The New Chief
(June 2009)
The goals Mayor Newsom has set for George Gasćon, his new chief of police, are to “Implement a computerized system for spotting crime trends, increase the crime clearance rate and improve the morale of rank-and-file officers.” Those goals should be simple to meet, if properly managed, because the mechanisms to achieve them have been around for a long time. All it will take is the will.
I had “a cup of coffee” as a detail head in the San Francisco Police Department Inspectors Bureau in 1970. I remember commenting to the Captain of Inspectors at the time that there were no provisions to follow-up on cases assigned to inspectors to assure that any work had been done. He assured me that if anyone complained about non-performance, dire consequences would follow.
To my mind, we should have been a bit more proactive than that, because simple procedures to manage investigative cases had been available in other departments for decades. Since then there have been any number of studies—too numerous to mention here (but available on request)—which have pretty much drawn the same conclusions.
Yet in 2002, the
Chronicle was able to publish a
series which revealed the fact that
The issue of management information deficiencies came up again in 2006, this time in a Chronicle series about the department’s failure to properly analyze use-of-force reports. Again, the solution depended on the arrival of a magical, mother-of-all computers.
There is no need to wait endlessly for some computer program. The methods to accomplish what is needed have long been available and could be fairly started on a lap top. The new chief seems well situated to understand that, for the Los Angeles Police Department, from which he hails, has been technically proficient in these ways for a long time, whatever else its other problems.
As to morale, he is coming to a department crying out for change, and a very different organization from that which confronted Chief Charles Gain in the 1970s. Then, it could be said, the department and much of the citizenry presented a united front against the new chief. Now, the department and the city are comprised of a number of identity groups, all vying for their piece of the pie.
There is one issue, within the power of the chief to effect, however, upon which all but the most marginal participants can agree. It is their opposition to serious violent crime.
By taking a different posture from his
predecessor, who, by all accounts “has maintained a low profile in
This will
involve some risk. He will have to somehow avoid or neutralize the factional
recriminations which accompany much of what passes for civic discourse in
A large part of what troubles police officers is the lenient treatment of many serious offenders by a overly tolerant justice system: the District Attorney and courts.
The new chief should apply the same analytical methods used to measure performance in clearing cases at the police department level, to the systematic study of what happens to offenders in the justice system beyond their involvement with the police.
He is politically beholden to no one else in the justice system and should use his bully pulpit to announce far and wide, to the press and public, exactly what the situation is. The officers will follow him then.
There is more to it than that, of course, but that’s a start. It’s actually pretty simple; but it won’t be easy. Let the work begin.
Retired