A Good Cop Wasted

Even if he did fall prey to some degree of exaggeration or overgeneralization, one has to take seriously his account of racism in one particular squad, which was something he documented in a report at the time. Even now it reads as an eye-opening revelation about a time that was well past the civil-rights era.

It was, however, nearly 30 years ago, as were many of the egregious examples of police behavior Stamper cites. So when we first meet in a downtown coffee shop, I ask him what aspects of policing today call for urgent reform. And what aspects police have the ability to reform—as opposed to issues like drug-law reform, to which police can lend an authoritative voice but which are ultimately legislative.

"Treating cops like grown-ups is critical," Stamper begins. "Too many agencies treat their frontline police officers like dependent or delinquent children, and then they're shocked when they occasionally act out. This gets to the culture of policing. It gets to the structure of policing. And for me, a pressing need is to systematically and very thoughtfully demilitarize aspects of the police structure."

Stamper's views on demilitarization have matured over the years. At one time in the '70s, when the concept was new, he wanted to put cops in blazers. "Blazers!" he writes with self-mockery in Breaking Rank. "I wasn't a cop, I was more like a Fuller Brush Salesman."

But he does still believe that the police disciplinary system needs to be overhauled. "There's a tendency in police work when a police officer misbehaves to keep the class after school," he says. Rigid, standardized disciplines are imposed when, in fact, cases should be judged according to their individual circumstances. Crucially, officers should not be penalized for an honest mistake. A case in point, Stamper says, is the shooting of an unarmed African-American man in 1996 by white Seattle police officer Bill Edwards, whose gun went off accidentally as he was trying to lift the man to his feet. The African-American community gave him hell for it, but Stamper decided not to fire Edwards but to put him through firearms retraining.

Stamper also believes that the top-down paramilitary model is stifling, encouraging cops to "look up rather than out." Where Stamper wants them to look is at the community. And he wants them to think creatively and collaboratively, reaching out to community partners to identify and solve problems. The kinds of problems that police once blew off—not just traditional crime but abandoned beater cars, graffiti, and broken windows— are the kinds of problems that create an environment conducive to crime.

But this is not exactly the version of the "broken windows" theory that former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his police chief, William Bratton, made famous. In '90s New York, police concentrated on arresting the people who broke the windows and committed all sorts of misdemeanors. That was the model that gave Giuliani and his chief a tough-on-crime image. Stamper concentrates on fixing the broken windows, or at least referring citizens to the people who can, as well as addressing the underlying conditions leading people to become vandals. Stamper's model gave him a wanna-be social-worker image.

That was the model he tried to implement in Seattle when he arrived in 1994. He established a community policing bureau and put every officer through three days of training in community problem solving, one day of which he taught himself. "Norm was one of the best teachers I've ever seen," says Clark Kimerer, who served as Stamper's chief of staff and is now a deputy chief. "He was gifted." Stamper also established a number of advisory councils for segments of the community, including African Americans, Southeast Asians, and gays. He attended community meetings constantly.

He had some notable successes. One of his officers, Tommy Doran, painstakingly worked with businesses and community agencies in the International District to clean up Hing Hay Park and an area adjacent to I-5 known as "the Jungle." Stamper's glowing description of Doran's work casts a redemptive light on the officer, later accused of racism after he fatally shot a mentally ill African-American shoplifter outside a Queen Anne Safeway.

But the rank and file remained largely unhappy. "I heard it directly from a lot of people," says Kimerer. "All this problem-solving stuff is nice, but I'm putting bad guys in jail." Kimerer himself had some qualms about Stamper's model that suggest that more than machismo was at stake. "Problem solving is a pretty involved and complicated enterprise," he says. "For many situations it's perfect. But day in and day out, there are also hundreds of situations that require a very straightforward execution of the legal process."

"You have to have a balance," says current Seattle Chief Gil Kerlikowske, reflecting on the Stamper years. "There was lots of training in community-oriented problem solving but little in day-to-day skills." He mentions skills related to officer safety, coping with stress, and handling traffic stops. The department had fallen behind in its first-aid training. While Kerlikowske once served as deputy director for the federal Office of Community Oriented Policing Service, he believes a department can't live on community policing alone. "You can't stop doing the basics," he says.