Breaking Rank Read online

  For James Norman Stamper, Everett Eugene Stamper, and Matthew Todd Stamper

  BREAKING RANK

  A Top Cop’s Exposé of the

  Dark Side of American Policing

  Published by

  Nation Books

  An Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group

  245 West 17th Street, 11th Floor

  New York, NY 10011

  Copyright © 2005 by Norm Stamper

  Nation Books is a co-publishing venture of the Nation Institute and Avalon Publishing Group Incorporated.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  This memoir is a product of the author’s recollections and is thus rendered as a subjective accounting of events that occurred in his/her life.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-78673-624-9

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Book design by Maria E. Torres

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

  1 • An Open Letter to a Bad Cop

  2 • Wage War on Crime, Not Drugs

  3 • Prostitution: Get a Room!

  4 • Capital Punishment: The Coward’s Way Out

  5 • Criminals’ Rights: Worth Protecting?

  6 • Getting a Grip on Guns

  7 • Men

  COP CULTURE

  8 • Why White Cops Kill Black Men

  9 • Racism in the Ranks

  10 • “Split Tails”

  11 • Sexual Predators in Uniform

  12 • The Blue Wall of Silence

  13 • The Police Image: Sometimes a Gun Is Just a Gun

  14 • It’s Not All Cops and Robbers

  15 • Doughnuts, Tacos, and Fat Cops

  THE POLICE DEPARTMENT

  16 • Demilitarizing the Police

  17 • Picking Good Cops

  18 • Staying Alive in a World of Sudden, Violent Death

  19 • Undercover

  POLICING THE POLICE

  20 • Treating Cops Like Kids: Police Discipline

  21 • A Dark Take on Financial Liability

  22 • Up With Labor, (Not so Fast, Police Unions)

  23 • Living With Killing

  24 • Citizen Oversight

  THE POLITICS OF POLICING

  25 • Egos on Patrol: Giuliani vs. Bratton

  26 • Marching for Dykes on Bikes (and Against Jesus)

  27 • The Fourth Estate: A Chief’s Lament

  28 • Snookered in Seattle: The WTO Riots

  29 • Community Policing: A Radical View

  30 • Cultivating Fearless Leadership

  CONCLUSION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  WHAT DO YOU SEE when you picture a “safe” America? I envision infants born into a loving, nurturing world—to women whose reproductive rights are protected by law. Children and teens who exhibit consideration for themselves and others. Citizens who question, challenge, and disagree with one another—nonviolently. Men who refuse to abuse women. Gun violence gone from our homes and streets, our schools and workplaces. Law enforcers, from the beat cop to the U.S. Attorney General doing their jobs properly, applying their imagination, playing by the rules. I see Americans, black, white, straight, gay, expressing themselves freely, pursuing happiness as they define it. I picture an America safe from consumer, environmental, and political, as well as predatory crime—and free from the specter of an overzealous, overreaching, moralistic government.

  Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results. That pretty much sums up this nation’s law enforcement approach to public safety. Take drugs, for example. How much more evidence do we need that America has lost its “war on drugs,” even as we keep our cops slogging away on the perilous front lines? Or prostitution: How likely is it that hookers and their johns will decamp the sex industry any time soon? Or guns: I heard Barry Goldwater rail against controls some 35 years ago because “it would take 50 years to get rid of handguns.” Or men: What are the chances that we American males will accept full responsibility for the breathtaking levels of violence in our society, and do something about it? Or racist cops: Do we honestly believe we’ve seen the last Rodney King, Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo incident?

  Problems like these can be solved. It’s possible for a police force to be tough on crime and still treat people with dignity and respect. But not with the same politics, the same paramilitary infrastructure, and the same inbred cop culture that produce police incompetence and misconduct. What’s needed is an honest examination of the failures of our justice system, along with the will and the courage to employ radically different—but theoretically sound—approaches to their solution.

  How? By breaking rank, by questioning long-accepted ways of doing business, and by taking direct action to change the system.

  I had impressions of the law and “lawmen” long before I became a cop. As a kid, I was in some kind of trouble just about every day of my life. Most of my behavioral problems were handled not by the police but by my parents (unevenly), or by teachers and coaches (more constructively, on the whole). Still, despite an anemic rap sheet I had enough early contact with “the Man” to cultivate some major hostility toward the police.

  I grew up in National City, a small town of car lots, slaughter-houses, meat packing plants, and navy bars at the southern city limits of San Diego, 14 miles from the Tijuana border.

  At nine, I had my first contact with two of NCPD’s finest. My friend Gary and I, weary of shooting out streetlights with our slingshots, meandered over to Kimball Park to kick over the portable Little League fence, again. We’d finished off about a third of the job when a black-and-white Dodge shot out from behind the visitors’ dugout and swooped down on us from the left field foul line. One of them seized the cigarettes I’d lifted from my mother. The driver cop, the talker, ordered us to put out our smokes and replace the fence. The two men sat in their car, supervising us, tiny orange dots lighting up their faces as they inhaled mom’s Chesterfields. When we finished, the talker ordered us, with great profanity, never to set foot in the park again. I had to agree with my pal when he said, as the black-and-white drove off, leaving us in a cloud of dust, “I hate those fuckers!”

  When I was sixteen a National City cop wrote me a citation for doing seventeen miles an hour through a fifteen-mile-an-hour intersection. (Later, I would learn the technical term for such a ticket: chickenshit.)

  A year later I watched a San Diego police officer jab his finger into the chest of the lead singer of our R&B band and call him a “splib” and a “motherfucking nigger.”

  In my late teens I sat glued to the tube as Birmingham Bull Connor sicced his dogs on peacefully assembled civil rights demonstrators. I saw well-dressed Negroes—women in Sunday frocks, men in white shirts, skinny ties, and porkpie hats, even children—get clubbed to the ground, kicked, bitten by police dogs, and sprayed with fire hoses. It felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach.

  At nineteen and twenty I was burglarized, three times. The police took forever to show up, and when they did the one in a suit mumbled something about the “Mezicans” who lived up the steep bank from my apartment. They took no prints, no shoe impressions, not even notes. They arrested no one, recovered none of the hundred
or so jazz and R&B LPs that were my most prized possessions. (To this day I still feel the sting of that loss, along with a powerful case of resentment. Not so much toward the burglars—they did their job.)

  And where were the cops when my old man was beating the snot out of his sons? Our house at 2324 K Avenue was the site of multiple and continuing felonious acts. But even if they’d been called (our neighbors certainly heard what was going on) the cops wouldn’t have done a thing.

  People talk about “bad apples” in police work. To me the whole barrel was moldy. Not once, growing up, did I have a positive contact with a police officer. I’m not claiming I was an angel, not saying my behavior didn’t contribute to my “anti-police” attitude. It’s just that I got neither protection nor service from my local police. All I got was no respect.

  So why did I become one of them? I needed a job.

  I was twenty, freshly married, working as a kennelman at the National City Pet Hospital. My eighteen-year-old bride and I lived in an apartment on the grounds. Dottie wasn’t overjoyed with the arrangement—the barking dogs, the yowling cats, the odors. And the pet owners rapping on our bedroom window in the middle of the night: a woman to inform me that Mitzi’s nose was warm, that she “just doesn’t seem herself lately,” the owner of a kitten wondering if Tangerine needed her rabies shot before traveling to Mexico, a party animal demanding to know why his new puppy, bloated and comatose, wouldn’t wake up after being fed a bowl of Bud. It was time for a new home, a new job.

  I passed each phase of San Diego’s civil service testing, which took a couple of months. At the end of the process I was scheduled to meet with the chief of police himself.

  I walked down the long, terracotta-tiled corridor of the old police headquarters on West Market to the “corner pocket.” The police chief, a white-haired, wrinkled man, squinted at me through rheumy eyes and thick horn-rimmed glasses. “Tell me, son, why do you want to be a policeman?” I’d been practicing for this all morning, I was ready.

  “To help people and prevent crime and—and mayhem.” The word, which a lieutenant had scolded me for misusing during my civil service interview (think not chaos and disorder but split lips and slit ears), was lodged there in my brain, like a song you can’t shake. The chief shook his head.

  “That’s what they all say. ‘I want to help people.’ Tell me the real reason you want to be a policeman.”

  “Really, sir. I’ve thought about it a lot. I really do want to help people. Like when they get robbed and so forth.”

  “Do you know what a robbery is?”

  “Sure. It’s when somebody, like, breaks into your apartment and steals your things.”

  “That’s a burglary son. A robbery is a little more—personal. But you’ll have plenty of time for all that in the academy . . . if I decide to hire you. Tell me, why should I hire you?”

  “Because I’m a hard worker? Because I care about people? Because . . .”

  “Are you asking me these things, or telling me?”

  “Telling you, sir.” I tried to be emphatic but my voice cracked in the middle of “telling.” The assistant chief, a large man with a crew cut who’d been sitting in silence off to the side, laughed, explosively. I blushed. And fumed. I didn’t need this shit. I could become a fireman. Or, God forbid, go back to working with Dad on his construction sites, something I’d done every summer from age eight to sixteen.

  “Well, you’ve made it this far,” said the chief. “I guess I’ll go ahead and take a chance on you. But you remember this.” He crooked a finger at me. “You’re on probation for a year. That means I can fire you just as quick as I’ve hired you. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir.” My voice cracked again and the assistant chief laughed again, a little softer this time.

  “Well, welcome aboard, son.” The chief stood up, wincing. Maybe he had a trick knee too; mine was from football. I’d lied about it on the application. The chief hobbled out from behind a prison-industries desk the size of a jury box and smiled at me as we shook on it. He seemed like a really nice guy.

  Although I was thrilled, I honestly didn’t get it: Why in the world would Chief Wes Sharp hire me? Later I learned that SDPD was hard up for cops at the time. It’s a cyclical thing, police hiring. Three months later, the budget closing in on him, the city manager demanding “economies” for the rest of the fiscal year, Sharp never would have welcomed me aboard. But he was hurting for cops in the field.

  I brought my new identity home from Albert’s Uniforms in two brown paper shopping bags. As soon as Dottie left for work I tried it all on. I was jolted by the image in the full-length mirror on the back of our bedroom door. But I would be a different kind of cop, I told myself. Sensitive and compassionate, responsive and responsible. I would catch people who stole from or hurt other people. I would not write chickenshit tickets. I would never use the “N” word, or act unprofessionally.

  I practiced a few quick-draws with my imaginary six-shooter and then pulled on my new raingear: rubber boots, a yellow coat, a yellow rain cap with a floppy visor. I looked like a 170-pound canary.

  The police academy was a catalytic, values-jarring, life-changing experience. The staff and most of the instructors, cops all, were charismatic and sarcastic, comical and irreverent. I aspired to be just like them. And bowed enthusiastically to their authority.

  What about all those accumulated grievances, all that fear and loathing of cops? They evaporated overnight. My top priority, my only priority, was to please or at least not piss off these cool new people in my life. To that end, I spent hours studying the academy manual and spit-shining my new regulation plain-toed black shoes.

  A few weeks into the academy I began to feel the rumblings of something I’d never felt before: self-confidence.

  There was no greater confidence-builder than overcoming my fear of firearms. I’d performed dismally at the range, and had failed to qualify in our first “shoot.” The rangemaster, Sergeant A. B. Davis, who sounded a bit like Sean Connery but looked nothing like him, ordered me to take my six-inch .38 Smith and Wesson revolver home and “dry-fire” it, over and over. “An schqueeze that trigger, Schtamper. Schtop jerking it. Itch not your goddamn dick.” I got home that evening and unloaded the pistol (counting the six bullets in my hand at least half a dozen times). I picked a tiny smudge on the living room wall of our new apartment, took aim at it, and started dry-firing. Click-click-click.

  My right hand was cramped, bruised, and cracked, but I went on to qualify. In fact, by graduation day I was the number-one shooter among SDPD recruits. (I would have been first overall but for an El Cajon cop who later got busted for pulling burglaries on his beat, on duty. I’ve always prided myself on being the number-one, non-felon marksman in the Forty-Ninth San Diego Police Academy Class.)

  After twelve weeks at the academy I was out on the streets on my own, at last. I loved it. Chasing calls, writing tickets, wrestling drunks, pinching the occasional burglar or stickup man. And letting the bad guy know who was boss. Our instructors had drilled it into us: it was us against them, good guys versus bad guys. I knew which one I was, and set out to prove it.

  I didn’t give a moment’s thought to how the job might be affecting me. Within months (was it weeks, days?) I was saying and doing things I’d never said or done before in my life. Not nice things, not proper things. But, oh my lord, was it fun! Screwing people around, laughing and joking about it after shift with my peers. My favorite stunt? Choking people out. I’d jab my right forearm against their throats, spin them around, hoist them up on my back, and squeeze with all my might. Then I’d whisper into their ears as they lost consciousness, “You’re gonna die, asshole.”

  I’d been on the job a little over a year when I pinched a nineteen-year-old puke who’d had the nerve to question my authority.* I’d busted him for a violation of Section 647(f) of the California Penal Code—drunk in a public place and unable to care for himself or the safety of others. In those days people arrested o
n that charge pled guilty and paid their twenty-nine bucks. Not this kid (I was three years his senior). A month after the arrest I received a subpoena. No problem—I knew exactly what to do.

  On the trial date I sauntered into the county courthouse, sidled up to the deputy prosecutor, and suggested with a wink and a poke that he dismiss the case. Why? he demanded to know. Because it was a skinny pinch, I told him. He asked if the kid had actually been drunk. What kind of a question was that? “No, not really. But he was a puke. He called me a pig.”

  The attorney peered at me through his tortoiseshell glasses and said, “Does the Constitution of the United States mean anything to you, Officer Stamper?”

  I was furious, as angry as I’d ever been in my life. But my rage quickly turned to embarrassment. How could I have come so far from my pre-cop views and values? By the time I slithered down the stairs of the courthouse and out into the bright sunshine, I was saturated in shame.

  That slap-down in the courthouse, coupled with other developments in my personal life (such as junior-college classes that were leading me to question, at least tentatively, some of the things we did in police work) triggered an abiding commitment to reform. Of myself, initially. Then of everyone else, the whole rest of that tainted, unholy institution called American policing.

  After a few years as a hydrophobic gasbag, haranguing my fellow cops and confessing our private sins publicly, I resolved to actually study my profession. My goal was to come up with more effective, more humane ways to get the job done.

  The investigation was experiential: every shift on the streets was a learning experience. A couple of coworkers and I would regularly debrief the incidents we handled, including the almost nightly riots and mini-riots in the black community, plus all those civil rights and antiwar demonstrations. It wasn’t always easy but we did learn things, and we applied the lessons to our practice.

  I also studied my field academically, researching and analyzing our laws, police procedures and police administration, political science, leadership, social and organizational change, systems theory. Later, I attended and spoke at numerous national and international conferences on policing, and visited and consulted with several dozen police agencies, often conducting “organization development” and leadership workshops for them. I taught at the police academy, and at San Diego State University, the University of California at San Diego, and the University of Washington. I wrote a dissertation, later published, on the “professed values versus the observed behavior” of American big-city police chiefs.* I came to Seattle in 1994 as a police chief with a Ph.D. in leadership and human behavior.