Excerpts

There is inherent nobility to police work, but it is poorly served by the dysfunctional bureaucracies of most police departments. I have attempted to explain how I came to this conclusion and what I think might be done about it. My views did not arrive suddenly, as a thunderclap. They began as uncomfortable suspicions many years ago, and developed and formed as my experience grew. The process was punctuated by appalling lurches and by my own mistakes along the way, but also leavened by a great deal of fun, especially in the early years. Now, with the perspective that comes with some distance from the events that influenced me, I am certain that my conclusions are correct.

Every word of every story in this book is true. I have not told some of the best stories because to do so would violate a trust or betray a confidence. Trust and confidence are not conditional upon the confidant's desire to write a book on reaching middle age. I have not included any stories which I feel do not serve to illustrate or amplify a larger point, and I have not revealed tricks of the trade which are inappropriate for public discussion. I have tried to open some doors for the general reader, and I would be especially pleased if this book proved useful to new officers.

The Police Department consisted of about 1200 sworn personnel and a couple of hundred civilian employees. There were old-timers on the department who had been there since the 1930's; some of them wore old-fashioned uniform items and handlebar mustaches. Several parted their hair in the middle as men had done in bygone eras. We used call boxes dating from the 1890's. ...

There were no computers, no copy machines, no fax machines, no cell phones, no 911 system, no SWAT team, no police dogs, almost no portable radios, and very little equipment of any sort. We used rotary-dial phones and wrote reports by hand or on ancient upright manual typewriters. One of our two patrol wagons was a 1947 Dodge that looked like a prop from an old movie. The landmark Supreme Court decisions on criminal jurisprudence were very recent, which meant that procedures such as advising suspects of their rights were still a new idea. Even the science of fingerprinting wasn't much more than fifty years old. (page 6 - 7)

Police work in general has changed more in the last twenty-five years than it did in the preceding hundred years, and this is certainly true of Seattle, as it is of most jurisdictions. As it happens, most of the change occurred during my years of service. I am one of that peculiar generation of policemen who served in both worlds. I worked with a man who was born in a sod house on the prairie where his parents came in a covered wagon to homestead, and I worked with a man who had a PhD from a major university. I worked many nights with a pair of black leather gloves and a wooden nightstick as my only equipment other than my revolver, yet I could classify fingerprints and perform glass fracture analysis and forensic ballistics. (page 7-8)

In those days, everything and anything was handled by the first couple of cops who got the call. The old-timers were tough, calm, capable men. Most of them had a dignity and a self-assurance that made a vivid impression on me. They had lived through the Depression and the war and then twenty years or more of street policing. Whatever happened, they handled it, although not always elegantly. Cops of my generation learned a lot from them. We learned to be decisive rather than hesitant, to take only purposeful action, to listen more than we talked, and to say less rather than more when we did talk.

They taught by example how to use authority. Usually, you ask citizens to do things, even when you have the legal right to order them around. When a lone officer asks fifty citizens to move behind a fire line, they comply, but not because they are afraid that he will arrest them all. It's a civil contract, this arrangement between cops and citizens, and it mostly involves both sides meeting in the middle.

When Seattle was new, the settlement that would grow into the city clustered near the waterfront. Contemporary accounts say the forest was so dense that if a person wanted to step off the beach they had to chop down a tree. The little town's first industry was logging, and Henry Yesler built a sawmill. Logging moved eastward, uphill from Puget Sound. Trees were cut down on the hill and dragged, or skidded, behind teams of horses down the rutted dirt road leading to the sawmill. Originally named Mill Street, now officially known as Yesler Way, to people who live and work in the area, it has always been The Skid Road, which, in its generic sense, is a logging term.

The sawmill had a cook house, which would also provide meals to travelers and visitors. Very soon, there were lodging places, saloons, whorehouses, and other amenities. The town got a reputation for being lusty and hard-drinking. The area near the original site of the mill became prototypical of depravity and social blight. The term "skid row," a contraction of Skid Road, came to characterize the hopelessness and vagrant poverty of such areas in cities all over the country and beyond.

Very early in Seattle's history, the local drunks, who even then were not of amateur standing, would spend all of their money on booze. When the money was gone, the craving remained, and on the frontier, substitutes for alcohol were few. The elixir of choice was de-horning fluid, an astringent used to prevent infection following the removal of horns from cattle. Chronic, hopeless drunks became known as "de-horns," later shortened to "horns." In Seattle, folks still say Skid Road, but the term "horn" is uncommon in today's polite, cosmopolitan society. Until the late 1970's however, real Seattle old-timers, both civilian and police, would say "The Skid Road," and even the somewhat archaic "de-horn."

De-horning fluid was gone from The Skid Road by the time I got to the street, but I have known horns to drink denatured alcohol, automotive anti-freeze, and shop-lifted hair tonic when desperate. A really desperate measure to get a drink was to pick up empty wine and beer bottles and painstakingly put the dregs from each into one container. This mixture was known as "a bottle of spiders," and its preparation was reckoned to be among the most pathetic acts of a last-stage alcoholic. Horns would approach police and say "Can you help my buddy? He's drinkin' spiders." (page 39 - 40)

While alcohol was a major thematic element of Skid Road life, it was merely symptomatic of greater social disorganization. Skid Road is like the special place in the jungle where sick and dying elephants go in old Tarzan movies. An old-time Skid Road hand on the department told me that there was something wrong with everybody on Skid Road, including us. The gist of his comments was that we were all wounded elephants, otherwise we wouldn't be there. Although he wasn't exactly a ray of sunshine, his pronouncements were food for thought.

People are drawn to Skid Road in part because it offers what they seek - cheap transient lodging, missions and social services, public agencies, general delivery mail service, cheap booze, and so forth. The proportion of wounded elephants in the population remains relatively constant despite fluctuations in the economy or societal unrest. These are the dysfunctional, often homeless, hard core of the people at society's margins. They don't all go to Skid Road, but all Skid Roads are populated with them in proportion to the size of the area of which they form the demographic center. A small town might have a town drunk; a big city has a Skid Road. (page 45)

The Wild Man lived on the western edge of Skid Road in the streets and alleys near the waterfront. He appeared to be in middle age, but was probably younger because life on the street ages people terribly. His hair was tangled and matted, and he wore filthy, ragged clothing. As far as I knew, he never bothered anyone or stole anything; he seemed to make his way by dumpster diving for food and other necessities. He never stayed at any of the missions or flops. He probably lived in one of the holes or shacks under the Alaskan Way Viaduct, or perhaps under a pier. (page 59)

I loved patrolling. It's sort of like hunting and sort of like relaxing all at the same time. You just take stock of the state of existence of your district. If you are lucky enough to have learned the art from real professionals, as I did, you soak up information that you don't know you need. Often, at a roll call briefing, someone will mention a vehicle or a person that has become of interest. An officer in the room will say that the vehicle has been parked in his district for two days, or that the person has been working as a dishwasher in a local cafe. The police see most of what they are looking for before they know they are looking for it. At least half of patrolling is the art of noticing things, and this activity is deliberate, yet unconscious. If you are relaxed and receptive as you work, the information will be available to you later, as required, in a series of associations. Experience helps, but some people never acquire the skill. (page 68-69)

Cops develop a different way of viewing the recent past. In wet weather, you can tell which parked vehicle arrived most recently because the tops of the tires underneath the fender wells will still be wet. Vehicles that have been parked since before the rain began have a dry spot underneath them. Vehicles parked after the rain began may have been there long enough for the tops of the tires to dry, but the ground under them will still be wet. If you know what time the rain began, you can look at a street or a parking lot and read a whole history of the night.

The windshields of parked vehicles reveal a lot. The way they display rain, fog, dew, frost, snow, and dirt indicate how long the vehicle has been there, how often it is driven, how well it is cared for, and whether or not it is currently occupied by a person who is sleeping, or perhaps hiding from the police. If a vehicle is driven after the frost has set for the night, the windshield may remain clear until morning. In rainy weather, the path cleared by the windshield wipers will have a different appearance than the windshields of vehicles not driven recently. The difference may be apparent for hours. (page 69 -70)

In police work, almost all of the important decisions are made by first-responders. The first officer to reach the scene is the one who talks to the jumpers, abused children, rape victims, and all the others who are frightened and hurt and vulnerable. With rape victims and abused children, the first words spoken by the first officer they see can have a profound effect on the rest of their lives. There are nights when the first officer at the scene literally decides who lives and who dies. The Chief of Police decides what color to paint the patrol cars. This is a critically important problem in policing. Police departments are completely upside-down with respect to their most vital work. (page 76-77)

An industrial area south of Skid Road and Chinatown used to be known as "the flatlands." At night everybody there sort of knew everybody else, except for strangers just passing through. There were the railroad crews, the late shift at the post office, the guys from the produce terminals that opened at mignight, workers from the bakery and the foundry and a few warehouses and trucking terminals that worked all night, security guards and cleaning crews, and the police. We met at a couple of restaurants or a convenience store, or just waved as we passed in the empty streets. It was like a small town which was only discernable at night. Many areas of cities have separate communities that emerge at night, and you can see them after most establishments close for the day and the streets empty.

The property where he had lived gradually became too valuable to be left idle and was redeveloped. New commercial buildings are there now, and I doubt there is anyone left in the neighborhood who would remember Dan or the way things used to be. Before redevelopment, the area had blackberry thickets in the rail yards, hobo camps, and a number of strange guys who lived in shacks and packing crates and old cars and trucks. We knew little dirt access roads that meandered through the rail yards and vacant lots, and we used to patrol the area in our prowler cars, and sometimes on foot. I have seen a number of small campfires scattered there at night, like descriptions I had read of soldiers bivouacked during the Civil War. Occasionally, we searched for and found fugitives in this urban jungle, but mostly we left folks alone there.

In the 1930's there had been a Hooverville there - a shanty town of unemployed and homeless people. Some historians say that Seattle's Hooverville was the prototype, after which all the others were named, as with Skid Road. I have seen an abstract of a death certificate issued in July of 1937 that lists the location of death as "Seattle (Hooverville), Wash." The deceased was a man born in Finland in 1880, and the cause of death was "acute alcoholism." Notes indicate that he was a widower and a laborer.

The residents of Hooverville, who numbered in the many hundreds during the depths of the Depression, had mostly been tolerated too, and gradually moved along with changing fortunes and changing times. The area was sort of the suburbs of Skid Road, and had the same hard luck spirit. (page 108-109)

The crabby old dispatchers would freely depart from established protocol in handling calls. Some of them had been on the department since the 1930's and they were a bit contemptuous of radio as a tool for police work anyway. Their judgment was usually correct. They were especially scornful about officers who requested a lot of stolen car checks, which was done by radioing a license number and asking the dispatcher to determine if it were stolen. In the days before computers, this was done simply by checking the "hot sheet," which the department published every twenty-four hours and updated continuously. Of course, the real police knew that most stolen cars are off the street and hidden or abandoned before the theft was reported. A young cop who asked for a "rolling stolen," a check on a moving suspicious car, could produce a chorus of belching and groaning and cursing from the old salts in the radio room. Each dispatching position had a cardioid microphone suspended from a creaking boom, and the dispatchers listened on speakers rather than through headsets. The result was bedlam. The background noise was always disconcerting, and occasionally entire symphonies of dyspepsia, flatulence, coughing, and ill temper were clearly audible on the radio citywide. (page 120-121)

The practice of keeping firearms concealed was traditional and unquestioned among uniformed police until 1917, when the New York State Police was formed. The governor of New York State appointed an old friend to literally create the State Police. The friend, George Fletcher Chandler, an Army surgeon by training rather than a policeman, struck out on his own, designing the uniform and everything else himself. Chandler's new uniform design included a revolver carried in plain view in a holster on a gun belt, even in winter uniform, when the gun belt was worn over the jacket. This was a radical departure from accepted decorum, and Chandler was fiercely criticized by chiefs of police around the country. It was considered crude and unseemly for a policeman's gun to be visible, but Chandler reasoned that if one of his men needed his gun, delicacy was a secondary concern. His way stuck, and is the standard practice today. Superintendent Chandler was a pivotal figure in the evolution of policing. Among his other innovations was the term "Trooper" to refer to his state policemen, and the now ubiquitous "herringbone" pattern of parking lot design, which he invented in time for the State Fair at Albany that fall. (page 136-137)

The gun occupies a prominent place in policing in the United States, where it is axiomatic that police officers carry firearms, very often off duty also. But this has only been true since the period following the Civil War. In fact, in several cities, including New York, there was some resistance from the officers when their departments required them to carry firearms. In that era, a lot of officers thought that carrying a gun was unmanly, and a tacit admission that they were afraid of certain people. This view may have been arguable before the advent of repeating cartridge firearms of reasonable size and reliability. Cartridge firearms began to supplant cap-and-ball muzzle-loading pistols during the Civil War, which is why the arming of all officers became practical in the period that followed. Because police were expected to have the capacity to use lethal force in the defense of citizens, the issue was really decided by default. So, the fact that police are armed is no longer controversial, but almost everything else about guns seems to be either contentious or misunderstood. (page 145)

There is no such thing as shooting to wound. The mere notion is a complete, absurd fiction. In a combat situation, you are lucky to hit your opponent at all, so you aim for "center of mass," the largest target, which is the middle of the torso. All of the experts and crack shots in the peanut gallery who think otherwise are simply ignorant, and have never been there. When it's dark and the target shoots at you first and you are both moving and both scared to death, hitting anything is not a simple matter. Even if you could shoot someone in the body part of choice, there is really no such thing as a predictably non-lethal gunshot wound. People shot in the foot sometimes die and people shot in the head sometimes don't notice. Chest wounds are actually less lethal than abdominal wounds. In combat, you shoot to put the suspect out of action and to save your own life. It's a dicey matter at best. Refinements are not part of the picture. (page 148-149)

The reality is that there is no such thing as a fair fight. Real fights are not athletic contests. Most of police work consists of talking to people and writing paperwork. Police officers are not bouncers or pugilists. On the street, no matter how tough you are, there is always somebody tougher, stronger, faster, and meaner, who places little value on his own life. (page 153)

In my early years on the street we did a lot of fighting. Skid Road had a lot of rough bars. If you had to make an arrest in or near a tough bar, there would frequently be interference by others, sometimes by a crowd. We never backed down. We called for reinforcements and took on the crowd and emptied the place if necessary. The reason was not machismo or esprit de corps, but because we had to go back there every night, often alone. It was a practical necessity. (page 154)

Then there were prison-style weapons, like a single-edged razor blade which protruded from a man's shoe, above the sole at the forward part of the instep. A weapon like that could slice an artery in a person's leg without even causing noticeable pain. Policemen were sometimes targets. There were other variations, like a single-edged razor blade set into a book of paper matches. This version could cut your throat before you realized you were in a fight and was unlikely to be discovered in a weapons frisk. The variety was endless and the ingenuity was impressive.

Knives are popular on the street - switchblades, gravity blades, home-made knives, and kitchen knives, all in dazzling abundance. Two specialties on Skid Road were the curved-blade lineoleum knife, sharpened to a razor edge, and the slender, wicked "butterfly knife," a Filipino innovation which arrived by way of Viet Nam.

There are several kinds of dead bodies. Cops always hope for the "nice, fresh natural'" meaning a person who has been considerate enough to die of natural causes rather than trauma, and who has done so quite recently. I recall meeting another cop for coffee after clearing a dead body call. "How was your dead body?" he asked. "Oh, just terrific" I said, "a nice, fresh natural." This exchange of pleasantries produced a shudder from the normal civilians in the next booth. We all became a bit coarsened by working the street.

Getting a nice, fresh natural is always a relief. Sometimes they don't even look dead. A surprising number of people die sitting up with their eyes open. If they weren't terribly animated in life, they don't appear to change much. One man died sitting at the table in a residence hotel on Skid Road. He was wearing an athletic-style undershirt, pants, and slippers. On the table in front of him was a bowl of cereal, a newspaper, and some other stuff. His eyes were open and he looked pretty good. While waiting for the Medical Examiner I sat across from him in the other chair at the table and wrote my incident report. The door was open to the hallway and several people casually said hello to him as they passed.

Another guy died sitting in a booth at a cheap restaurant uptown a little. I sat across from him in the booth and wrote my incident report while waiting for the M.E. The manager wanted me to ask the Medical Examiner to hurry it up because having dead guys sitting around the joint was bad for business, and because he "could use the booth." Things like that become routine. I seemed to spend a lot of time sitting across the table from dead people. (page 173)

The other kinds of bodies are worse. The mechanism of death can be gruesome, as in the case of trauma, which may involve massive tissue destruction, avulsion (traumatic removal) of appendages, decapitation, and so on in endless variety. But, worse than the mechanism of death, is the possible involvement of contagious disease, insects, toxic materials, and other complications.

A body which has been in the trunk of a car parked in the sun is especially unpleasant, but you can get away from it and stand upwind. A stinker in a steam-heated room is the worst, because it has a particularly unpleasant quality and because there is no escape. The odor will linger in your uniform and in your hair the same way that cigarette smoke does. A lot of cops keep a cigar in their kit for such occasions. I tried it, but the cigar made me about as sick as the stinker, and I would frequently just rough it.

Bodies found floating in water are, of course, known as "floaters." They are usually also stinkers, because fresh bodies tend to sink. It's the decomposition of internal organs which causes them to resurface because it generates gasses which fill the abdomen and later the chest cavity. (page 174-175)

... Police work can be dangerous, but the issue of danger is not a simple matter. It is qualitative rather than simply a matter of statistical probability. There are a number of occupations more dangerous than police work, but statistics don't tell the whole story. It is very dangerous to be a convenience store clerk or a taxi driver; the danger there is principally from armed robbery. Statistically, store clerks and taxi drivers are killed at a higher rate than either cops or firefighters, but there are two important differences. Police and firefighters run TOWARD trouble and deliberately insert themselves into very dangerous situations. And, although it is statistically more dangerous to be a firefighter than a cop, firefighters are seldom assaulted - an important qualitative difference, because the element of deliberate human aggression constitutes danger of a whole different dimension. A further difference is that on many police departments less than half of the sworn members actually work the street as first responders, so you can double the staistical danger for the real police. (page 183-184)

Shortly before one o'clock in the morning, police radio broadcast a report of suspicious circumstances in an alley in the heart of Chinatown. A caller had said that there was a bloody man in the alley asking for help. A call of this nature was not in the least unusual, but for some reason I had a bad feeling about this one. Since this was my district and my responsibility, I answered for the call and drove quickly, but without emergency lights or siren, to the scene. (page 185)

In commercial buildings, exterior doors mostly open outward, the opposite of houses. It is easier to force a door inward than to forcefully pull it toward you. To force ordinary doors inward, you kick them with the bottom of your foot, driving your leg forward like a piston. This is known as "stuffing" a door with "the universal passkey" or "the size-twelve search warrant." Anybody who has worked the street for a few years has done it a lot. (page 196)

When you got really tired of seeing the same drunken couple for a family disturbance call night after night, you would affect an air of official majesty and set the hook. "Listen folks, we don't like to talk about this, but the state statutes provide for the granting of emergency divorces in certain severe cases. If the situation is critical, police officers are empowered to invoke the statute without process and application to the Superior Court, blah, blah, blah ... legalistic double talk."

Unbelievable as it sounds, this routine was a show-stopper, because our customers were mostly unsophisticated drunks. "Really?" they would ask, like children. Once, I even divided the property for a couple and had them raise their right hands and repeat some gibberish. It was guaranteed to solve the problem until they sobered up, by which time they were too chagrinned to make a formal complaint.

A stylish refinement on the routine was to perform it in the presence of a very new officer, who would naturally be appalled by the incident. If a new cop was favorably impressed by this routine, it was evidence of great potential which deserved careful nurturing and tutelage. Most of us had to be coarsened by the street a bit before we descended to this sort of tactic. (page 217-218)

The most basic issues in policing are to attract people who would make good officers, to give them sufficient reason to stay, and to encourage them to do police work rather than administrative work. To accomplish this, we must discard the military pattern of organization, because it is wholly unsuited to the task of policing. It is magnificently well suited to the military, but the police are not the military, at least not in free societies. There has been a traditional view of police departments as "semi-miltary organizations," a favorite refrain of police administrators, but they are profoundly confused. (page 220)

One of the most important core values in police work is the concept of feeling responsible for a district - an officer's area of patrol. The tradition of territoriality, of loyalty to the citizens of one's area of assignment, is an integral component of the ethic of the real police. Having a district of one's own is what officers should aspire to, and it is a privilege to be earned. ... (page 226)

In general, there is too much specialization in police departments. Much of it is politically motivated, and all of it saps the strength of the most basic mission of policing - patrol. Some departments even play games with manpower at the expense of the patrol division. They will pad specialty units with more and more people, leaving some of them assigned to patrol but "on loan." None of these specialty units patrol or answer radio calls or respond to requests for service from citizens. Some of them, typically traffic units, are indistinguishable from patrol units in the eyes of citizens, but they function almost like separate organizations. Most of this specialization is bad policy. (page 230)

There are actually two departments. The one we all loved was the gross, ribald, earthy, funny gang of the real police - any or all of whom would instantly put themselves in harm's way for any of the others. Over the years we had all done it. We had willingly exposed ourselves to gunfire for each other, given blood, sat with the families, and gone to the funerals. The larger family included cops from other agencies, and firefighters too. Once accepted into this peculiar family, unless you leave in disgrace, you are always a member. ... (page 236)

The other department was the formal bureaucracy, the insanely irrational, arbitrary "them." The administration may have thought that the department was organized into bureaus and divisions, but from the perspective of the street it was always "us" and "them." The department administration wrote unintentionally hilarious memos, but other than that, we reckoned they weren't good for much. ... (page 237)