A VETERAN CHIEF: TOO MANY COPS THINK IT'S A WAR

By JOSEPH D. MCNAMARA

In the wake of the violent abuse of police authority in New York City, one question stands out: How can this happen?

One answer is that the nature of police misconduct, if not the volume, has changed. In the past, brutality frequently took the form of a cop retaliating against someone trying to harm him. Often it went unnoted. Today there is frequently an element of police gangsterism. Small groups of police officers share a fermenting contempt for the people they encounter. Rogue cops band together and cover one another's crimes. When all this unravels in public, it seems as if entire cadres are corrupt.

This wouldn't happen if some cops didn't believe they had a mandate for such behavior. Even though the rate of serious crime in the U.S. has fallen to levels not seen since the early 1970s, public fear of crime has reached an apex. TV transmits vivid pictures of actual violence into the nation's living rooms on a daily basis in more and more graphic detail. Politicians respond to the mounting public fear with declarations of war on drugs and crime that resonate with voters, from presidential to local elections. They also play well to the police culture. As a result, powerful police unions endorsed mayors Rudolph Giuliani in New York and Richard Riordan in Los Angeles. The largest national police group supported President Clinton for re-election after he promised federal funding for more cops and a blazing war against drugs. In such an atmosphere it is easy to accept the notion that tough cops prevent crime.

Giuliani and the two police commissioners of his administration, William Bratton and Howard Safir, have argued strongly that vigorous police action against so-called quality-of-life violations has cut murders in half and greatly reduced other violent crimes. Under the New York style of policing, which has spread to half a dozen other cities, police officers stop and question people at will and penalize those who commit such minor violations as riding a bicycle on the sidewalk and urinating in public. If a person is unable to provide photo identification, he or she is taken to the station, searched, fingerprinted and possibly detained.

Before the Rodney King beating, when Los Angeles cops practiced their own style of macho in-your-face policing, crime did not decline. But when, as a result of widespread and bitter criticism in the King case, the L.A.P.D. retreated from such aggressive policing, crime did dip. Crime also dropped in cities practicing community policing, which I define as a partnership effort with neighborhood groups in solving such problems as noisy bars, crack houses and prostitution. As police chief for 15 years in San Jose, Calif., I saw this approach succeed many times where indiscriminate crackdowns had failed. San Jose became the safest large city in America, while maintaining excellent police relations with its citizens, most of whom were members of minority groups.

During my years as a police chief, I found that police misconduct often had its roots in subtle indications by supervisors to officers that the sort of "extralegal" tactics common to quality-of-life policing were acceptable. Cops in minority neighborhoods would detain, question and push around people on the street without reason. If a young man asserted his legal right to leave, cops "kicked ass." Inevitably a number of officers felt justified in using illegal and at times fatal force. It was constantly necessary to emphasize to the officers that we were peace officers, servants of the community--not soldiers in a war against crime and drugs. Cities in free nations will never reflect the orderliness of Berlin under the Nazis or Moscow under the communists. In America police methods must comply with the law and community standards. They must not arise from a rigid concept of public order formulated within the police culture.

Many of the current brutality cases show officers in an almost maniacal rage. The message of politicians to police that they are soldiers in a war may be driving these angry and violent expressions of contempt. It is common in war to dehumanize the enemy. And all wars produce atrocities.

In the end, it is not tough cops who prevent crime; it is citizens' respect for the law. And these brutality cases do incalculable damage to police credibility with poor and minority citizens--those most in need of protection and without whose cooperation the police cannot be effective. We need to impress upon cops, in New York and everywhere else, that a free society is directed by its citizens.

Joseph D. McNamara, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, served as police chief of San Jose, Calif., after retiring from the N.Y.P.D.