The New Black Police Chiefs

By Michael S. Serrill

In 1960, Clarence Dickson, the first black to graduate from the Miami police academy, proudly stood for a picture of the class in which he ranked third out of 16. A few days later, while Dickson was out on patrol, the class reassembled and a new, all-white "official" picture was taken without him. Last month the Miami police department held another solemn ceremony from which Dickson, 50, could not be excluded. For he was being installed as Miami's chief of police, the first black to hold that job in the racially troubled city.

In 1964 in New Orleans, Warren Woodfork was working as a postal clerk when he accompanied a friend to police headquarters for a recruitment test. "As a kid," said Woodfork, who grew up in the city's housing projects, "I never had a desire to be a policeman." But on an impulse he took the test, got the job, "and fell in love with it." Three weeks ago, Woodfork, 48, became the first black police superintendent of New Orleans.

Dickson and Woodfork thus joined a growing group of blacks across the country who have reached the pinnacle of law enforcement. The police chiefs of four of the nation's six largest cities--New York, Chicago, Houston and Detroit--are now black, as are twelve of the top police officials in the 50 largest cities. The eight-year-old National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives now numbers some 60 police chiefs, directors of public safety and sheriffs among its 700 regular members. Ten years ago, there was only one black chief in a large city, Hubert Williams, police director of Newark, N.J. Last week Williams was named the new president of the Police Foundation, the influential law-enforcement think tank in Washington.

The new chiefs' credentials are impressive: they have either spent decades struggling up through the ranks or combined street experience with a lot of college credits (at least four are Ph.D.s). Nonetheless, politics was often what put the final shine on their brass. Virtually all the major cities where they serve have at least a 25% black population, and the appointment of a black has commonly been seen as a concession to the minority community, one that is, of course, standard in U.S. urban history. But the new appointees are no guarantee against continued turmoil. Dickson is Miami's third chief in the past year. "If I only last a week more," he says, "I'll be happy knowing that I reached the top."

Most of these commanders are traditionalists who think of themselves as blue first, black second. To the residents of New Orleans, says Woodfork, "I'm not their black police chief. I'm their police chief." Doing the job is what counts, notes William Hart, chief in Detroit for eight years. "There's nothing magic about a policeman's badge, and nothing magic about being black." Inevitably, the chiefs' perspective reflects their life experiences. When he was growing up on the South Side of Chicago, says Chief William Dye of Columbia, Mo., "the only time we ever saw a police officer was when there was a problem. We didn't believe they were there to protect us. That attitude still exists in a lot of minority communities." To fight suspicion of the police, all the chiefs advocate a three-pronged strategy: vigorous efforts to put more minority officers in uniform; strict policies against the unnecessary use of force; and a commitment to "neighborhood policing," which means getting both white and black officers out of their squad cars and involved in helping the citizenry protect itself against crime.

Substantial gains have been made toward achieving the first two goals. Of the half-million law-enforcement officers nationwide, about 43,000 are black, still less than 10%, but more than triple the number in 1973. Of the roughly 108,000 officers in the nation's 50 largest cities, 14% are black, though that falls far short of the 26% total black population in those cities. Progress in restraining police use of force, which black leaders say is applied | disproportionately in their communities, has been encouraged by the new minority chiefs. More than one black has quickly followed his swearing-in with tough new rules on the use of guns. The firing of police weapons has dropped dramatically in many departments headed by blacks.

Getting minority communities to see the police, black or white, as anything other than an occupying army remains a difficult task. Under black Superintendent Fred Rice, Chicago police have not only stepped up enforcement efforts against neighborhood gangs but tried to get more residents to cooperate in jailing gang suspects. In Atlanta, under George Napper, the black public safety commissioner, the department negotiates written agreements with community organizations to enhance police service. In Detroit, officers in 50 storefront "mini-stations" organize crime-prevention seminars, conduct business and residential security surveys, and attend community meetings.

As their community-relations efforts demonstrate, the black chiefs are well aware that their jobs are political balancing acts, which their race makes more complicated. They must please three constituencies: the general public, their own officers and the minority community. The experience of three chiefs illustrates the travails and triumphs of the process:

Benjamin Ward, 58, New York City. When he was appointed the city's first black police boss, in 1983, Ward considered himself the "best-qualified commissioner" ever. A big, blustering, outspoken man, he had 23 years of experience in the police department, plus service as chief of the city's housing police and as both state and city corrections commissioner. But Ward's reputation as a cop's cop made some minority leaders nervous, and now they say their fears are being realized, as Ward struggles with a major crisis.

Last October a white officer shot and killed Eleanor Bumpurs, 66, an emotionally disturbed black woman who allegedly lunged at a second officer with a ten-inch knife while police were evicting her from her apartment. Ward ordered new procedures for handling such cases, but found that the officer who fired acted properly. A grand jury disagreed and indicted him two weeks ago. Ward suspended the officer pending trial and then reinstated him in a desk job. The commissioner's backing and filling has some black leaders complaining that he is an "Uncle Tom." His officers, for their part, last week protested the indictment with the largest demonstration in department history and groused that Ward had not supported them strongly enough. The commissioner so far has maintained an uncharacteristically low profile.

Lee Brown, 47, Houston. Brown was public safety commissioner of Atlanta during the black child murders that ended in 1981, and his name became known across the U.S. In Houston he is now a local superstar. Initially, despite a doctorate in criminology from Berkeley, Brown got a cool reception when Mayor Kathy Whitmire named him chief in 1982. But he has engineered a remarkable turnaround in a department that for years had a national reputation as brutal and racist. Brown "just took charge and started getting things done," says Larry Troutt, an aide to Whitmire's chief challenger in the past mayoral election. Brown was not a campaign issue, says Troutt, because "across the board, everyone has something good to say about him."

Using community outreach techniques he pioneered in Atlanta, Brown made the department responsive for the first time to business and other community groups. He reorganized the demoralized top echelon of the department into an efficient management team, and has won over line officers by supporting their demand for overtime pay and other benefits. The soft-spoken chief is not shy about his accomplishments. "I'd give myself an A," he says. That seems about right. When Houston power brokers gathered for lunch a year ago and his name came up, everyone at the table gave him the same grade.

Reuben Greenberg, 40, Charleston. Upon arriving in 1982 in tradition-bound Charleston, S.C., Greenberg had three things going against him. He was black. He was an outsider, from the Florida department of law enforcement. And he was a practicing Jew, the great-grandson of a white Jewish Texas farmer and his black wife. In less than a month he had created several new obstacles to his popularity in the department: a firm order forbidding the unnecessary use of force, followed by a volley of other new regulations that now fill a 3-in.- thick handbook.

But Chief Greenberg had at least three things working for him: energy, flamboyance and competence. During the past two years the number of arrests in Charleston has doubled, and the crime rate has tumbled. In the same period, not a shot was fired by police. His increased foot and mounted patrols pleased downtown businessmen, and he delighted the rank and file by taking to the streets himself when things got slow at headquarters. He has made dozens of % collars in his car, on foot and on horseback, and gained some national publicity when he nabbed a bicycle thief while roller-skating. As for the department, "our morale is the highest it's ever been," reports the head of the police association, "and it's because of the chief." But the accomplishment that pleases Greenberg most is his full-scale assault on crime in black neighborhoods. "That's my constituency," he says. "Those ladies who have worked hard all their lives, probably cleaning somebody's floors. They deserve not to be prisoners in their own homes."

Does the new ascendancy of such chiefs mean that blacks will take over law enforcement, as the Irish and then the Italians did before them? Some observers think not. "The majority of high-ranking officers in most departments are white, and will be for some time," says John Glover, the one black among eleven assistant directors of the FBI. This small pool of future black chiefs may shrink further as opportunities for blacks open up in more lucrative fields. But the fact remains that the nation's largest cities are increasingly dominated by politicians who know that to survive they must alleviate minority hostility toward police. That political reality and the accomplishments of the current cluster of black brass suggest that the history of U.S. police departments may be at the start of another phase of renewal, led by a group of the once disenfranchised.

With reporting by Thomas McCarroll/New York and B.J. Phillips/Charleston, with other bureaus