructionist” Warren Burger in 1969, and nominating Harry Blackmun after Lyndon Johnson’s crony Abe Fortas stepped down. Now he had two more picks—a historic opportunity to remake the Court and, perhaps more importantly in Nixon’s world, to “stick it to the left,” as White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman would put it in his diary.
³⁸

Nixon had run into problems, however, with his last appointment. His first nomination to replace Fortas, Clement Haynsworth, became the first Supreme Court nominee to be rejected by the Senate in nearly forty years. The Senate rejected his next nominee too—G. Harrold Carswell—before finally confirming Blackmun.