SHOOTINGS BY POLICE

Broken Trust

When officers engage in questionable conduct, both police and public must
practice restraint

POLICE CREDIBILITY in the United States should be extremely high at the
moment: Crime has decreased for seven years, and the number of shootings by
police has also diminished.

But in many areas, police credibility is down. Questionable shootings by
officers across the nation have led to doubts: A police officer in
Connecticut shot a motorist he believed was reaching for a gun, which turned
out to be a cell phone. Four Riverside officers and a sergeant have been
fired after fatally shooting a young African-American woman dozing in her
locked car with a gun on her lap. Two Los Angeles officers are under
investigation for shooting a 105-pound homeless woman to death.

In this context, public concern about San Jose police officers shooting
seven people since the beginning of the year -- six fatally -- is
understandable.

However, it is wrong to decide that there is an established number of times
that cops can shoot people and to condemn officers for exceeding some
``quota.'' Even one unnecessary shooting is too many; on the other hand,
police officers have no way of controlling the number of life-threatening
incidents to which they respond.

Instead, each case must be evaluated by this criterion:

Did the officers fire as a last resort, in the reasonable belief that they
or others faced imminent danger of death or serious injury?

Answering this question, while not easy, is the way to distinguish between
police shootings that are necessary in the line of duty and those that are
warning signs of deeper problems.

The truth is, bad police shootings and instances of police brutality do not
take place in a vacuum. They ferment in negative police cultures thriving on
overheated rhetoric that describes cops as ``soldiers'' in ``wars'' against
crime and drugs.

In San Jose, Chief Bill Lansdowne has ordered a review of training and
procedures, and he has increased the use of crisis-intervention teams
specially trained in non-lethal methods. These steps send a strong message
of restraint to officers, and they should reassure citizens that the police
department is committed to minimizing use of force.

The wrong way

N.Y. mayor derides protests over shooting of immigrant

But in February, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani responded quite differently
to the police shooting of Amadou Diallo. Diallo, an unarmed African
immigrant with no criminal record, died in his own hallway after four white
New York City police officers fired 41 shots at him.

Giuliani called the subsequent protests and demonstrations ``silly.'' The
police officers did not testify before a grand jury or publicly justify
their actions; they have been indicted for murder.

And trust in the department has plummeted: Almost 80 percent of minority
citizens said, in a recent poll, that New York cops are biased against them.
Even most whites polled thought that cops treated minorities unfairly.

The mayor and his police commissioners are experiencing the results of
creating a zero-tolerance police culture. New York has adopted the ``broken
windows'' model of policing, which holds that urban decay, littering and
graffiti send encouraging signals to criminals.

Therefore, police are ordered to crack down on even minor violations. Amid
this climate of a ``war'' on crime and drugs, many New York cops do not see
local citizens as allies against crime, but rather as individuals needing to
be firmly controlled by the police.

There is no evidence, of course, that such conditions signify anything other
than an impoverished and segregated area. However, the ugly confrontations
between police and minorities set in motion by ``broken windows'' has led to
broken trust in the police.

It reminds me of what I saw when I came to San Jose as police chief in 1976.

The San Jose experience

Department's turnaround required three years

Before my arrival, a San Jose officer pursuing a black man for a traffic
violation had fatally shot him in front of his home. Another policeman had
fatally wounded a young Latino, thinking he was reaching for a gun. The boy
was sitting in a car with his girlfriend in front of her home, and no weapon
was ever found.

The police department reacted with much the same insensitivity Giuliani
displayed in the Diallo case. However, the San Jose mayor and city council
did not. Their desire for improvement led to my appointment.

As a result of the shootings and generally bad relations between the police
and minority communities, the mayor and city council had asked the U.S.
Civil Rights Commission to monitor the department. Three years later, the
commission praised San Jose police for greatly improving relations and
recommended that the department be used as a national model for large cities.

Those shootings, tragic as they were, were part of a more serious problem.
Like Giuliani's officers today, San Jose police back then believed it was
their job to keep the citizens in line. They saw themselves as tough cops
and believed that confronting everyone -- especially minority males -- as
potential criminals would scare people into being law-abiding.

In reality, police disrespect made citizens reluctant to report crime, help
gather evidence or come forward as witnesses. Paradoxically, the police
were discouraging the very citizen cooperation they needed to fight crime.

With the help of supervisors like Lansdowne and leaders from community
organizations, we were able to change the police culture and bring cops back
into contact with the people they served. Both crime and police use of force
declined as trust was renewed.

War mentality

Officers are public servants, not soldiers in combat

Reasonable people accept that a cop's job is difficult and dangerous, and
most people understand that sometimes an officer will have to shoot someone.
State penal codes and juries everywhere support an officer's right to use
reasonable force, including deadly force, when necessary.

But the police are not and should never be allowed to think of themselves as
soldiers, or to believe they face the same level of danger.

Gen. Colin Powell during the Persian Gulf War bluntly reminded the nation
that a soldier's duty was to kill the enemy. Because of that, the military
accepts certain civilian casualty levels in dealing with the enemy.

Police, however, are public servants who maintain order and enforce the law.
They are never right in viewing any group in society as the enemy.

Police training should emphasize that officers are not justified in shooting
motorists reaching for driver's licenses or cell phones.

In many cities today, overbearing policing has greatly reduced police
credibility -- worsening the tendency to view police shootings as racially
biased even when they are not. A police culture embracing zero tolerance can
also encourage biased officers to use unnecessary force.

Philadelphia Police Commissioner John Timoney, former first deputy
commissioner in New York, recently said: ``Frankly, there is a problem with
race in policing. To solve it, we have to deal openly with it.''

Reducing crime

Being overly aggressive has its costs, too

New York police justify their aggressive style of policing and the
resentment it causes by saying it is a necessary price to pay for reducing
crime. But that claim does not hold up.

Crime had begun to decline in New York before Giuliani's election. Moreover,
crime has declined nationally -- including in areas such as San Jose and San
Diego, where police pursued cooperative partnerships with neighborhood groups.

Crime also declined in Los Angeles following the police beating of Rodney
King, when cops did little more than answer calls because they feared
complaints.

Furthermore, during the 1980s -- when crime was increasing nationally -- San
Jose became the safest large city in America. Crime dropped as the
department followed a community-policing model and as the computer-driven
economy provided ample jobs.

The latest reports indicate homicides in Manhattan are up 27 percent
compared with last year, and up 19 percent in Brooklyn. Of course, the
police commissioner and mayor who took credit for the previous declines are
not attributing the increases to their own ineptness.

Close calls

Split-second decision leads to peaceful end

My dad, older brother and I all worked as policemen for many years in New
York's highest-crime areas. None of us would have fired at Amadou Diallo. We
were conditioned to believe that cops were part of the neighborhood -- not
an occupation force put there to maintain our own image of what the
neighborhood should look like.

In my 10 years as a policeman in Harlem, I, like other cops, frequently
experienced tense moments, only to find out later that things were not what
they appeared to be. And even a police chief can face split-second decisions.

About 9 o'clock one evening in San Jose, as I was driving home from
headquarters, I saw the passenger in the car in front of me point a gun at
youngsters in a park. I radioed a description and requested backup.

A uniformed officer quickly arrived and went to the driver's side of the
car, not realizing that it was the passenger who had the gun. I rushed to
the car and pointed my weapon at the suspect's head, ordering him to freeze.
Instead, he reached under the seat.

I had seen him pointing a gun at other people. I would have been morally and
legally justified in shooting, and he certainly would have been killed.

But like almost every cop I've known, I didn't want to shoot anyone. I
grabbed him by the neck and hauled him out of the car.

It turned out he wasn't drawing the gun but sticking it under the seat. It
was a poor-quality weapon and probably would not have done much damage if it
had been fired. I had almost killed a confused 17-year-old playing out a
fantasy with his girlfriend, the driver. He had no intention of shooting anyone.

The point is that every day, cops refrain from shooting even when justified.
Of course, we never see these cases in the news. When we analyze officers'
split-second decisions later, we don't owe them a blank check. But we do owe
them a calm and fair verdict reached under due process of law, not a
judgment based on partial media reports.

Equally important, the cops deserve the kind of reasoned leadership they are
getting in San Jose -- not the all-too-common belligerent demagoguery
delivered by ambitious politicians declaring phony wars on crime and drugs.

Joseph D. McNamara

(mcnamara@hoover.stanford.edu) was police chief in San Jose from 1976 to
1991, when he became a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He wrote
this article for Perspective.