SHERIFF'S OFFICE FACES TASK OF PRESERVING PUBLIC TRUST

Other cities find that can be hard

A debate about recording interviews by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office
highlights the pressure police are feeling to preserve public confidence
after months of embarrassing and sometimes painful allegations of officer
misconduct.

That pressure mirrors the experience of communities across the country where
law enforcement agencies have faced recrimination for officer actions
ranging from brutality to race-based investigations and participation in
robbery, murder and drug trafficking.

But the history of those communities suggests that public confidence is more
easily lost than regained, and that rebuilding faith in law enforcement can
be a lengthy and daunting task.

"Trust, once you've lost it, can you ever really get it back? I don't know,"
said Elizabeth Pittinger, who manages a civilian review board for police
misconduct that voters in Pittsburgh created in 1997.

There and elsewhere, efforts to win back trust through reform have run risks
of being tangled in disputes over political support for law enforcement,
autonomy of local agencies and the requirements of existing civil service
laws and collective bargaining agreements.

Whether bad deeds by Jacksonville officers will measurably harm trust in
their agency remains to be seen.

Sheriff Nat Glover has reported little backlash from the agency's greatest
humiliation, the indictment this month of three officers on civil rights
charges involving robberies and the killing of a store owner. At the same
time, State Attorney Harry Shorstein said he fears a growing public
skepticism of police, and he may ask detectives to videotape interviews with
suspects to refute claims that confessions were coerced.

Shorstein said his concern stemmed from "the environment we find ourselves
in now of so many allegations of police misconduct," from the indictments to
an officer fired for improperly searching a bikini-clad girl.

Police critics in Pittsburgh had no blockbuster cases, such as the charges
filed against Jacksonville officers last week, but wove dozens of minor
complaints into lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union.
While lacking the shock value of a major scandal, numerous isolated
indiscretions can carry a collective weight that damages a whole
department's image.

Citizen complaints

"They [police officers] just treated people like crap," said Witold Walczak,
the ACLU's point man in Pittsburgh. "That was sort of symptomatic of this
attitude that 'we're in charge.' "

He said some officers exercised arbitrary street justice by jailing people
on minor charges that couldn't stand up in court but would get people locked
up for a night. Complaints of overzealous and unfounded charges were
greatest in minority neighborhoods, and internal affairs investigators
hardly ever found an officer in the wrong.

Eventually the U.S. Justice Department stepped into the dispute, and in 1997
the city signed an agreement to reform its policing and submit to at least
five years of scrutiny by a monitor reporting to a judge.

The agreement, called a consent decree, listed specific changes the
department had to make to satisfy Washington. They included annual police
evaluations; rules for thoroughly investigating citizen complaints; a
computer system to track police performance; and training or transfer for
officers facing repeated complaints.

Those pledges created an objective way to measure change, with a promise of
punishment in court if the city didn't keep its word.

"It is very clear that the public has more confidence in the police today
than it did five years ago. And the reason for that is the consent decree,"
Walczak said, adding there are questions mostly about what will happen when
the monitor's work is finished. "He is the community's window into what's
going on in the department."

But Pittinger, whose eight-person agency was created separately over
objections from the mayor and police supporters, said she thinks citizens
and police are both on edge.

"We've had a terribly tumultuous few years," she said. "The consent decree
certainly polarized people."

Officers who try hard to do a complicated job think their careers can be
torpedoed by one mistake, she said. Meanwhile, only three of the 11 officers
criticized by the citizens board last year were actually disciplined by the
police chief.

She said a combination of cautious politicians, civil service laws and
police union agreements have made real reform harder to reach. One officer
was convicted of a felony and was fired, only to have his firing reversed by
a labor dispute arbitrator whose rulings are confidential under Pennsylvania
law. The same cop was fired two more times and each time survived through
arbitration, Pittinger said.

"That handful of people who should never have been police in the first place
terrorize people, and they get away with it because they're protected top to
bottom," she said.

Battle lines

Police unions in a number of cities have opposed changes forced on them from
outside. In Jacksonville, the Fraternal Order of Police sent Glover its own
recommendations for 22 reforms.

Pittsburgh-style federal intervention has been regarded in some cities as a
way to break local inertia. Activists in Chicago, for example, have openly
campaigned for the Justice Department to sue the city, using a 1994 law that
allows federal action when police show a pattern or practice of violating
civil rights.

But the idea of forcing change from the outside has also fueled hostility
among police supporters, and in some cases drawn battle lines over whether
change is even needed.

Phil Harmon, a lawyer from a Columbus, Ohio, suburb, campaigned almost a
year for a seat in Congress largely on a platform of opposing Justice
Department involvement in the Columbus police force.

"We stirred it up pretty good," said Harmon, a conservative Republican who
ran an independent campaign for the seat being vacated by U.S. Rep. John
Kasich. Although he trailed badly in polls and ultimately withdrew, Harmon
considers it an accomplishment that Columbus officials ultimately rejected
the federal consent decree, choosing instead to face a federal lawsuit that
is still in progress.

The subject has taken on national political dimensions, with conservatives
labeling federal involvement as a Washington power grab to control local
police. President-elect Bush has said he opposes Justice Department lawsuits
against police except in extreme circumstances.

Harmon said reasonable people could disagree over whether problems in
Columbus amount to anything more than isolated incidents, but that in any
case the problem would warrant smaller, incremental steps.

"In Columbus, there was never a single federal civil rights charge brought
against an individual police officer," he said. "We thought that didn't make
sense, that if there were a problem you would go after the root first rather
than the whole system."

Glover so far has taken initial steps to produce local solutions, but has
also borrowed outside ideas.

In September, when he formed a committee to advise him on reforms, he also
announced the creation of an integrity unit that would be housed separate
from other police offices and would test the honesty of other officers in
secret sting operations.

That idea has been in place for several years in New Orleans, where in the
mid-1990s a historically crooked police force became so notorious that
business leaders said it was hurting the city's vast tourist industry.

"I think 5 percent of your organization needs to be in an integrity unit in
every police department in the country," said Terry Ebbert, director of the
New Orleans Police Foundation, a non-profit group financed by top corporate
executives to improve the city's law enforcement.

Silent presence

The unit becomes a silent presence in the department, he said, as officers
periodically receive letters telling them they've been tested sometime
recently and thanking them for their professionalism.

The integrity squad, the foundation, and far-reaching efforts to weed out
bad cops and instill neighborhood-based policing became cornerstones of
reform there.

But progress in New Orleans has involved a complicated set of factors that
few cities would want to reproduce. Pay for officers was abysmally low, with
rookies earning $18,000 per year when momentum for reform gathered several
years ago. At the time, Jacksonville rookies earned $30,000.

Dozens of police officers were indicted -- some for murder -- dozens more
quit under investigation and more than 100 were disciplined or demoted.

And with a city council soured on the police department, police backers
initially turned to the corporate community as their only source of money to
improve conditions.

The New Orleans Police Foundation donates $1.4 million per year to projects
that benefit the police department, including underwriting medical
insurance. While the city has provided money to hire more officers and raise
pay, corporate donations are still an essential funding source. The
foundation is involved in police recruiting efforts, managing advertisements
for new officers and checking applicants' backgrounds.

Supporters point to opinion surveys that now show residents feel better
about law enforcement. But even supporters say there are still some problems
with misconduct, and that progress is a relative matter.

When the reform drive started, "the only thing we were No.1 in the nation on
was crime," Ebbert said. "We were down at the bottom in a lot of other
things."