A Good Cop Wasted

Norm Stamper is standing at the intersection that changed his life. He's on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Union Street in downtown Seattle, facing the Sheraton Hotel. Five years ago, as the city's police chief, he was there when he saw a thin line of King County sheriff's deputies attempt to hold back a sea of protesters surging toward the underground parking lot of the hotel, where delegates to the now infamous World Trade Organization conference were staying. "That was a defining moment," he says, when he realized the scale of the fiasco before him. The whole mess—complete with charges that the city had become a "police state" and emblematic images of officers decked out in Darth Vader armor—was also a strange and impossible-to-predict defining moment for the career of a man who, up until that point, had been known as a radical visionary who wanted to take policing into new, touchy-feely territory.

"That's my legacy," Stamper says with resignation. In town for a few days from his new home on Orcas Island, renowned of late for a scruffy look that includes a beard, the white-haired retired chief is wearing black jeans, a casual brown jacket, and an air of nothing-to-lose honesty. "Thirty-four years in the business—with my passions around domestic violence, community policing, citizen oversight, true partnerships—and for me, it's WTO. It's kind of funny. But I do see the irony."

Hold on, though. There's a new chapter in Stamper's career. Or rather a new book, due out this week, and it goes a long way toward putting Stamper back into the progressive, reformist role he long occupied. Published by Nation Books, affiliated with the lefty magazine of the same name, Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Street-Smart Approach to Making America a Safe Place—for Everyone is at its best a blunt, juicy, surprisingly writerly account of a life's work and thought in what he dubs "that tainted, unholy institution called American policing."

The book openly aims for controversy. The publisher's description on Amazon.com hails its "provocatively titled chapters, like 'Why White Cops Kill Black Men' and 'Sexual Predators in Uniform,'" as well as its unorthodox positions in favor of gun control and the decriminalization of drugs and prostitution. That much-read Amazon description has already made Breaking Rank the subject of sniping buzz around the city's precincts. "I don't know what the hell that's about," says Seattle Police Officers Guild President Kevin Hastings, referring to the chapter title on white cops as killers.

All along, I'm thinking, We've got this sucker covered. But my cops? They weren't so confident. . . . They were convinced the city was in for a real shitstorm. (Harley Soltes)

Beyond the hot-button topics is the core of Stamper's vision: a demilitarized, empowered, grassroots-based model known as "community policing." It's a model that is long past heretical, but it still rubs against the grain among officers who long to do what Lee Libby, criminal justice program director at Shoreline Community College, calls "hairy-chested police work." Breaking Rank also serves as a reminder of idealism in a profession now preoccupied with the very hairy-chested, post-9/11 task of hunting down terrorists.

Many who read the book will undoubtedly consider Stamper's ideas on their own merits. But those in Seattle saw his ideas take shape. It's no secret that the verdict is mixed. "You have to remember that Stamper was one of the most unpopular chiefs around," says former Mayor Paul Schell, who appears as a brilliant but petulant character in the book. No doubt, Schell has his own version of events, but he's got a point. Talking to cops now, what's striking is the criticism Stamper receives not only from the rank and file he tried to empower but from his former top officers. Given the culture clash that Stamper ignites, that's not entirely surprising. Nonetheless, one senses that Seattle is a lesson that Stamper and the police world still need to digest.

As he describes it in Breaking Rank, Stamper was, from the start, an unlikely cop. The son of a periodically abusive construction worker, he was a troublemaker of a kid who watched the civil-rights movement play out on TV and who viewed cops as disrespectful, useless bullies. He nevertheless drifted into police work in the mid-'60s when, married at 20, he needed a job.

Unexpectedly, he found himself exhilarated by the work and got right into the swing of the prevailing machismo of the time. He says his favorite stunt was "choking people out," using a hold that cuts off consciousness, while whispering in their ear, "You're gonna die, asshole." Like his peers, he exhibited disdain for what they called "pukes" (antiestablishment types) or "assholes" (establishment types without sufficient subservience), both frequently the target of "attitude arrests" on trumped-up charges.

But the transformation into one of the gang didn't last long. Only a year into his career, he received a shaming scolding by a prosecutor over an attitude arrest. He quickly turned himself into a reformer and found in that role his professional calling.