A Good Cop Wasted

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. Pugel, Stamper's former aide and the field commander during WTO, remembers the chief asking some obvious questions before the event, questions like: Who are these protest groups? "I thought they were rhetorical," Pugel says. "I thought he had the answers." He didn't. In fact, Pugel says, Stamper and several of his lieutenants judged it more important to pay attention to an officer's disciplinary hearing that was going to appear that same week on Court TV. It was a colossal miscalculation born of a lack of attention, Pugel implies. Stamper, he says, "was so visionary out here that underneath we were missing things."

Would the department have done anything differently had Stamper paid more personal attention to WTO? As Stamper points out in his chapter on the subject (see "Snookered in Seattle," p. 21), the department undertook an unprecedented level of preparations, even if it ultimately proved inadequate. Should Stamper, as one city report charged in the aftermath, have had many more officers from around the state on hand? "The answer is, I just don't know," says Stamper. "Part of me believes that no matter what we had done, it wouldn't have been enough. The other part is just left wondering."

Stamper: Free trade, fair trade, what's the difference? (Harley Soltes)

In any case, Stamper took measure of the debacle and a souring relationship with the mayor and resigned days after the conference limply ended. Where was the public to back up this man who had reached out to community groups more than any chief ever had? That's what police insiders asked themselves. "There was this deafening silence," Pugel says.

Stamper says he doesn't spend a lot of time obsessing over the ironic end to his police career. He's faced ironies before, including one incredibly poignant incident that he shares in his book. In 1972, then a lieutenant, he went out with his San Diego officers on a call. A habitually abusive man was threatening to kill his wife and his 2-and-a-half-year-old boy. In the end, the man sat in his car holding what appeared to be a gun to his son's head. Stamper, who abhorred violence, shot the man dead, splattering blood and brains on the tiny child. The man wasn't armed, it turned out, but an investigation deemed the killing justified.

That's not the end of the story. Twenty-one years later, one of his detectives handed him an incident report about a young man who had threatened to jump off a bridge after the girlfriend he had beaten and threatened to kill broke up with him. That young man was the little boy he had saved. He blamed his problems, in part, on the cop who had killed his father.

Still standing at the intersection that served as a WTO turning point, I ask Stamper what that incident says to him. He thinks for a moment. "It reinforces the nature of the business," he says at last. He means its unpredictability, its sporadic violence. "At any given moment, a community-oriented police chief or a cop can be called upon to do something that seems to clash with his values."

That doesn't mean Stamper is about to abandon his values, though. Detached from day-to-day crises, Stamper is free to do what he does best: thinking, teaching, provoking police officers to think both about his values and their own.

nshapiro@seattleweekly.com