A Good Cop Wasted

He was an ambitious reformer, eager to climb up the ranks, and he did what it took to get there. He spent a year on a top-secret assignment "infiltrating the commies and pinkos," as one of his bosses put it, a secret he has kept until now and one that confirms longtime activists' suspicions. He also went undercover to bust gays hooking up in park bathrooms and discovered, after several of those he had handcuffed saved him from a lunatic, a newfound empathy for their cause. He encountered domestic violence victims, too, like six kids covered with bruises whose mother had scrawled the police phone number on the wall for the next time Daddy went nuts. Experiences like that helped lead him to the conviction that "domestic violence is a precursor to all other kinds of violence."

At age 24, after only four years on patrol, he made sergeant—the youngest ever in the San Diego Police Department. He soon became the youngest-ever lieutenant, then captain.

To many, it appeared that Stamper stopped doing the basics. WTO brought that failing into sharp relief, along with a management style favoring delegation and decentralization. (Harley Soltes)

Looking back on it now, Stamper can see that his meteoric rise had a downside. "It robbed me of experience," he admits during a day we spend together in Seattle. Thrice married and divorced, now living by himself in a remote island cabin, he has come to town to celebrate his 61st birthday with friends. He has an easy, expansive way of talking, and it was a moment of particular self-reflection. "I never carried a caseload. I never worked homicide. I never had all kinds of opportunities that, had I not been ambitious, I would have benefited from."

He had ideas, though, influenced by his short but eventful time on patrol and his liberal politics. And those set him apart. "Norm was wired differently than other cops," says Jack Mullen, a retired sergeant from San Diego now living in Oregon. Mullen remembers that he and others were "aghast" when Stamper suggested that they write fellow officers speeding tickets. For the officers, the right to speed with impunity was a kind of professional courtesy. For Stamper, ethics were paramount.

His voice gained credence on the San Diego force as a series of enlightened chiefs came to power that, with Stamper's help, made the department nationally famous. One, Bill Kolender, called for an investigation of racism in a troubled graveyard patrol squad. He assigned Stamper, then a captain, to the task. The year was 1976. What he found, as described in Breaking Rank, was shocking. Thirty out of 31 officers admitted to using racial epithets and demeaning terms. The use of the N-word was just the start. Officers said they radioed "no human involved" for a situation involving blacks, or used the code for an injured animal. One cop refused to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a black woman. Another sang, "Mammy's little baby loves shortnin', shortnin',"to a suspect in the back seat of his patrol car. The only black officer on the squad fell into a weeping jag when he admitted that he went along with it all.

Stamper gets into hot water when he talks about racism among police. In 1998, four years into his tenure as Seattle's chief, his rank and file exploded over an interview he gave to Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Susan Paynter in which he discussed his memories of the racist, aggressive cop culture of his early days on the force. Seattle officers complained he was tarring them for something that didn't exist here and implied that he was playing to a stereotype. Stamper tells me he also got a load of letters from San Diego officers saying, "It never happened." He shrugs as if to indicate that they were in denial. Retired San Diego Sgt. Mullen, whose views have come closer to Stamper's in recent years, doesn't seem to be in denial when he says, "I didn't see overt racism, but here's what I did see: I saw the fact that you saw very few black officers, and all the black officers worked in the black part of town."

At times, one wonders if Stamper is exaggerating to make his case for reform. Jim Pugel, a highly regarded assistant chief in Seattle who served as Stamper's administrative aide, remembers questioning the chief's account of his aggressive behavior in the Paynter article. Stamper had told Paynter about his predilection for choking people out. "Do you think he did that?" Pugel asks. "I don't think he did. He's the nicest guy in the world." With a moralist's inclination toward self- confession, Stamper also calls himself a serial "spouse abuser" in Breaking Rank, admitting to verbal rather than physical abuse. That surprises his son Matt, a high-tech manager in San Diego, who never heard or saw anything like that, although he notes he was only 2 and a half or 3 when his parents separated.

Stamper insists he's not exaggerating. He says he came to acknowledge his own dark side through therapy and a particular men's retreat. "Too woo woo even for this book," he tells me, which is saying something. (Toward the end of Breaking Rank, Stamper talks of the need to be tough and gentle at the same time, to lean into your fears, and to learn from the samurai tradition of flower arranging before swordsmanship.)