Police exchange with Amsterdam urged for S.F.

Assistant chief says two forces have some things to teach each other

Diana Walsh
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF

San Francisco's Police Department could be looking to freespirited
Amsterdam to get a lesson or two in fighting crime.

Assistant Police Chief Earl Sanders, who spent a week in the Dutch
city last month, wants to create an exchange program between the two
cities' police agencies.

"I'm sure that there are things that we can learn from them and things
they can learn from us," Sanders said Tuesday.

With prostitution legal and marijuana officially tolerated, Amsterdam
has some of the most liberal laws in the world. The deemphasis on
those vice crimes has left police there more time to pursue hard drug
dealers who traffic in cocaine and heroin, and organized crime
leaders, according to Sanders.

Sanders, who will present his exchange plan to the police commission
in the coming weeks, said he had yet to figure out exact details or
funding but would like to see as many as six captains or lieutenants
travel each year to Amsterdam, where they would spend a week learning
about different policing strategies.

The assistant police chief said it would be beneficial for San
Francisco officers and the police commission to learn more about what
had happened in Amsterdam after their laws were loosened.

"It may not work here. It may only work in Amsterdam. . . . I'm just
saying "Here's a different way of handling a different problem,' "
said Sanders. "I'm certainly not in favor of prostitution, but the
world didn't come to an end when they did what they did with
prostitution, and the world didn't come to an end when they did what
they did with marijuana."

Amsterdam has 5,000 police officers in a city of 1.1 million people,
while San Francisco has 2,100 officers for 750,000 people.

Sanders, who was invited as a guest of the police chief in Amsterdam,
said he was most impressed with Amsterdam's community policing
efforts.

San Francisco has already adopted community policing strategies, but
Sanders said that Amsterdam cops, who have been using it for 10 years,
had created a model program. Amsterdam has assigned cops to
neighborhoods where they are intimately involved with and
knowledgeable about the people who live there.

"They have connected all the way down where the officers and the
people truly know one another," he said. "The citizens are very
involved in policing their own neighborhoods."

City cops frequently travel to other cities to pick up tips from
fellow police departments, but Sanders said he thought this would be
the first exchange program with a department outside the country.