Features » November 2, 2005
Breaking Rank (cont’d)
You describe several dangerous situations where you had to employ creative strategies and make split-second decisions involving arrests of very unstable individuals. You didn’t use your gun in most of those cases.
What do you think about Tasers and their popularity in police departments across the country these days? Are they are a substitute for more skilled, psychological and/or physical methods that could be used to talk down—or take down suspects?
You’re on to something here. When I became a police officer in 1966, I was given a gun and handcuffs, and a baton that I rarely took with me into any scene.
It was understood when you became a police officer in the ’60s that if you couldn’t fight, you didn’t belong in the business. It was also understood that you didn’t pull your gun, and you didn’t shoot people.
The reality of my occupation, back then, was that cops weren’t going to get killed on the job. They got killed if they fell asleep at the wheel … which is how the last police officer had been killed, three years prior to when I came on the job. They weren’t dropping like flies. And that made life a whole lot safer for everyone. It didn’t stay that way, though.
We came to an appreciation that we needed to provide officer survival training. One of the things that we did was to remove the continuum of force that’s so popular in police departments across the country.
Tell me more about that.
The continuum of force says that I’m entitled [as a police officer] to use whatever level of force I need to overcome your resistance, but only that level of force that I need. So, if you come at me with a gun, I pull my gun and shoot you. It’s legal. If you come at me with a knife, I have a choice. If I shoot you, I’m legally justified [in doing so]. But I may not be morally justified in doing so. Maybe you’re 11 years old, maybe you’re infirm, maybe you’re 20 feet away? We get into a lot of maybes. So, the knife begins to pose a lot of decision making possibilities. You also have a breadth of options that historically have been aligned along a continuum: This weapon, this threat, met with this level of force by the police.
Instead of a continuum, we created, in effect, a circle with the police officer in the middle of that circle. When you are faced with a threat that could end your life or that of another, you are legally empowered to use lethal force. You are also empowered to select from this sphere of tools, techniques, methods, and tactics. Even with a gun, you may make a decision not to use it because this person may be more suicidal than homicidal. Maybe it’s a matter of realizing, “I need to get my ass out of here and take cover.” Maybe you wait this out. Maybe you call in SWAT. There are all kinds of options.
But back to your question, I do think there’s a real problem [today] with the potential of police officers resorting to a lethal or less-than-lethal weapons as opposed to other strategies. Part of what I think is happening today is that we’re putting an excessive fear in the hearts and minds of police officers.
To my way of thinking, the safest police officer is one that is alert and aware, and she or he is always ready for what might materialize.
Which is different from being paranoid.
It’s a state of mind. I know what’s going on around me, I’m sensitive to my surroundings. Right now, for instance, I’m doing something unusual because I’m letting you have the cop’s seat in the house.
That’s funny, because I intentionally took this seat. I never sit with my back to the door, if I can help it. I can see who’s coming and going, and I’m more aware of my surroundings this way.
So, you’ve got my back?
Technically speaking, yes, I’ve got your back.
Thanks, I appreciate it.
But you raise a very good point, and it’s one that I understand, as a woman walking down the street and having to be aware at all times of what’s going on around me. Doing that doesn’t feel paranoid, it actually makes me feel more secure in the world and more comfortable with my surroundings.
That’s right. The more fearless we become in confronting every conceivable threat—from emotional threats to physical threats—the less impulsive we are, the more confident we become, the more able we are to handle situations.
This is the “way of the warrior” that you refer to in your book?
Yes.
So, if we agree that there’s an overreliance on more violent and damaging tactics toward suspects, as opposed to more effective police methods of de-escalating conflict, we still have to ask the question: Why is this happening?
I would call it a perversion of officer safety and survival training. Instead of helping police officers to feel more comfortable in their own skin, more willing and able to size up situations and seize the initiative, we’ve taught them that they could well be the victim of a sudden, violent death, and that it really could happen at any time.
You know the old axiom that if all you’ve got is a hammer, the whole world is a nail. Well, if I’ve got a Taser and I’ve been trained with it and get comfortable with it as a regular part of my job, then what I have out there, in front of me, are lots of opportunities to use it.
For the last decade, we’ve seen a gradual decline in the overall crime rates, and particularly violent crime rates. In light of that, can’t we finally start to consider reducing the ranks of police officers in major cities?
I actually favor more—and better trained—officers for a number of reasons. As an advocate and principal architect of community policing in the country, what I have come to conclude is that police officers are overextended in [big] cities like San Diego.
Police officers run ragged going from one call to the next. It doesn’t give you a time to stop, reflect and think about things. There may be a family disturbance call that has not legally erupted into a domestic violence case. Is there a way, if you spend a few extra minutes with that couple, to prevent an act of violence or even an act of murder?
I’m a strong believer that police beats ought to be small, police officers need about 30 to 40 percent of their day to be uncommitted time so that they can, in fact, engage in meaningful, joint community policing problem solving.
Onto another tough subject: The WTO demonstrations, here in Seattle, in 1999. I was on the streets during that time, covering the protests, and these are my observations. I saw a city that had no real inkling of what was about to unfold, and was completely overwhelmed by an experience the likes of which it had never had before. I also saw some protesters acting absolutely irresponsibly. They were, however, very much in the minority. Having said that, I saw our police officers produce a whole new arsenal of weapons that had the effect of truly frightening people, myself included. I also saw countless examples of police officers acting irresponsibly and abusively.
I feel that much of this was glossed over in your chapter on the WTO “Snookered in Seattle: The WTO Riots.”
If I get an opportunity in a second edition, I have a list of about 100 things I would change in the book. At the top of the list is my conclusion about WTO: We started it.
“We?”
The police department. We started it on Tuesday morning. We had had skirmishes, and some problems before that, but the real problems started on Tuesday.
We blew it on Tuesday morning when we gassed non-violent demonstrators. That changed the rules of the game. It was perceived to be unfair and unjust and inhumane. We believed in the decision, which is to say, “Yeah, we don’t want to do that, but what choice do we have?”
The demonstrators had made the decision to sit and lock arms, which meant that the only way we could unclog that intersection was to use two officers per one person, and unlink the arms by force. If it came to that, it was understood that the demonstrators would resist through passive resistance and going limp.
The arithmetic was not in our favor, and it was so overwhelmingly clear that we could not accomplish the mission of unclogging that intersection using that approach.
So, what could we do? We could declare it an unlawful assembly, inform them, and tell them we’ll be using chemical agents, like tear gas, to clear that intersection. I’ve been around police work long enough to know that using tear gas under those circumstances is going to accomplish two things. It will clear the intersection, and it will piss people off and make far more militant, and potentially violent in their reaction against the cops that did that to them.
For that matter, even against the cops who didn’t do that to them.
Exactly. But here was the rationale: We need even a corridor of that intersection free, so that if we need to be able to drive an aid car through, we can do it.
That was the cop in me—and the cop in me did what a cop would do.
But back to the ‘greater good’ argument. The tactic was not designed to alienate, offend, or even hurt anyone, and it certainly wasn’t intended to produce a much deeper and broader reaction, an anti-police reaction, but that was the effect.
It was wrong and I should have vetoed it. That’s how I feel today. And as the police chief, I should have understood the potential for creating a week’s worth of problems. I didn’t.
And I’m really sorry.
It clearly had a radicalizing effect, so one of the positive byproducts of all of [what happened] is that because of those scenes—day after day and night after night— globalization was put on the map and its sinister effects were exposed. Even then, too much of the attention was, for a very understandable reason, focused on the police response.
Over the last five years, as a private citizen, I’ve become even more of an opponent of globalization. I think the effects have been devastating on the United Sates and many Third World countries. Outsourcing, and the replacement of indigenous industries and economies are among the biggest problems. There’s a documentary, Life and Debt, about [the impact of economic globalization] in Jamaica, that I want everyone to see.
Yes, that’s an amazing documentary.
I want to show that to any American who says they don’t get what the big deal is about globalization. It’s happening here and across the world, and it’s just devastating. It’s horrific what’s happening under the name of globalization.
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Appeared in the November 21, 2005 Issue
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