American Enterprise Institute

April 20, 2006

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

9:15 a.m.	Registration
9:30	Introduction:	Douglas J. Besharov, AEI
	Presenter:	Edwin J. Delattre, author
11:00	Adjournment

Proceedings:

Douglas Besharov:  Good morning, everyone.  I’m Doug Besharov, and I have the personal honor of opening today’s program and introducing Ed Delattre and his wonderful 5th edition of “Character and Cops.”  I’m going to say a few things – probably more things than Ed wants to hear – and then I’m going to get out of the way and he’s going to go from there.

Ed Delattre is one of those rare gems, an academic – and I sometimes consider myself an academic – not afraid to involve himself in the real world and with the dilemmas of real people.  I’m delighted to see some people in uniform here because you know exactly what I’m talking about.

I should start with Ed’s formal positions, even though they tell only half the story:  professor of philosophy at the University of Toledo; director of the National Humanities Faculty; president of St. John’s College in Annapolis and Santa Fe; vice chairman of the National Council of the National Endowment of the Humanities; and professor of philosophy and professor of education and former dean at the School of Education at Boston University.

Most important, for almost twenty years Ed has been an adjunct or resident scholar here at AEI.  That, of course, is his most important affiliation.  That’s where we met, we had offices next to each other, although I could hardly keep up with him.  I was sort of wandering into the office to get going at what I thought was an early time and he was coming back from lunch. 

Besides numerous articles and chapters, Ed is the author of two wonderful books: one, “Education and the Public Trust,” and the other, as I mentioned, “Character and Cops: Ethics in Policing.”  Ed has a habit of leaving the ivory tower not just to practice what he preaches – this is important – but to learn what to teach.  I think that’s the lesson of this book.  He has been, for example, a member of the State Board of Education of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  Later on, when we get to the question and answer period, I might ask him which is tougher: dealing with police departments or school systems.  We’ll see how he gently glides out of that question.

So I asked Ed how it came to be that a philosopher wrote about character and cops.  It turns out that he was asked to teach a course on ethics for police and to prepare for that course he didn’t just go into the library.  He said, I want to spend some time with some police.  So he spent forty hours a week on the streets with police at night and other times.  From that came a course. 

From that experience came a book.  For the last twenty years, Ed has been teaching FBI agents, police chiefs and other law enforcement personnel, here and the Caribbean – the Caribbean is a gig I’d like.  I didn’t get invited to introduce him in the Caribbean but we’ll let that one pass.

I greatly appreciate Ed’s work because I used to be a prosecutor.  I was a twenty-something prosecutor.  I spent a fair amount of time with detectives and street cops, usually waiting for the judge to throw out our case or whatever.  I got to know them very well.  So I know the firsthand truth of two passages from Ed’s book that I’d like to read before getting off the podium.

The first is, “Still, despite much literature that describes police as cynical, alienated, disaffected and unhappy, my own experience with police of all ranks indicates that many love their work, find great fulfillment in their work, and that civilization does not come into existence or survive by accident.  That they, police, take seriously their job, their place of sustaining it.”  I like that word, sustaining civilization.

But like Ed, I’ve seen the other side.  This almost sounds like I’m writing this but Ed wrote it.  “I have likewise met sly, greedy, cowardly, mean” – what a line here, this keeps going – “unreliable and brutish police.  I have witnessed the effects of individual rogue corruption and violence and of institutionalized corruption and brutality.”  Although I think it was somewhat exaggerated, it is the fact that a movie about this called “Crash” won the Academy Awards this year.  It may be interesting to find out how accurate a picture Ed thinks that movie provided.

This book is a study about the nature and formulation of moral integrity and intellectual competence.  It actually goes beyond police.  One in almost any profession can learn from it.  When Ed was here, he graciously agreed to come and attend a conference I organized for child welfare professionals.  There was a little shock and awe for the first five or ten minutes when he deigned to use the word “evil” in relating to some of the problems that we see.  But as usual, he wowed the audience.

This book has two audiences.  One, policy analysts and informed public, like many of us here. But I think that we’re relatively less important than the other audience, who by the way, have kept this book in five editions.  That other audience is the brave men and women who risk their lives every day to “sustain our civilization.” 

Ed, welcome back to AEI.  After Ed presents, we’ll take questions from the audience.

Ed Delattre:  Thank you, Doug.  Good morning, ladies and gentlemen and thank you for joining me for the release of the 5th edition of “Character and Cops.”  When I got here this morning I was told that 400 copies were ordered last week, so we’re off to a nice start.  I did not see the 5th edition until this morning and so I’m thrilled to have a copy in hand.

I’m very grateful to my friend Doug Besharov for that generous introduction.  He was a resident scholar of great distinction at AEI when I worked here twenty years ago.  His books, articles, columns and research lectures have profound and worldwide influence and effect.  Indeed, his books, including “Recognizing Child Abuse,” “When Drug Addicts Have Children,” “Combating Child Abuse,” “The Maltreated Child,” “Family Violence,” “Ending Dependency,” and “Legal Services for the Poor: Time for Reform,” are universally acknowledged to be the best in the field.

I was honored to be a Bradley Fellow in Residence at AEI in the late 1980s.  The Lynn and Harry Bradley Foundation gave me, without my having asked for it, the financial support to write “Character and Cops” and it’s meant a great deal to me that AEI has continued my affiliation as an adjunct scholar throughout the sixteen years since my departure for Boston University.

Since 1975, when I first began to work as a philosopher on ethics and the public trust in policing and law enforcement, that work has become the center of my intellectual and civic life.  If there were any professional accomplishment that belonged on my tombstone, it would be the authorship of “Character and Cops.”

During these thirty years since I first started, I’ve kept in mind portions of the first major commission report on the condition of policing and law enforcement in this country, the Wickersham Report, named for the chairman of the commission.  But most of that report was written by the acclaimed police leader and visionary of that era, August Volmer.  In the report, Volmer said, “In America, law enforcement is generally held in contempt and policing is taken as one of our national jokes.” 

I don’t think a day has gone by in the last thirty years that I haven’t harkened back to that to compare what I have witnessed with what he said.  In all the research I have done, I have never been able to find a single police or law enforcement leader in this country who rose to contradict what Volmer said seventy-five years ago.

By 1975, when I started to work with police, no one could have made such a blanket assertion without objection.  Today, despite enormous variation in the quality and trustworthiness of police departments and law enforcement agencies and their individual personnel across the 17,000 police departments and the extensive array of federal and state agencies just in this country alone, beyond other countries, if anyone were to repeat Volmer’s blanket assertion today, the major city chiefs, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the Police Executive Research Forum, and any experienced student of policing and law enforcement could provide ample evidence that such a claim would now be at best hyperbolic, prejudicial and indefensible.

Since 1931, a great many of the finest police and law enforcement leaders in this and other countries – and by leaders I don’t just mean people of command rank.  I mean people of all ranks who exercise influence with their peers, their subordinates, their colleagues in their departments and in kindred departments.  The best have not feared to dream of and dedicate themselves to the elevation of policing to high standards of professionalism, indeed to the conception of policing as a profession with its personnel educated and trained for fulfillment of a broad mission – an incredibly broad mission, and I don’t use the word “incredibly” lightly the way it has now become fashionable.  But a broad mission that covers, as I wrote in 1977, everything from slaying dragons to rescuing cats. 

Even though 79 percent of the police departments in this country have fewer than 25 sworn members and some have scant budgets for background investigations and can’t investigate across state lines, and even though major departments and agencies have suffered failures and disappointments in policy and practice – some of them grievous – the drive toward higher standards of recruitment, training, supervision, accountability, performance, trustworthiness, effectiveness and professionalism itself – whether in “broken windows” policing, problem-solving policing, community-oriented policing or in other reforms – has been both persistent and courageous. 

I have witnessed in my thousands of hours with police on duty far greater progress toward intellectual and moral excellence than in the other field to which I have devoted my life, pre-college, post-secondary and higher education in this country.  I have not endeared myself at conferences of college and university presidents by expressing my belief that the rise in the standards, quality and expectations of police chiefs and command staff in the United States has far surpassed any progress among executives in education over the same period of more than thirty years.  They don’t like to hear it, but I can prove it.

I do not know of any large human institution in any walk of life, or any walk of life itself, or any profession that’s free of corruption and incompetence.  Corruption and incompetence are the two great impediments to the worthiness to bear the public trust.  But if policing was an object of derision eighty years ago, it is no joke today.  The best police and law enforcement personnel I know at all ranks believe in the traditional principle of higher intellectual and moral standards for public servants than for the public they serve, and the weight, the gravity of their salutary effect through example and peer pressure shows.

Much of what I do as a philosopher has to do with narrative and the telling of stories.  I learned that from Socrates and others.  Here’s one.

A few weeks ago in one of our major cities, I accompanied members of an anti-gang task force, urban police, ICE (immigration and customs) and FBI agents working together on two pre-dawn raids to arrest two very dangerous gang criminals, one a member of MS-13, another an East Coast Blood, fugitives whose whereabouts had been divulged to police by key important confidential informants.  The arrests were made.  Five other illegal immigrant gang members were also caught in the process.  No one was hurt.  Three innocent women, a teenage boy and a little girl, a babe in arms really, simultaneously protected from harm by task force members. 

Here we were, all of us dressed in SWAT gear, armor, the police and federal agents heavily armed.  When we took the doors and when they had everything under control, every single one of those men had a smile, a kind word for that baby, to ensure that the baby wasn’t frightened.  But there was no question of the mission having been or being accomplished.

After the last arrests had been made and the last arrestees had been transported for incarceration, the police sergeant in charge of the two operations gathered all of the task force members around him in the parking lot of the second apartment complex.  He thanked them all for a job well done.  I had talked privately with a number of the members, federal and local.  All of them told me that they would be willing to go to war with any of the other men in the task force, which is a kind of trust that you don’t always find across institutional lines.

I had seen out of the corner of my eye that the sergeant had gone upstairs in the second apartment alone, which troubled me that he hadn’t waited to be accompanied. When he came down and gathered the people around him, he said, “You did not see it, but I made a potentially fatal mistake in this operation and in this apartment.  I want you to know of it because I don’t want you ever to make it and put yourselves at risk as I did.”  He continued, “When I found the woman and the boy upstairs and saw no one else, I holstered my weapon as if the area had been cleared. 

Suddenly a closet door flew open and the suspect we were looking for showed himself with his hands buried in a pile of clothing on the floor of the closet.  I hadn’t cleared the closet.  I had no backup.  If he had had a weapon, he could have killed me before I possibly could have defended myself.  I should not have gone up alone.  I should have cleared all the doors and I should not have holstered my weapon.  Today you all did a fine job and I got lucky.  Don’t you ever do what I did.”

That took the kind of courage it takes to be a good cop or a good teacher, or good at any serious responsibility.  Compared to some of the members of that anti-gang task force, that sergeant has relatively little experience in gang intelligence and enforcement.  Much of his background was in the investigation of traffic fatalities.  But over a span of days, I had witnessed his willingness to learn from the others, younger but more experienced than he; to listen; and I had also seen his capacity for focus, for drawing together the information they had acquired, for turning it into intelligence, and for making sound planning out of it.

Several of the cops and agents – I think there were no other cops or agents, even though one of the FBI agents had only three years experience in the FBI and less in gangs – he had learned an enormous amount already from the street cops and from the FBI – I don’t think there was anybody else there who would conceivably have made the mistake that sergeant made.  They were far beyond those kinds of errors.  In fact, when one of them was about to take a suspect through the kitchen out the back door of one of the apartments to interview him privately, he looked at me – I was in the kitchen and could see the entire kitchen and he couldn’t – he looked at me before he went to the door with the suspect.  I said, “There’s a butcher knife on the counter.”  He walked the suspect back into the other room and somebody else’s custody, came in and put the butcher knife away where it could neither be seen or got hold of, and then he carefully brought the other suspect through.

In any case, they were far beyond any errors of that kind, but the honesty, candor and respect that sergeant accords those men in his leadership, including the courage in his willingness to admit error for the sake of their safety and potentially for the safety of the woman and the boy who were upstairs in that building, draws those men together into a smoothly functioning unit across the turf differences and other differences in these three very different kinds of institutions.

The stories of police professionalism, excellence, courage, integrity, confidence, are legion.  A few weeks earlier, Alice and I had gone to New Orleans at the invitation of Warren Riley, who is now the superintendent there.  It is virtually miraculous that a man of Warren Riley’s intellect, probity, convictions about police worthiness of the public trust, should be able to rise to the top of that department in a city so historically driven by corruption and incompetence.  It’s near miraculous, truly.  New Orleans is mighty fortunate to have him as their superintendent.  We had worked together in the Police Executive Research Forum Senior Management Institute for Police.  We had gone so that if I might be of any help with things he was trying to accomplish, he would know that I was available for writing about his efforts and so on.

While we were there, we toured the Ninth Ward in New Orleans with a sergeant in the New Orleans Police Department who is also an ordained minister.  He’s in his mid-thirties.  His job during and in the immediate aftermath of Katrina was to comfort and counsel the civilian dispatchers in the New Orleans Police Department who listened to people drown while begging for help on their cell phones.  He did it without flinching.  When I think of policing as a profession and its future, I think of men and women like him.

I’ve participated in a great many investigations of police and law enforcement corruption, brutality, incompetence and other betrayals of the public trust.  The same goes for education.  I’ve also been blessed to see the work of countless police and law enforcement personnel like the members of that task force, like that cop who was a minister, who know what they are doing and why, and countless leaders who have had the courage to treat their own fallibility as an opportunity to teach their peers and their subordinates.

The 5th edition of “Character and Cops” – I’ve waited a long time to do this.  My wife and I have been married for almost 42 years and I have never dedicated any of my publications to her.  I saved that for the 5th edition of this book, which is dedicated to her and which is written – the new material in it is written as a tribute to all those in policing and law enforcement who have drawn, who have given their best to draw the field toward the moral and intellectual excellence worthy of a true profession.

The new chapter, the 21st chapter, on ethics in action is a description and analysis of brilliant work in policing and law enforcement that is illustrative of the future of policing and law enforcement as the profession they should aspire to be and toward which they are making progress.  As with all my work in ethics, the chapter explains that when we voluntarily accept positions of responsibility to others, we take on the obligation to become very good at fulfilling those responsibilities and the institutions for which we work must take on a reciprocal obligation to help us by training and supervision and example to get very good at fulfilling those responsibilities. 

Duties of competence.  Most of the work I know about in ethics in many different walks of life ignores the importance of competence to the fulfillment of moral obligation.  Getting good at what you have promised to do.  Competence, it seems to me, is as deep-running, as essential to trustworthiness as are moral integrity and intellectual honesty. 

Competence is an indispensable element in both morality, which I take to be morality as a matter of learning to protect others from what is worst in human nature and potentially therefore worst in ourselves, and is also fundamental to prudence, which is learning to protect ourselves from the worst in others.  Police, to get good at what they do, have to learn both.

In this framework, then, the 5th edition introduces new case studies on ethics in action, in four settings.  In this, the 21st chapter, I focus first on the professional excellence of clinical psychologist and former FBI special agent Duane Fusillay and Michigan State University psychiatrist Frank Ochberg for their investigation and analysis of the mass murder at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, of which this is the anniversary.  They identified careful study, identified profound differences between Columbine and typical school shootings.  Showed that Harris and Klebold – that no evidence could be found that they had been abused at home, that they had been bullied, isolated, ridiculed, treated with derision at school.  That the conventional accounts of bullying and the rest didn’t apply. 

From the background in journals and videotapes and the rest, and from the physical evidence, they were able to show that Columbine wasn’t supposed to be a school shooting at all.  It was supposed to be a bombing, and if the propane pipe bombs that Harris and Klebold planted in the school cafeteria at Columbine had gone off at 11:16 as planned, there would have been 900 people in the cafeteria.  The bombs were strong enough to bring down the roof and probably 600 would have been killed or seriously injured.  Their explicit purpose was to eclipse the death count in Oklahoma City.  They also planted pipe bombs in their cars in the parking lot, and their intent was to get to the ridge above the parking lot so that when people fled the bombs in the school, they were hit at 12:30 by the bombs in the parking lot and shot, as they attempted to escape the parking lot.  If they had had greater competence with bombs, Columbine would have been the greatest mass murder in American history.  Incompetence stood between them and remarkably evil intent.

Second and third, I describe the professional excellence of Los Angeles police in the Rampart area of Los Angeles and reforms in the Bureau of Professional Standards there, and excellence in the Fairfax County police in Northern Virginia.  Both have worked brilliantly on gang problems, especially in addressing the emergence in the United States and other countries of a very dangerous criminal gang called MS-13 or Mara Salvatrucha.  Policing at Rampart has been brilliantly transformed under the leadership of Charlie Beck and Deborah McCarthy since the catastrophic misconduct and criminality of some police there in 1996 and 1997.

Fourth, the chapter discusses the professional excellence in the New York State Office of Homeland Security in working against terrorism while setting a stellar example in this country of simultaneously safeguarding civil liberties and privacy. 

I’ll tell you a couple more stories from the book and then Doug and I will happily have a conversation with you.

For many years, police leaders – and I have been privileged to share this with them, do this with them – have emphasized the importance of uses of technology for professional standards in internal affairs investigations and the like, as a matter of protecting not only the public interest but protecting good cops from cops who can’t be trusted. 

When I was working in Rampart many years ago, I had emphasized that whether the outcome is guilt or innocence, investigations, due process and resolution of complaints should be timely for the sake of both the police and the public.  And when that guilt is established, sanctions should be imposed without delay.  If a termination offense by a member of the department has been proved, that person should be dismissed immediately, not awaiting the result of any criminal prosecution, which is somebody else’s responsibility, not the police department’s.  These standards elevate a department’s reputation as well as the reality in the department, protect other departmental personnel from subjection to or suspicion of wrongdoing, and safeguard the public from further misuse of official power by a person known to have betrayed the public trust.

Now in LA, when these kinds of conditions are met, the officers are fired for termination offenses proved and they are identified in the media then as formerly of the LAPD.  This assurance of trustworthiness is once again reaffirmed.

While I was in Los Angeles, a case was resolved involving two police officers, uniformed officers who were partners, an older senior officer and a younger, less experienced officer.  Two women, between whom there was no known connection, both accused the senior officer of – when called with his partner to a domestic violence situation involving them, that they had handcuffed the man – either the husband or the man with whom they were living or the problem had occurred – and the senior officer told his junior partner to take the man and put him in the back of the cruiser and wait.  The women said that the senior officer then locked the door behind his partner and then sexually assaulted them. 

An investigation was conducted.  Both women said that the junior partner couldn’t have known anything at firsthand about this because he wasn’t there.  They made no claim that he was complicit in any way.  The officer denied that any such thing had happened.

The Professional Standards Bureau of the LAPD set up an apartment in the precinct of these two officers.  They put a man and a woman undercover officer in the apartment who appeared to be drunk.  The woman called a dispatcher at the precinct knowing these two officers would be called to the scene.  The apartment was equipped with hidden cameras and audio equipment.  The police knew that this was far too important a charge just to leave unresolved and they knew in addition that having two people make such similar claims with no connection to each other couldn’t be ignored either. 

The two officers answered the call.  I saw the videotape of this.  The woman and the man were confrontational with each other.  The senior officer and the junior officer separated them, cuffed the man.  The senior officer told his partner, “Take him to the car and lock him in the cruiser, I’ll be out shortly,” and locked the door behind him.  He then turned on the woman and immediately assaulted her.  His hands were all over her, and then he told her to go sit down.  She turned and looked at one of the cameras that he didn’t know was there, and made a gagging face.  Not only had this man had his hands all over her, she now knew that she was in the presence of a dirty cop.  The other police entered.  He was arrested.  Due process was held within the department and he was summarily fired.  When I was there, the police expected him to be prosecuted for what he had done.

That’s professional standards.  That’s seriousness about whether a person is worthy of the badge.

In Rampart in 1996 and 1997, there were police who were committing murders of gang suspects and then falsifying reports, planting evidence to make it look as if these had been legitimate self-defense cases, justifiable homicide, legitimate shootings.  The City of Los Angeles didn’t settle the complaints and legal cases arising from this until March of last year, for a total of some $76 million.  It took a complete overhaul.  When I was in Rampart twenty years ago, crash units, LAPD gang units, were over-spraying graffiti over gang graffiti on walls, over-spraying graffiti that said “Riva parvido”[?], “We rule for life.”  They were over-spraying it with “LAPD rules.”  They were another gang.  By 1996 it was much worse.

In cooperation with Professional Standards, McCarthy and Beck, with backing later from Bratton, have overhauled Rampart.  I watched a great many operations there – drug stings and other operations – conducted brilliantly.  Many of the police now working gangs and narcotics in Rampart have a good college education.  All that I met are well trained and supervised.  The policies, the accountability, the supervision are done just the way they should be. 

Some of these police have very substantial experience in a wide range of police assignments.  Almost all started in uniform.  Some have spouses who may have married across cultural and ethnic lines.  A large number are bilingual, some with first languages other than English.  Quite a few are literate and experienced in more than one culture, either by birth or by marriage.  Some have military combat experience going as far back as Vietnam and some come from generations of cops.

Their work now is a far cry from what it was in 1996 and 1997.  Their gang impact team is full of people willing to learn.  But above all, they figured some things out about strategy and tactics at Rampart that were known long ago but the fact that they’re well educated and studied history gave them a chance they wouldn’t have otherwise had.  When I asked them how they were reclaiming Rampart from MS-13, 18th Street and other gangs, they said, We applied the principle of Frederick the Great, that to defend everything is to defend nothing. 

We concluded from all the data available to us that in order to restore Rampart to some kind of civilized place, we had to reclaim MacArthur Park, the 32-acre MacArthur Park, from the gangs.  MacArthur Park was the place from which it all sprang – narcotics, extortion, prostitution, all of it.  Fraudulent ID scams.  MacArthur Park was so out of control that the drug dealers would rush from car to car to car, including offering drugs for sale to cops in uniform sitting in unmarked cars.  Wouldn’t even bother to look who it was.  You could only go there at peril of your life. 

Not anymore.  They retook MacArthur Park in cooperation with General Electric and Hamilton, with cameras and surveillance and the proper use of their assets and resources.  A person with a baby in a stroller could walk across MacArthur Park at midnight now and be as safe as if he or she were in this room. 

It took years for them to clean Rampart up, turn policing around, and the reason the cleanup inside the police was possible was that the mission was clear and the work mattered.  Years to accomplish.  Protection rackets are no more there.  In the mid-1990s Rampart saw 150 murders a year.  In the first nine months of 2004, when I was there, there were 17.  Even after impressive reductions in the crime rate were well underway in 2004, they still had an 8 percent decrease in total crimes, 21 percent in violent crimes, 39 percent in homicides, 37 percent in shooting victims, 22 percent in gang crimes.  Gang enforcement arrests were up by 33 percent, narcotics enforcement arrests by 13 percent.  Remarkable for a place…what Rampart was just ten years ago.

In Fairfax, even though much of Fairfax is a well-to-do suburb where the general public of a million people might be inclined through ignorance or inexperience or suburban complacency to deny any gang problem, the police had no such inclination.  The police of all ranks and in a variety of assignments with whom I spent time had clearly resolved that no such complacency should impair their mission.  They were not behind the curve with MS-13. They had taken the initiative.  They had gone far beyond reacting and were taking expansive steps to prevent both area MS-13 cliques and MS-13 leaders elsewhere in the United States and Central America from judging Fairfax to be an attractive target of opportunity for gang recruitment and criminal predation.

They began their gang unit all the way back in 1994 with three members, expanded it in 1997 to twelve, made the unit permanent in 1998.  Each police station in the department has a gang coordinator, an organizational arrangement now shared in Alexandria and Arlington.  They’ve become the original supervising agency for the establishment, with federal funding initiated by Frank Wolf of the 10th Congressional District, gang task force.  They have brought together departments from all over Northern Virginia plus the Virginia State Police, with support from the FBI, ATF, ICE and DEA.  They are as good at the distinction between gang enforcement and gang intelligence – acquiring information and turning it to intelligence and protecting intelligence people from involvement in enforcement in a way that makes it impossible for them to gather information – as anybody. 

Their work with the Commonwealth attorneys in prosecuting gang crimes are really extraordinary.  By the time they initiated their task force, they had already gathered information and prepared intelligence on 400 gangs in Northern Virginia.  They don’t use the word gang lightly.  They had identified 100 gangs with a total of about 3,000 members in the county in the first year.  They worked 837 gang-related cases, 78 of them in the schools, 203 more cases, and by January 2004 they had classified MS-13 as the dominant gang with 760 identified members divided into 22 cliques.

To the extent that conflicts for and against the public interest are settled in favor of those who know the most – to the extent it’s true that knowledge is power – this police department has shown rare and compelling insight and resolve, probity and competence of the highest order, of the kind that foretells the future of a profession.  It is work of this kind – unwillingness to give up where things have gone wrong; willingness to do the best you can when your resources are very great, as they are in Fairfax – a place like Rampart with huge disadvantages, a place like Fairfax with great advantages – and yet the same kinds of intelligence, character, determination to do the best possible with the resources available.  A strategic and tactical sense, worthiness to bear the public trust. 

That has been really the grounds for the last word in this edition and all these years I have in every public forum where I’ve worked with police, when they have asked about policing as a profession, I have always said, not yet.  It’s not a profession yet.  There are many constraints against it, including conflicts between unions and management, where standards have been negotiated away by unwise compromises.  Not yet.  But in publishing the 5th edition I wanted to say we have a chance.  There are places where professionalism is already of a very high order.

I hope you find the 5th edition worthwhile and I’m very grateful to you for coming today.

Douglas Besharov:  Ed, thank you very much.  That was just great.  Let me take the prerogative of being the moderator, while people are thinking about their questions.  Let me ask you a question first. 

This business about the quality of police departments and the professionalism, I want to take this in a slightly different direction for a minute.  I’d be delighted if some of the law enforcement people in the room felt like contributing as well, and we’ll have a mike for questions.  I’m struck by the following: the impact of the media on our expectations of what law enforcement is like.  I mentioned in the opening about “Crash,” and now I want to ask you to talk about that but also something else which I see.  I love watching – I don’t even know the names of these shows, I get them in the middle – but I love watching all these computers and these little thinga-ma-hoozies, and where it becomes absolutely for sure who did it not just because of DNA but all sorts of evidence.  So there’s no doubt about guilt. 

But as an old prosecutor, I remember always wondering a little bit.  What I’ve seen is both the public but also jurors – and I’ve read a little jury studies about this – expecting higher levels of professionalism and expertise from the police than exist in most places.  The effect being perhaps more acquittals than we should expect when these cases get to the courts.

So I’ve given you this long question and you can answer any part of it or a different question, as we do here in Washington.

Ed Delattre:  For a long time, when you’re about to do an interview you have to set your own agenda and you have to think of yourself as a teacher.  That when a police chief goes on television, he or she has to decide what it is his or her duty to teach the viewing public.  That no matter what questions you’re asked, you have to set that agenda and not let somebody in the media who doesn’t know what your responsibilities are set the agenda for you.  This of course is a very different case.  We’re friends, you know exactly what kinds of work I do.  The question as a whole would take an awful long time to treat, but let me do pieces of it.

I hadn’t watched “Crash.”  My wife and I rented it because it won the Academy Award.  It’s one of the two or three worst movies I ever saw.  In fact, I don’t think it qualifies as a movie at all.  It’s a collection of vignettes, most of them unrealistic, some of them cynical, none of them thorough, with a follow-through and a punch line intended to show that a person who has a fundamental character flaw can also a profound virtue.  Well, we’ve known that since David fought Goliath and murdered Uriah and stole Bathsheba. 

There’s hardly anything new in the fact that valor and vice can be found often in a single person.  So I thought that wasn’t handled with any originality and I thought what I took the message to be of the movie was simple-minded, not very well conveyed, but I think conforms to much of the political disposition in Hollywood.  How a movie like “Crash” could prevail over a movie like “Good Night and Good Luck” tells you a very great deal about some of the arbiters of culture or quasi-culture in the United States.

As far as media expectations and jury conduct, I’ve written extensively before about two problems.  The problem of turning from a standard of reasonable doubt to a demand for no possible doubt, no matter how unreasonable.  I’ve followed trials where the standard of doubt had shifted far away from anything that might be described as reasonable doubt.  Of course we are facing in this country the problems of jury nullification because of a belief among juries that some laws are unjust or the consequences of laws are intolerable, and therefore even if it’s proved that a person has broken the law, some juries will not convict. 

When you have those kinds of problems, you have a crisis of history in part and of sound education about the constitutional heritage of the country.  Books like Joseph Story’s, a 19th century book on the Constitution for study by teenagers, was re-released some twenty years ago by the Heritage Foundation but it never made its way in the schools.  In the states that require the study of the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the Declaration, that book should be a must.  But most of the states that have such requirements treat them with a wink.  Massachusetts requires the study of the founding documents, including the Federalist Papers. 

I don’t know a handful of teachers from Massachusetts from all the years I served on the state board who obeyed that law, or principals or superintendents who care about obeying the law, or members in the state department of education or the legislature who care whether they obey the law.  I hear lots of students told serving on a jury is the most important civic responsibility you will ever have.  I don’t believe that.  I think how a person behaves toward his or her fellow citizens day to day in the commonplace affairs of daily life is the most important civic responsibility any of us ever have.  But I believe in the commonplace, not the extraordinary.

Question:  Susanne Devlin, I’m the deputy chief for Fairfax County.  I just want to thank Ed for his wonderful remarks about Fairfax County.  I wanted to make a quick comment.

First of all, I think there is a crisis in America as it relates to policing and its relationship with the public, in that I think that I could probably say that if I were to ask the people in this room how many of you had a personal interaction with a police officer, assuming you were not in police work, that is not related to a ticket, I probably would be surprised if very many of you raised your hands. 

The crisis that we face in professional policing is in establishing and having a real relationship with the public who we would say is like us.  So when we wrestle with particularly controversial cases, what we tend to experience in professional policing is a silent public that is like us.  And what is heard by the media and what is printed in papers are all the people who are really not like us.  That’s what gets the sound bite, which is extremely troubling to professional policing.

I think if Ed writes another book, it should be about sort of a call to arms, because we police – particularly police who when you think about corruption, when you think about the movie “Crash” – the movie “Crash” was significant to me because it is what the public believes police are.  I believe that.  That’s what’s very frightening is that in fact Hollywood and the media have sold the public on the kind of policing that they think is really out there and most people are afraid to find out if in fact that is the way police are. 

I taught for George Mason and Northern Virginia Community College for about a decade, and one of my favorite projects to my students was that their job was to actually interact with a police officer in a non-enforcement manner.  Their question to me, in a rather horrifying way, was, How could I possibly do that?  I said, well, you approach them.  They said, oh my god, no way.  They’ll throw me against the wall, they’ll do terrible things to me.  I said, well, provided you approach them in a way that is not threatening, that should not happen.  Year after year, I had – these are young people, these are people who are our new citizens – year after year, they were shocked to discover that police were just like us. 

I think that we police need the real public that we serve, and having your support allows us to be freed of corruption and media influence.  But what happens is police very quickly, particularly chiefs, can be arms of the political agenda without real public interest and watchfulness.  So when you look at police corruption, police corruption is balanced with the public’s interest in who the police are.  And police become corrupt because there is not the public interest in who it is that they are.  The public needs to be educated and encouraged and enticed to participate in what is democratic policing.  Policing and the public are one and the same in America.  Remember, we’re traveling around the world preaching this, yet we do have our challenges in this country.

So I thank you for all that you have done to suggest and say that we are probably as a profession one of the most moral and ethical group as a whole – there’s good and bad, and there’s a lot more press and publicity and sexiness in those who have gone awry.  But as a group of people, they try so hard to represent our very good public but all too often we don’t have the other half of the handshake.  And that’s what we need.  So I thank you.

Douglas Besharov:  Thank you very much for your comments.  Ed?

Ed Delattre:  I can’t top that. 

Douglas Besharov:  Fair enough.

Question:  I appreciate your comments today quite a bit.  I spend a little time at AEI but I spend most of my time when I go to policy events across town at the Cato Institute.  I hear a very different side to policing in this country.  For example, I don’t know if you’ve seen the recent book by Judge Napolitano, who’s on Fox News.  He was an ex-prosecutor.  But in his book, he documents case after case where police have violated our basic constitutional rights and arresting people without cause, keeping them in jail unwarranted, prosecuting them when they know these people didn’t commit a crime. 

I wanted to know from your point of view, in your day-to- day work with police around the country, how much is in their mind concerning our basic freedoms and liberties that are guaranteed by our Constitution?

Ed Delattre:  Thanks.  First, police don’t prosecute anybody. They’re not prosecutors, they’re cops.  A police officer, like any other person, can be in a position to persecute somebody.  But prosecution is beyond their capacity and competence.

I’ve been called in to work in a lot of places where problems were very grim.  I’ve helped with investigations of corruption, where corruption had become horribly institutionalized and where no reforms were possible from within, where internal affairs was itself corrupted, and where the only way you could clean a department up was by bringing in the FBI and by working undercover inside the department.  Much of that institutionalized corruption springs from political pressure. 

Here in Washington, in 1989, late 1988, the Congress told then Mayor Marion Barry that if he did not put 1,500 new police on the streets in less than two years, all of them residents of the District, they would withhold $432 million in federal funding from the city.  The police department put 1,471, is my recollection, new cops on the street in the allotted period, all of them residents of the District.  They conducted background investigations by telephone.  People were receiving letters welcoming them to recruit classes in the Metropolitan Police on the same day they were receiving letters denying them parole from prison. 

Background investigations hadn’t even turned up that they were incarcerated.  The felony stop training at the police academy was reduced to learning how to paint the lines in the parking lot.  Training was abbreviated.  People were begged – city leaders, others were begged not to allow people to get into or get out of the academy.  Police executives resigned in horror over what was being done.  But those people became cops.  It was as horrible as the river cops in Miami.  Two hundred and fifty-nine of those cops were dismissed and then reinstated because the police department ignored its own regulations on the timeliness of investigations of misconduct.  Those people all had to be put to work in make-up jobs inside precinct stations – you couldn’t put them on the street because they would be decimated by any defense attorney.  I think 111 of those police went to prison for crimes ranging from rape to murder.  Crimes committed behind the badge.

I could go on with stories like that.  I said earlier, you’ve got 17,000 departments in the country.  You’ve got 16,000 school districts.  The bottom is very low and the top is very high.  If you wanted to – there are no police departments the same as there are no schools that are free of incompetence and corruption.  There are probably none of either that are free of brutality, illegitimate uses of force, sadism and the like.  There are certainly people behind the badge for the wrong reason.  There is no way that you can get it entirely right in recruitment any more than you can get it entirely right in college admissions.  No amount of conscientiousness will perfect a human institution, any more than any amount of conscientiousness will perfect an individual human being.

So if I wanted to write a book that focused only on police excesses and deficiencies, I could write it.  This book includes many stories of police excesses and deficiencies, political intrusion, corruption by political intrusion, by mayors who want to pretend they’re police chiefs or governors who think they’re fit to be cops, and the like.  Stories of attorneys general of the United States, head of the FBI, heads of police departments who didn’t give a damn about reality but only about appearance, destroyed the careers of innocent people in their own institutions and thereby guaranteed that it would take at least ten years for the people inside those institutions to trust the institutions again. 

I’ve been on the street here and in other countries where there is a phenomenon called FIDO, which is where police don’t trust their supervisors to back them up if they do the job right, and where if there is potential for racial conflict the police will see what’s coming and they will say FIDO, which means [inaudible] it, drive on – we’re not stopping and getting involved in this.  If they don’t trust the leaders.

So yes, every good cop I know, every good law enforcement person I know, understands that the people who are entrusted to defend the Constitution and the constitutional republic have more power than anybody else to wreck it and to betray it.  But for anyone to say a book about police excesses and deficiencies would be anything like a realistic account of any major city department – even LA when Rampart was at its worst, some editor here working on the manuscript for this book described Rampart as “throughout corrupt,” changed my language to say that policing in Rampart had been “throughout corrupt.”  That’s outrageous.  It’s despicable.  It was never true.  There are people in Rampart who served the public faithfully through all of it, when the media were at the door every day looking for blood.  These people came to work and did their jobs knowing exactly how they were going to be treated. 

No disrespect to Cato, although I once was in a conference on television with Cato people and when I cited Doug’s numbers on drug addiction, the only way the fellow from Cato could refute it was to say all of Besharov’s research is false.  None of his data are true.  Well, I don’t say that about the Judge’s book at all.  But I wouldn’t want my name on a book that told only that small part of the story.

Question:  I think that very high on our national agenda right now is the topic of illegal immigration.  I hear behind many of your comments the filtering in of the circumstance that now face police across the country in coping with some of the consequences and circumstances of our nation having many millions of illegal immigrants.  It seems that this is a circumstance that challenges policing if not in an entirely new way, at least in portion a greatly new way.  Rather than ask a specific question about it, I would wonder if you cared to comment on the manner in which illegal immigration fronts on the topic of your book, the challenges facing police and ethics.

Ed Delattre:  Thank you, Peter.  Some years ago, I spent time during the Clinton Administration, while I was an advisor to Immigration and Doris Meissner, and teaching at Glencoe U.S. marshals and Border Patrol and so on, in Georgia – I spent time with Border Patrol people between San Diego and Tijuana.  Night-time, where the fence was built.  The fence that we built between the United States and Mexico, which rises out of the sea and runs through that godawful terrain with great drops and the Tijuana River, which it is illegal for us to purify in any way, with women and infants being told they would be raped by la migre – that is, by Border Patrol agents – who would go into the river because they were told by bandits they were safe there and then they would drown with their babies in sinkholes.  Then immigration officers who made it their mission to go in that filth only to persuade others not to go in it.

The fence, when it was built, was built out of corrugated steel.  The corrugations are 90-degree corrugations.  You could either build it with the corrugations vertical or horizontal.  Because of the shape of the panels it was cheaper to build it horizontal, which means that the fence is a ladder.  Any eight-year-old child can climb it.  Any adult can dig under it.

The main idea at the border, where you have these kind of conditions with high brush, insects, snakes – the main idea is for everybody to go home safe.  The Border Patrol, the people coming over and under the fence, children – for everybody to get through the night without getting badly hurt or killed.  The only contribution I made was to encourage that big lights be put above the fence so that people couldn’t be raped in the darkness when they came over the fence and were taken into the bushes by gangsters without anybody seeing them.  That was done.

When people would go into the bushes in groups and be surrounded by Border Patrol agents, many of them were on a first-name basis.  They would say in Spanish or English, okay, we’ve caught you this time.  Come out.  They would come out and be taken to a center, put on a bus back across the border, if they were Mexican.  The Mexicans won’t take them back if they’re not Mexican.  Why should they take them?  They won’t close their southern border any more than they’ll defend their northern border.  So the people from Central America come through the southern border and go through.  When they come into the United States, the Mexicans don’t want them.  So we’re faced with the challenge of the expense to send them home, mostly money we’re not willing to spend.

A lot of the people who come over, come over three or four times in a night.  You catch them, they go back, two hours later they’re over the fence again.  Many of them have jobs.  If they’re determined to get through, they’re going to get through.  Even women with small children are going to make it through if they come enough times.  You can build a fence across the southern border of the country.  You can put a Border Patrol agent every few yards.  Still going to get through.  As they say in California, if you don’t want to pay $6 for a head of lettuce, let them through.

It’s not just a border problem.  Every time, whether it was Tom Constantine as head of DEA talking about the place of the Mexican government in drug transporting and smuggling in this hemisphere, or the failure of the countries in Central America to uphold their end in matters of immigration – every time that happened, they were squelched because of other matters in American foreign policy.  I think that’s likely to continue to happen with balance of trade issues, the problem of political leanings in Central and South America, the unwillingness to rile certain people, so that the likelihood of a comprehensive approach, a comprehensive national and international approach to immigration problems in this country and in the hemisphere, is very small.  I think many of the people who suffer the most for that are the people who are from countries around the world waiting for legal entry into the United States and being denied it.

So I’m not a pundit, I’ve never been much good at political predictions, but I’m pessimistic about the kind of thinking that has to be done even to get a handle on immigration. 

As far as police go, all of the good police departments and federal agencies I know are expanding their recruitment of people of different first languages.  In Fairfax, when I was working there, they already had a program in Spanish instruction for their people and were talking about a program in Korean, because of the immigration facts of life in Fairfax County, which has I think the fastest-growing Muslim population maybe in the United States, certainly in the eastern United States. 

The worst immediate problems for police and law enforcement, aside from trying to be able to serve people who are skeptical of government because where they come from the government is just another gang, just another bunch of criminals – whether it’s Vietnamese or Cambodian or Laotian, or people coming in from Serbia, Somalia, the Sudan, and so on – trying to be of service to those people and to help them understand something of the American way of life at its best is an enormous challenge.  These are people who are in no way criminals and who want to be here for the same reasons we want to be here.

The other challenge is the criminal element.  Of that, my view is that the most serious challenge now is MS-13, Mara Salvatrucha from El Salvador.  The 13 is for the letter M, the 13th letter of the alphabet.  In the early 1980s, a great many Salvadorans during the Salvadoran civil war fled to this country, to southern and northern California.  Some of them had paramilitary training.  They were hunted down by Salvadoran death squads. 

When they got to this country, southern California, they were preyed upon by the Mexican mafia.  Large numbers of them had already belonged to a criminal gang in El Salvador called the Maras, the Group.  They formed Mara Salvatrucha here sort of like the Latin Kings formed in Chicago, as a way of protecting people of their own ethnicity.  But of course as it became a gang, it became criminal.  By the mid-1990s we had deported about 10,000 Mara Salvatrucha members who were felons in California.  They now, I would guess, they have close to 100,000 members in El Salvador and Honduras. 

On December 24 a year ago, the Christmas before last, when the Honduran government was threatening to reinstate the death penalty for gang crimes, ten Mara Salvatrucha members boarded a public bus and machine-gunned 22 women and children to death and left a sign on the bus windshield claiming to be some terrorist group but in fact saying don’t talk about reforming the gang laws, we won’t tolerate it.  The leader of that assault, Rivera Paz[?], was arrested in Honduras, imprisoned, and a few days after his imprisonment he was arrested by the Texas Highway Patrol just north of Brownsville. 

The FBI started an international task force on Mara Salvatrucha, headed by a very good fellow named Bob Clifford, and they have brought police, immigration people together in this country and in Central America.  But it’s a long uphill pull.  The federal databases on MS-13 are almost all narcotics-driven database and a lot of the MS-13 people aren’t in narcotics yet in the eastern part of the country.  So I think the numbers are way low – certainly low from Southern Maryland and Washington all the way to the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley.  Almost a thousand have been deported in the last two years under Operation Community Shield. 

But this gang is coming.  I’ve been in counties in the country where you can see them massing in the next county north.  They’re a huge presence in Kenner, Louisiana, outside New Orleans.  They’re one county north of Tampa.  They’re known to have committed 21 murders in Charlotte in the last 18 months, and so on.  That’s not just a law enforcement problem, but law enforcement’s got the brunt of it at the moment.

Question:  Ed, since you have experience in both worlds, I would be interested in your thoughts on corporate governance.  Can organizational America, corporate America, learn anything from the police experience in dealing with ethical issues?

Ed Delattre:  Joe knows that I serve on the board of directors of the Quaker Chemical Corporation, a multinational based in Philadelphia.  I’ve been on that board for 24 years.  I’ve given this book to a lot of people in corporate life who say they have learned from it.  I have introduced corporate leaders to some of the best people I know in policing and law enforcement.  And I’ve encouraged blue ribbon task forces rather than civilian review as a way of corporate and police leaders benefiting from the experience one of another.

If there were any single lesson from policing that corporate leaders could well learn and that legislators like Sarbanes and Oxley could learn, it is that Madison was right, that the aim of every political constitution is or ought to be in the first place to secure for rulers men – we would say men and women – who have most wisdom to discern and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society.  In the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they hold their public trust.

Too many corporate people think systems will take the place of virtue and a few think virtue will take the place of accountability.  What the best police leaders and the best corporate leaders I know understand is that if you’ve got less than both, you have no real hope.

Joe is a friend of mine of long standing who’s retired from law enforcement, from the FBI, and is now in business.  He knows more about the question than I do.

Thank you all very much.

Douglas Besharov:  Thank you all for being here.

[End of audio]

[End of transcript]