ONE DAY, WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT, WE MAY HAVE TO STRUGGLE WITH LEGALIZING
DRUGS IN ORDER TO DRIVE OUT THE PROFIT MAKERS.

It's been seven years this month since I retired from the Madison Police
Department. Looking back, I enjoyed a police career that spanned three
decades with three city police departments.

It was a career that was enormously satisfying. However, in the early years
it was not like that.

I began my police career in 1960, a time of great social and racial unrest
in our nation. The police were in deep trouble trying to cope with our
changing society. Few blacks served as police officers and the few women
who served generally worked as jail matrons or truant officers. Until this
time, policing was a blue-collar job, and those who chose police work were
not noted for their intellect, insight, or sensitivity to social issues.

After a few years, I decided to leave the police. I was working the night
shift, and attending university classes during the day, when I started
considering employment other than the police.

All that soon changed when I came across the newly published report of the
President's Commission on Law Enforcement. I began to see the police with
new eyes. Along with my classes in sociology, psychology, and history, I
came to see the great potential the police had for improving our society.

Now seven years after my retirement from the police, and deeply into my life
as a parish priest, I wonder if that potential will ever become a reality.

Sometimes it is helpful to look back before we go forward. It was in
England in 1829 that the bold idea of using civilians rather than the
military to enforce the law came into practice. Sir Robert Peel thought
civilians could best police a free society. His first principle of policing
states that police should be, "In tune with the people, understanding the
people, belonging to the people, and drawing its strength from the people."

This principle is just as important today as it was then. As our country
becomes increasingly diverse and multicultural, nothing could be more
important for our nation's police than to be in tune with, understanding of,
belonging to, and drawing its strength from the people they serve.

Nevertheless, I sense a slow, but steady, shift today in the nation's police
away from that historic, yet vital, vision. Two illustrations come to mind:
how the police are responding to the problem of illegal drugs and how they
are dealing with crime in general.

Let me deal in this first installment with the question of how police are
approaching what has come to be referred to as the "drug war". . .

POLICE SHOULD BE DOMESTIC PEACE CORPS, SERVING THE PEOPLE

We cannot have a war-time police department and peace time service. The war
on drugs has resulted in many police departments shifting their priorities
in order to get everyone, not just the drug enforcement units, on the
frontline fighting the war. In order to do so, the police have found an
old, but newly resurrected, strategy of "zero tolerance."

Zero tolerance directs the police to be concerned about all kinds of "social
disorder"; no offense is too small to overlook (after all, the person may be
illegally possessing drugs!). Zero tolerance includes making arrests for
noontime jaywalking, minor traffic violations, and street corner gatherings.

All this was an outgrowth from a March, 1982 article in The Atlantic Monthly
by George Kelling and J.Q. Wilson entitled, "Broken Windows." What "broken
windows" means is that if you leave an automobile on the street with a
broken window, and if no one cares or "fixes" it, the automobile soon will
be the target of increasing vandalism and theft. In short, the theory
suggests that if society tolerates or overlooks one area of social disorder
it will enable other, increasingly serious behaviors.

In some ways, this theory may be defensible, however, in looking at its
application in New York and other cities, it was a good idea gone bad. New
York's effort to clean up areas like Times Square resulted in something most
senior police officials have known for years -- it doesn't solve crime, it
just displaces it. Unfortunately, the areas to which these crime problems
are displaced are, more often than not, poor or economically marginal
neighborhoods that have enough of their own problems. Those who profess
that these questionable tactics prevent crime fail to understand that major
cause of our nation's crime reduction is more the result of demographics
(the aging of America) than police action.

Even if the "zero tolerance" theory is worth considering, we need to know
what strategies the police will use and how they will carry them out. What
zero tolerance and its collateral strategy, racial profiling, means in New
York City is that even minority police officers have difficulty driving from
their homes to the police station without being detained en route by their
colleagues who have been schooled in "zero tolerance." Those who call for
taking the "handcuffs" off the police often do not feel the result of it.
Those who do feel it are those who are poor, young, or minorities.

Another outgrowth of this crime control strategy is that we permit the
police to stop and search us for almost any reason. I find that greatly
offensive. (I am encouraged, however, that the U.S. Supreme Court has
recently agreed to review a case involving these kind of searches.)

Of course, those of us who are white are not usually subject to these
searches and racial profilings. If we were, I question whether the practice
would have ever begun, let alone have progressed this far.

But then again, I shouldn't be surprised by all of this. The nation's
police have not had a history of focusing on the solution of various crime
problems or sensitivity in their enforcement. In fact, when it comes to
policing the city, crime control is more about politics than science. If we
spent as much time and money researching our social and educational problems
as we do economic ones we would not be having this discussion.

So what should the police be doing? What is the "butter" side of this "guns
and butter" equation? I admit I would be more comfortable with a military
blockade of international commerce than with our local police given the
responsibility for waging the war on drugs.

My vision for the nation's police, and especially for the Madison Police
Department, hasn't changed much over the years, it's still based on Robert
Peel's 19th century vision for the police to be:

"In tune with the people, understanding the people, belonging to the people,
and drawing its strength from the people."

Regardless of the problems we face as a society, I believe we should
specifically expect the following from the police:

* That police officers be both well educated and well trained. Street
justice is the work of the nation's police. It is too important to be left
to the untrained or the uneducated. The ranks of the police must be filled
with men and women who are formally educated and intensely trained. When I
was the chief, I preferred candidates with four-year college degrees (not
degrees in "police science," but in the humanities -- in sociology,
psychology, art, political science, or history). But a warning here, the
same commitment and effort to assure an educated police department must also
be directed to making sure we have a department representative of the
community it serves. These two efforts are compatible. The objective of
having an educated police department is not to "fight" crime, but to prevent
it. In order to do this, it takes a bold and consistent organizational
vision, commitment to develop leadership, the ability to partner with the
community, and a willingness to experiment with creative police strategies.

* That police departments be committed to prevention over reaction. When I
look back at over twenty years of my life with the Madison department, I
most regret not doing away with police patrol; that is, not changing once
and for all the old and tired police paradigm of "going to work, checking
out a patrol car, and waiting for a call." I wish I had made an even
stronger commitment to work with the community to prevent those calls in the
first place. Where I wanted to go is best illustrated by Madison's
Neighborhood Officer Program which, two decades after its inception, is
still not the primary way of doing police business in Madison (nor, for that
matter, in any of our nation's departments). Rather than driving around
waiting for something to happen, Neighborhood Police Officers are assigned
to small, specific areas of the city. When Neighborhood Officers come to
work, and they review what has happened in the last 24 hours, as well as any
trends in police-related problems. They plan their work for the day, and
respond with an eye always toward prevention, and work in partnership with
neighborhood residents.

* That police departments be peace departments. Police also need to be
street-corner constitutional officers. They should be committed to seeing
that the Bill of Rights works for all persons regardless of race, gender,
sexual preference, ethnic background, or social economic class. I believe
this type of "street-corner justice" actually keeps the peace in our
country, not police in tactical gear driving around in armored vehicles.

Before I came to Madison in 1972, the department was literally at war with
the community. Shortly thereafter, we had a recruiting drive for new police
officers in which we tried to demonstrate what we were trying to become. So
we decided to advertise on some city billboards with "Join the Madison
Police Department -- the other Peace Corps!" Because that is precisely what
we should be - a domestic Peace Corps. What happened was uplifting, young
men and women, of majority and color, who never thought of becoming a police
officer, joined the department and helped us change it for the better. The
objective of a peace corps, versus a police corps, was to keep the city's
peace through dialogue, not nightsticks. And a police department does that
best when it treats everyone with respect, regardless of their provocation,
and is, itself, as intelligent, diverse, and peaceful as the community it
serves.

* That police chiefs be community leaders. The police chief must not only
be concerned for the welfare of his or her department, but must care for the
whole city. The chief must be able to see the "big picture," speak out on
social issues, and be everyone's police chief. It is the job of the chief,
in conversation with elected officials and other community leaders, to set
the vision and tone of the police department. The chief then leads the
department in that direction so that the vision can become a reality. Along
the way, he or she must have the moral strength to resist political or
inside pressure to use the department in any improper or unethical way. In
policing, a good "end" can never justify the use of illegal or improper
means. We cannot smile to ourselves when the police bend the law to catch
bad guys!

* That police departments be committed to innovation and experimentation.
The Madison Police Department has enjoyed an international reputation of
being a creative innovator. During my tenure, we tried to commit ourselves
to always being on the cutting edge of the art of policing. We even had a
place where we could try out these new ideas -- the south side experimental
police district. Experimentation was an important part of trying to
continually improve the quality of our services. We believed innovation in
policing could happen in Madison because our city enjoyed certain things
other cities did not: a chief of police with job tenure, a manageable crime
rate, and an expectation from the community that all its public employees
will strive for excellence and continuously improve what they do.

* That police departments and their officers be neighborhood-oriented.
While much has been said about neighborhood oriented policing, the fact is
that it works and it is the best way for our society to deliver police
services. In the early 1980s, we defined a neighborhood oriented police
department as "a police organization which enables and empowers its police
officers to function as community workers and organizers, and to work
alongside neighborhood residents to help them prevent, resist and eliminate
crime and other disorder in their neighborhood."

Nothing is more important for the future of policing in this country than
the decentralization of patrol services to the neighborhood level and for
the police to partner with neighborhood residents to control crime. While
police continue to see traffic control as the backbone of their strategies
for crime control, citizens, nevertheless, ought to expect the police to
focus their traffic enforcement to problem areas where certain driving
behaviors (like speeding, running red lights, or illegal turns) are causing
accidents or injuries. The police must justify their enforcement efforts by
demonstrating a relationship between increased enforcement and the reduction
of traffic injuries and accidents. Otherwise, it appears that traffic
enforcement, especially when minorities are stopped, is simply a ruse to
more fully expand the war on drugs.

* That police departments strive to create positive workplaces and high
customer satisfaction. A police department that operates like the U.S.
Army in the 1950s will not be able to rise to the level of excellence we
expect from them. Today, smart businesses, including our nation's military,
are places that are concerned not only about customer satisfaction, but also
about the personal growth and satisfaction of their employees. Stephen
Covey, in his book Principle-Centered Leadership, explains this point very
well:

When one of our governing values is total quality, we will care not only
about the quality of our products and services, but also about the quality
of our lives and relationships...Total quality is a total philosophy...And
it is sequential; if you don't have it personally, you won't get it
organizationally.

For years, the vision of the Madison Police Department was "Quality from the
inside, out!" This meant the police department can only deliver
compassionate and high quality police services to the public when they take
care of the people, "their lives and their relationships," on the inside of
the organization. The business world has found that empowered and satisfied
employees are the ones who are most likely to deliver high quality,
customer-oriented services. They have also found that top-down,
hierarchical organizations cannot be competitive in today's market. Those
who continue to use these old structures are called "dinosaur"
organizations - -- soon to be extinct.

I have often said that a city deserves the kind of police it has. When it
comes to Madison, I happen to believe that this city deserves the very best.
While we frequently overlook the police until there is a problem (for
example, the serious misconduct cases recently come to light in the New York
City and Los Angeles Police Departments as well as what appears to be a
growing intolerance by the police toward political protest), it is,
nevertheless, our responsibility as citizens to periodically require the
police to report to us on how effectively they are doing their job.

For example, in the 1980s we inaugurated a customer survey which told us how
we were doing. It randomly queried persons who received police services,
even persons who were given citations or arrested. This monthly survey gave
me a good idea as to how we were doing our job in the eyes of our community.
In fact, we were able to show that our overall customer satisfaction was
getting better and better.

My understanding today is that the department does not do this anymore. I
wonder how they can do their job with out getting some balanced feedback
from the people who live and work in this city?

We give the police a great amount of trust and power in this society -- we
trust that they will properly use the power we give them and the power to
use force is the highest level of that trust. In light of that, police must
continue to dialogue with their communities and demonstrate to them they are
not abusing that trust.

I believe the areas which I have touched upon are the areas which the police
need to be attentive if they are going to effectively serve this nation in
the future. I vividly remember the Civil Rights movement and the protest
against the Viet Nam War during my years of service. They were two areas
for which the police of my generation were not prepared. The outcome was
that to this day many Americans will never trust the police. I predict that
unless today's police pay attention to the points I have made, they will
find themselves in a situation far worse.

Yes, I am saddened by what I see happening. Most police departments seem to
be unable to reach the organizational excellence to which they are capable.
Others have even slid backwards; seduced by the excitement and money that
surrounds crime and the war on drugs.

The Madison Police Department would be wise to be wary. Yet the Madison
department is gifted by a unique blend of intelligence, compassion, and
ability. They have a long history of creativity and innovation in the
police field and they have the capacity to be the very best police
department in the United States. We should expect and demand nothing less.