The Renaissance Man was in charge

Retired police chief Norm Stamper at a recent Ted Talk

by Greg Saville

I first met Norm Stamper twenty years ago when he took over as Chief of the Seattle Police Department. He was a thought-leader with a PhD, an author, an advocate for community policing, he had decades of police experience in the San Diego Police. And now he was leading a major city police agency!

The Renaissance Man was in charge.

All this was a decade before troubles brewing in Seattle Police led to a federal government Consent Decree to repair a department that had gone wrong. You may remember Chief Stamper when he retired in 2000 shortly after the Seattle WTO protests, the so-called Battle of Seattle. We quickly forget how the loss of a great leader costs us all.

Norm will be the keynote speaker at this year's annual conference of the Police Society for Problem Based Learning. His message resonates now more than ever.

Norm's recent book, To Protect and Serve: How to fix America's Police, and the mandate of the PSPBL, provide the ideal recipe in a profession that so badly needs new ingredients. This year's PSPBL conference Stepping Into Innovation, Aug. 16-18 is in Tucson, Arizona. It will host a roster of talented speakers with tactics for success in training, education, emotional intelligence and problem-solving. Norm Stamper will keynote.

If you care about 21st Century policing, this is the conference to see.

Eyes on the prize in policing and reform

It is impossible to talk safety and prevention and not talk about cops. I am conflicted whenever I see stories of ineffective, obsolete, or just bad policing, as I did this week.

My conflict arises from my own belief in the decent goodness for people who choose an often impossible and unforgiving profession. I am committed to police reform. But it seems our policing system is a legacy of a pre-digital age. Recent crime trends, it seems, are not.

Ultimately policing is a vital, but very small, part of the public safety story. It's a story that cannot be told without participating residents.

Consider my February blog with the LAPD video about this very point.

watch video

Today the news in Vancouver is flooded with yet another story about a tragic Taser death during a violent arrest. We are told by the Taser crowd the technology works and saves lives, though apparently not in this case. We are also told Tasers are too often abused during arrests. Who to believe? Tasers are a newer technology with promise. But the medical research on them looks less like facts from sources and more like factoids from sourcelings. What to believe?

Yet again we hear calls for police reform reverberating through the media.

read Vancouver newspaper story

No one is immune and Vancouver is by no means alone. The public wants something done, mostly they want safer neighborhoods and less fear of violence. Which brings me to my duh moment - our goal: We obsess on the means to an end (policing, tasers) and forget all those means are but a tiny part of how we actually get to our public safety end.

Of course the police use of force is important. By the nature of the job it cannot go away. During violent arrests it may be needed. Of course we should make sure police training is done properly and the technology does what it says. Of course we need police reform, especially reform in training/education and the political gumption to stick with it.

Yet the goal should be to keep our eyes on the prize - neighbors working together in functional places to make vital and safe streets.

The questions we should be asking:
How to get neighbors to work together in a positive way?
How to create functional neighborhoods with social activities?
How to build places where people feel safe and participate fully in community life?
How to more effectively do community development?

As I read the latest crisis it is easy to obsess on the vicissitudes of policing when things go bad. I agree we must never forget, or fail to prevent, deaths in and from police arrests. All lives are precious. But policing was created specifically for crime prevention and public safety. Do police tactics, resources, and training focus directly and daily on crime prevention and safety? No! When they don't, they need to.

That is the prize that matters most.