EDUCATION, PALLIATIVE TO INTOLERANCE

EDUCATION, PALLIATIVE TO INTOLERANCE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 23, 2009

“What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the human soul. The philosopher, the saint, the hero, the wise, and the good or the great, very often lie hid and concealed in a plebeian, which a proper education might have disinterred and brought to light.”

Joseph Addison (1672 – 1719), English essayist

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OVERVIEW

Over a ten-year period (1970 – 1980), I did consulting, while a full-time graduate student in industrial-organization psychology pursuing a Ph.D. in that discipline. I was able to practice my profession while I immersed in academia.

In the course of that work, I gave seminars from Seattle to Denver to Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York City, Hartford (Connecticut), Washington, DC, Richmond (Virginia), Raleigh (North Carolina), Charlotte (North Carolina), Atlanta, Jacksonville, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Miami, New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

These were mainly executive seminars in the public sector sponsored by the Professional Institute of the American Management Association where I worked as a contract consultant. Attending these sessions, typically, would be city managers, mayors, city council members, police chiefs, and officers of state governments.

In addition, I did organization development (OD) interventions with several police agencies. One such intervention was a nine-month intervention in the Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD) after a riot occurred in Herndon, a small town in Fairfax County. An (FCPD) officer shot and killed a 26-year-old African American inside a Seven-Eleven Convenient store in a Hendon shopping plaza.

Subsequent to that, I conducted a three-month intervention of the Raleigh Police Department (RPD) in which the majority of the 350-man squad of sworn police officers walked off the job in protest to the leadership of the sitting police chief.

My police work in Fairfax County became the basis of my master’s thesis. My police work in Raleigh supported by a statistical study of several policed communities in Florida led to my Ph.D. dissertation. Also, factored into that research was other empirical police work conducted across the country, weighed against metropolitan police problems reported in the literature. This included the 1975 case of murder of a Mexican American while in the custody of Houston police officers.

The central theme here is that education is a powerful palliative to intolerance. With education, police officers are more inclined to serve and protect rather than resort to force in the performance of their duty. But herein lies a caveat. Novelist Joseph Wambaugh, formerly a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective sergeant, says: “A community gets the police the community deserves.” It has been my experience that he is correct.

The better educated the community the less crime, drug addiction, teenage school dropouts, teenage pregnancies, teenage unemployment, promiscuity, and gratuitous violence against persons and property. Generally speaking, police reflect the way a community views itself, and the way it views itself is the way police believe they are expected to act.

Where communities are struggling with image, where African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities are not integrated into the wider community, trouble is likely to brew. A common statistics that bears repeating is that where 75 percent of white students and a comparable rate of minority students graduate from high school, teenage petty crime, drug abuse, pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, vandalism, and stealing are reduced to single digits. By the same token, where graduating rates are less, these numbers are more likely to be in the double digits.

Why? Let us look at this situation from the perspective of police.

Police see the policed naked with all our warts and blemishes, all our hidden secrets and shames revealed on a day-to-day basis. Policing takes a powerful toll on the social, psychological, emotional and psychic reserves of police officers often threatening their perspective of what it is to be a human being. No profession needs a more diverse tool kit to cope with the underbelly of society, and yet such a tool kit is often foreign to them.

Police officers should be acquainted with literature, history, with psychology, sociology and anthropology, with cultural studies, with languages, and with science and technology. All are necessary, but none more significant than understanding the human dynamics of human combustion.

Police officers require “3-D” proficiency: (1) direction; (2) discretionary use of their authority; and (3) decision-making acumen. The most effective police officers have never drawn their weapon. Common among them are a college education many with law degrees. They don't fall back on their ethnic biases because they realize they are not relevant.

“3-D” is the equivalent of seeing the situation clearly as if through clear glass while putting a mirror up to the individuals involved in an altercation, so that they might see themselves more clearly. Obviously, there are limitations to this when people are intoxicated, but you still deal with them with discretion knowing they are not in charge.

Over my career as a consultant to law enforcement professionals, I have found officers who could express themselves well were less intimidated by aberrant behavior and didn't have to hide behind their badge.

Police officers often have to make quick decisions in explosive situations. No profession is closer to being judge, jury and executioner than a police officer armed with a badge and revolver. Education not only increases tolerance, but also improves the chances of officers making wise decisions. Rather than have the situation deteriorate into confrontation, education gives them a chance to step back and consider the implications. Arrests may still have to be made but no one need be hurt.

Let us now look at these three police department to illustrate in particular what has been discussed here in general.

A SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY OF THE POLICE ORGANIZATION: THE ANATOMY OF A RIOT

After a riot occurred in Herndon, a small community in Fairfax County, Virginia, I was brought in by the America Management Association to assess the situation and make recommendations. I would spend the next nine months commuting back and forth from Tampa, Florida.

Herndon, a nearly total white community, received, over time, the relocation of some thousand African Americans into the community from Washington, DC, twelve miles away. Unfortunately, no infrastructure specifically to meet the needs of these new residents was established in the way of a jobs bureau, recreational center, or a plan to integrate them into the wider community. Only a small complex became a common meeting place as well as the lone shopping center.

Young people would hang out there and entertain themselves of a weekend by driving their cars around the shopping center with their ghetto blasters sending the beat of the music into the night. This was found disturbing to white residence, and a curfew was imposed that seriously restricted this activity. This was considered an affront to African Americans in general. Tensions were high and on the rise.

Then an incident occurred that set off a riot. There was a young black man popular with his peers, let us call him “Sam,” who wasn’t intimidated by white police officers, especially one who had it in for him, let us call him “Joe.”

Sam was a renegade, unemployed, and enjoyed shocking his peers with his daring. He was twenty-six-years-old with a suspended driver’s license, only to be caught by Joe seeing him pull into the Seven-Eleven convenient store in the shopping center.

Joe followed Sam into the store and confronted him as he was getting a cold drink out of the cooler. Joe asked to see his license to which Sam said, “Why, I ain’t drivin nothing!” Joe reminded him what he had seen. Egging people on was Sam's style, which found him looking around the store, asking, “Any of you see me drive in here?” No one answered.

“Are you calling me a liar?” Joe steamed. Sam uttered some profanity under his breath, laughed and attempted to walk away.

“What did you call me?” Joe stormed as he pushed Sam hard against the cooler breaking the glass, cutting Sam, and angering him to the point that he grabbed Joe’s nightstick and attempted to defend himself. Joe unloaded his service revolver on Sam, killing him dead.

The shooting occurred in the late afternoon of an autumn day. An hour later youths were throwing rocks at passing cars. This gravitated to making Molotov cocktails by early evening, throwing them first at cars, and then on the roofs of the shopping center buildings setting the whole complex on fire.

It was evident from the first that FCPD was not prepared for this. The department had grown with the community from a police force of 80 sworn officers twenty years ago to more than 600 now, but the department still operated as if 80 officers. Item:

(1) Three quarters of the police force had come up through the ranks including the entire command staff, none of whom had any college training.

(2) More than 75 percent of the sworn officers lived outside the county, one of the most affluent in the nation, because they could not afford to live there. Thus they had little sense of community or ownership.

(3) The sworn officers were not trained for riot situations nor did they have the necessary flack vests, gas masks, and fire protection uniforms for such duty.

(4) There was no formal community action plan or network with the black leadership of the community. As one leader put it, we are the forgotten minority.

(5) Fire fighters were not able to put out the fires because they were not confident they could depend on police protection.

(6) A delay of several hours ensued while suitable protective attire was acquired for police officers from Fort Meade. By that time little was left of the shopping plaza.

(7) Looting was ignored and no arrests were made because of the handicap of the lack of protective gear.


FROM HEEL TO HERO

The whole drama was put on its head when a shamed police office who once “borrowed” a fine Swiss knife from the evidence lock up, which sabotaged a pending case, and was suspended for the theft, and treated as a non person, happened to be the only person in the department with a good relationship with the black leadership.

Without authority, leaving behind his protective gear, he walked in the middle of “no man’s land,” which separated the two camps, Molotov cocktails falling around him, and yelled, "It's me!" Somebody in the black community said, “Stop, let him pass.” And they did.

Later, he would say he didn’t think before he stepped forward. “It just happened.” He didn’t think of his physical safety, or what the “brass” might think. “It was a case of pure insanity on both sides,” he confided. “Better believe I wasn’t trying to play hero.”

He knew what it felt like to be ostracized. He was also studying sociology at the George Mason University. In an unofficial way, he had developed rapport with the African American minister and other community leaders. He felt certain they trusted him and wouldn’t harm him. For a few hours, he became the chief negotiator between the rioters and the police, indeed, the embodiment of police authority, and was effective in neutralizing the situation. It was his action that saved bloodshed and further embarrassment to the police and the county.

Over the next nine months I learned a great deal about FCPD. The department was out of touch with the times. The command center had computers but complaints were hand counted. Computer specialists existed in the department but were serving their allotted time in patrol, as officer succession was not unlike it had been twenty years before when the department had only 80 officers. Recommendations were made to address such irrelevancies, which were in the early stages of being implemented when I completed my assignment.

THE MUTINY OF THE 350 – AN HERCULE POIROT “OD” MOMENT

The Public Safety Institute (PSI), a law enforcement consulting firm, contacted me to work with it when the majority of the 350 sworn police officers of Raleigh, North Carolina walked off the job and refused to serve and protect the community. They issued an edict to the city manager and city council that unless the city removed the present police chief from office they would not return to work.

PSI brought in statisticians, police organization experts, and management consultants. My role in organization development (OD) was to be the people person on board. We each worked separately and would periodically compare notes. I rode several hundred hours over a three-month period with police officers on all three shifts. It wasn’t funny but I often felt as if we, meaning PSI, were acting like the Keystone Cops for all the progress we were making.

SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM

From interviews with the chief of police and the command staff I had a sense he was a shadow but not the source of the problem, although he was getting all the heat for the dissension and the mutiny.

We seem to create a structure of evil around anything that goes down poorly. It is an exercise in convenience. All guns can focus on a specific target, in this case the chief of police, and literally blast away. Frustration and anxiety follow. It could not be otherwise for I felt we were grasping at shadows while the real problem eluded us.

My intuitive sense was that we were being directed away from the source of the problem, but I wasn't certain how or why. I was riding with officers, interviewing senior city officials, and educators from various universities in the area, I even developed a brief questionnaire that was included in the water bill, but I felt as if I were treading water.

The questionnaire was not a scientific study, but was meant to provide an indication of the collective mindset of the community. More than ten percent responded, which in itself was impressive. The profile suggested a negative attitude towards the police, an exaggerated sense of personal and property crime, little interest in a larger police budget, improved officer training, or hiring college graduates for police work. Citizens just wanted the problem to go away.

The print media and television seemed as ambivalent as were citizens. Media seem content to have improved circulation and ratings with mutinied officers appearing in news stories, editorials, and major attraction of the 6 o’clock and 11 o’clock television news. The chief of police was given some coverage, but little changed.

There was an office I would pass every day with a white haired man sitting there reading a newspaper and doing little else. I stepped in one day, and introduced myself. “I know who you are.”

“You have one up on me,” I said, “I don’t have the pleasure of knowing you.”

“I’m the former city manager of this place," he said, spreading his arms out to encompass city hall, "was my job for more than twenty-five years.”

For the next two hours, he talked and I listened. A pattern developed. There were no more shadows, no more false roads. This was it! It all fit nicely together. He personified the problem, and in many ways, he was the problem.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM

The former city manager talked of an erosion of values and beliefs in the community he loved so dearly. He remembered when Raleigh was a pastoral community, gentrified, southern, with a tradition. Change he saw killing the community, killing the government, and now killing the police. His ignorance was monumental and it had come to prove costly to RPD.

He told a story of the late police chief, a personal friend, and the first college graduate chief of police in Raleigh’s history. The chief had a heart condition but was three years from retirement. The city manager instituted a policy of rotating the three active majors in the police department every four months as “acting chief” giving the actual chief a titular role.

Close to the end of this three-year period, his friend had a massive heart attack and died. The city manager appointed the senior major permanent chief, persuading the city council to approve the deputy city manager to take his place, and then he retired.

Three discernible islands were created in the wake of his leaving, internal war zone, each operating without a clear mandate, each without a clear function or direction, and each with deep suspicious of the other. He had created essentially three distinct police departments that were destined to spontaneously combust.

Once the senior major was made permanent chief, he neutralized his competition by appointing one major to administration and the other major to community service, while elevating his sergeant to the position of major over patrol. This was a line position where the power lay. In addition, he appointed an adversary who was a captain to permanent nights over the patrol division. This is where he made his error.

The captain was confident to the point of cocky and was a leader who thrived in situations in flux. Intelligent and cunning, he was also witty and popular with all patrol officers. The shelving to permanent nights was meant to punish him for his countermanding attitude to the new chief whom he saw as a buffoon, but instead provided him with theatre to create his havoc.

Eighty percent of the police force was attached to patrol. These officers rotated on three shifts on a monthly basis, giving the captain exposure to the entire patrol division on a regular basis. He used his uncanny sense of the dramatic and inclination to go for the jugular to gain their trust while exploiting their gullibility. Officers respected him for his wide experience and knowledge at several levels and often came to him for personal as well as professional advice. From the beginning, he manipulated their confusion and vulnerability, as these officers had a crisis in identity and confidence never being quite sure where they stood because each of the three chiefs had operated so differently.

The captain fed their disenchantment with the fine wine of grievance, giving it the body of language, while developing strategies to taunt the chief. He operated so subtly and persuasively that it wasn’t until my meeting with the former city manager that I recognized that I had been caught up in his evil not seeing it for what it was.

At roll call on the night shift, he would have mini seminars to demonstrate what leadership was, using the current chief as an example of what it was not. Often he would do this in a jocular and seemingly flippant way. Incrementally, he was feeding the officers’ frustration with his own massive contempt and deceit. Riding with officers and listening to them they sounded like a mouthpiece for his views. One officer, who was quite intelligent but poorly educated, and popular with the troops, found his inspiration in “Mein Kampf,” a book I suspect was given to him by the captain.

On occasion, this officer talked to me of natural law and natural justice, and the values and standards that are necessary to create a specific society of men. He would speak of police as if an organism with a unique history. When I would ask him what he meant, he would look at me passionately and declare, "A lone individual must conceive the values and purposes of the group and form its natural will."

It was no accident that he was the frequent face on the front page of the daily newspaper surrounded by his deputy rebel confederates. He would also be seen at the televised city council meetings, but the ventriloquist was the captain safely in his lair on permanent nights.

THE OD MOMENT

There aren’t many opportunities in the work of an industrial-organization psychologist when he can succinctly define a problem and frame the picture so clearly that his words take the air out the inflated disruption. That is what happened with my report of this situation.

Leaders of the community, as well as the police involved, could see now how they had been duped by the actions of the former city manager and the hidden agenda of the captain on nights.

Police officers returned to work, the police chief gave a special reprieve for most officers, created an appeals process, organized continuing education training, formed a task force to look into potential problems between the police and the policed, and gave special attention to minority community relations, which had been neglected.

The police chief remained in office until his retirement. He elected not to get rid of the captain on permanent nights, but he didn't have to worry. The captain retired.

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

Novelist Anthony Burgess penned a novel of this title with reference to the expression “as queer as a clockwork orange,” a punning reference to a mechanically responsive (clockwork) man, a creature who can only perform good or evil, a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil, or the “almighty state.”

Burgess sees the application of Pavlovian or mechanical laws as the critical index to human behavior. To emphasize this phenomenon, the protagonist of his story is conditioned to respond to feelings of evil, which prevent the exercise of his free will.

In the course of my work with police across the nation, I saw something of this mechanism working between the police and the policed. It became the title of my dissertation, “The Police Paradox: Systematic Exploration in the Paradoxical Dilemma of the Police and the Policed” (1978).

I was particularly drawn to the journalistic report of Tom Curtis in the Texas Monthly (September 1977). The article opens with this Pavlovian summation:

“Stephen Orlando never thought about being anything but a Houston police officer. A graduate of Waltrip High School on the city’s north side, he joined the force in 1975, when he was nineteen. His father is a police detective, his mother is a police dispatcher, and both his older brothers are Houston cops. Like so many of his fellow officers, he drives a pickup truck and says his main hobbies are hunting and fishing. Also, like most of the other officers, he has experienced the frustration of police work.”

The article goes on:

“Orlando isn’t a cop anymore. Last May he was fired from the force and then indicted – along with another Houston policeman, Terry Denson – for the murder of Joe Campos Torres, Jr., a prisoner in their custody.”

The article goes on to say that in three and a half years since Mayor Fred Hofheinz has been in office, there have been more than 25 cases in which police have shot and killed or wounded citizens without being prosecuted. Several of these cases are reviewed here along with the ambivalent outcomes, including that of Mr. Torres.

It was common for police officers, according to Curtis, to beat prisoners while handcuffed behind their backs, only in the case of Mr. Torres he died. Joe Campos Torres, was a 23-year-old Army veteran and a laborer for a glass contractor. His corpse was found floating in Buffalo Bayou on Mother’s Day.

Torres was drunk and disorderly when police arrested him at a club in the heart of Houston’s East End barrio on Thursday, May 5, at 11:35 p.m. Torres had a drinking problem that had resulted in his discharge from the Army the previous September, and on this particular evening he was apparently at the end of a twelve-hour drinking bender.

Torres fought with officers Stephen Orlando and Carless Elliott who wrestled him to the ground, handcuffed him and dragged the cursing Chicano to the backseat of the patrol car. Orlando told other officers responding to the radio dispatch that prisoner Torres had given them trouble. Two other police cruisers accompanied officers Orlando and Elliot to a dusty warehouse district east of downtown Houston. The three cruisers drove down the embankment to the south bank of Buffalo Bayou, far below street level.

The officers removed Torres from the car, leaving him handcuffed, and all except Elliott, the rookie, struck him repeatedly. Officer Terry Denson remarked that he had always wanted to watch a prisoner swim in the bayou.

At this point, Orlando and Elliott returned Torres to the patrol car and took him to the city jail. The duty sergeant took one look at him and ordered the pair to take him to the emergency room at Ben Taub Hospital, where he could be treated prior to booking.

But in the police car, Torres again cursed the officers. Orlando suggested instead of the hospital they needed to scare him before they let him go. Since Denson had wanted to throw somebody in the bayou, Orlando suggested this would be a good time.

Five officers, only Elliott not participating, carried the drunken and beaten Torres to the banks of the water. “Let’s see if the wetback can swim,” Denson said. With that, they shoved him over the edge, which was a twenty-foot drop to the water. Elliott returned from talking to dispatch handing Torres’ wallet to Orlando, who pitched it into the water. They shined their lights on Torres and saw his head was above water, and left. Three days later his body was found. The medical examiner ruled the cause of death was drowning.

CRUCIBLE OF INTOLERANCE

Orlando and Denson, the two officers charged with murder in the Torres case, are typical Houston police officers. From deep East Texas, Terry Denson is one of tens of thousands of semi-rural whites that have come to Houston in search of jobs. He worked nights to go to the University of Houston, but was drafted in the middle of his freshman year, and instead joined the Marines. After Vietnam, he joined the police force.

Twenty-seven-year-old Denson was a model cop with five years on the force when Joe Torres took his fatal plunge. Like Orlando, he had never fired his gun on duty. His record was exemplary, but what didn’t show up in Denson’s file was the same growing frustration Orlando felt, that the police were fighting a losing battle. Denson believed public resentment was building up against the badge itself.

The constant Houston police officers' lament was that justice seemed more on the side of the criminal; the public didn't want to help; nothing we did mattered.

The facts of the matter are that society keeps changing. This increases frustrations, and frustrations are not what many Houston police officers are equipped or trained to handle.

Still, police recruiting seems to be a bottom feeding activity as lower class recruits with the lowest socioeconomic backgrounds and the least education are most likely to be hired. Curtis writes, “In contrast to Dallas where 38 percent of the officers are college graduates, and Austin, where 22 percent are, only 11 percent of the Houston police force hold college degrees.” Curtis reports that the Houston Police Department routinely eliminates applicants who might be experienced in dealing with the variety of people who make up an urban society. They want people who look, think and behave as they do, not realizing the omen.

Psychologist Martin Reiser, an expert on stress, sees officers that resort to violence go through what he calls the “John Wayne Syndrome.” After three or four years, they go from idealistic, flexible, open-minded recruits to cynical, over serious, emotionally withdrawn, and strongly authoritarian officers.

It has been my experience it doesn’t take nearly as long as that. I saw changed behavior in nine-month-recruits in the Fairfax County Police Department. The first evidence was the swearing when they didn't swear at all initially. The second evidence was the change from cheerfulness to moodiness. The third thing I noticed was going from nonsmokers to chain smokers. In fact, within that period, most of the ugly side of FCPD was apparent in their conduct.

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These studies are more than a quarter century old. Yet, today, here in the early twenty-first century, few police departments have a majority of college graduates, and less than fifty percent of all police chiefs in the United States are college trained. The system exacts an amazing Pavlovian influence on behavior, as people reflect the face of the dominant culture. This is true of a police force, and is equally true of an entire community.

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