BAD COP

Unfortunately, nobody can seem to agree on what “community policing” actually is. In fact, in the absence of a firm definition, the phrase ” community policing” is now used interchangeably to describe two radically opposing theories of law enforcement.

To its intellectual progenitors, James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, ” community policing” is a means of preventing crime by forcing cops to confront obvious signs of civic disorder. Menacing behavior that goes unchallenged by the police, Wilson and Kelling argued in a seminal 1982 Atlantic Monthly article, is a signal to criminals and would-be criminals that a neighborhood is ripe for takeover. When a neighborhood is out of control, or when it seems out of control, people act accordingly.

The Wilson-Kelling idea was a direct challenge to existing police practices in most cities; with the spread of so-called “911” policing in the 1970s, many police departments had moved from preventing crime to contending with its aftermath. But the notion that beat cops might be better at thwarting crime than cops in patrol cars slowly spurred a revolution in law enforcement. In New York in the early 1990s, Kelling advised then-police chief William Bratton on ways to combat “quality of life crimes” — aggressive panhandling, low-level drug dealing, public drunkenness — that the city had virtually ignored for years. The effect was immediate and dramatic, and police chiefs around the country took notice.

So did the Clinton administration, which in 1994 created the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services within the Justice Department to stay abreast of the trend. Soon, the definition of the term began to change. According to the Clinton administration, “community policing” was not simply a new way of fighting crime but an opportunity to repair the social ills inside the hearts and minds of police officers themselves.

“The hidden cultural heritage of institutional racism and sexism that has gradually become part of the U.S. culture, including the culture of law enforcement, must be acknowledged and examined,” explains a training paper produced by the Community Policing Consortium, an organization created and run by the Justice Department. According to the consortium’s “bulletin” on cultural diversity, those in law enforcement “must learn to recognize the power and beauty of diversity, rather than blaming our social problems on other people.”

In the opinion of the Clinton administration, this, too, is “community policing.”

This is not just a fight over semantics. Consider the case of Nicholas Pastore, the recently departed police chief of New Haven, Connecticut. The Pastore case is a cautionary example of how “community policing” can be dangerous in the wrong hands.

Pastore took over as chief of the New Haven police department in 1990, the same year Bratton came to New York. Like Bratton, Pastore was an enthusiastic advocate of community policing. Unlike New York’s chief, however, Pastore believed the primary threat to public safety came not from criminals, but from police officers. Average New Haven cops, he explained to Newsweek shortly after becoming chief, “want to chase a guy, bang him on the head and brag about it later.” Such brutality, Pastore insisted, had not stopped crime, but instead created it. “Mean policing leads to mean streets,” he said. According to Pastore, when police violence wasn’t spawning more violence in New Haven, police racism was encouraging it to flourish. Cops have allowed black men to kill one another, he told the New York Times, because in the eyes of bigoted police officers, “the right men are dying.”

Criminals, for their part, were virtually always driven to crime by some form of discrimination — in the case of prostitutes, Pastore claimed, by ” systemic racism against women.” In interviews, Pastore blamed violence in New Haven on sexism, racism, homophobia, capitalism, even a conspiracy of “gun manufacturers” intent on arming street gangs.

Soon after becoming chief, Pastore forbade his officers to chase suspects before first receiving permission from a supervisor. In practice, the policy allowed criminals to run away unhindered as frustrated cops waited to reach a superior over the radio. Pastore still defended the policy, implying that the sight of police officers chasing people, often minorities, down city streets was simply too brutal to be allowed.

Pastore expanded affirmative-action efforts dramatically, openly hiring by quota. Written portions of police promotion exams were eliminated, regulations were changed to allow the department to hire applicants with misdemeanor criminal records. Pastore proclaimed himself tired of ” paramilitary, crew-cut males” and said he would prefer to recruit more unwed lesbian mothers.

Many cops complained that promotions were given without regard to experience or ability. When Pastore promoted several female officers to the rank of detective, Brenda Coleman-Lokites, herself one of the first women to become a patrol officer in the state of Connecticut, protested the hasty move. According to Coleman-Lokites, some of the new female detectives “hadn’t investigated much more than a bicycle theft.”

Not that such details seemed of much concern to Pastore. What really mattered, he said, was establishing a “proactive dialogue” with the ” community.” Pastore’s first attempts to do so were clumsy: When a group of demonstrators gathered in front of the New Haven courthouse to protest the Gulf War, Pastore arrived wearing a white armband to express his solidarity. ” I love you people,” he shouted to the crowd.

In 1991, Pastore began requiring cops to attend seminars at Yale University’s Child Study Center. Over the course of eight weeks, recruits attended discussion groups at the center on “issues related to child development, human behavior, and strategies for policing.” They also sat through screenings of the movie Boyz N the Hood, an experience meant to ” make the theoretical concepts vivid and relevant to police work.” Veteran cops took a semester’s worth of psychology courses.

Like Pastore, the staff at the Child Study Center believed that the police department itself was responsible for much of the violence in New Haven. ” When police officers are in fact thoughtless or inconsiderate to a child in the course of their response to a crisis,” explained the center’s program description, “they reinforce the child’s experience of society as uncaring, and strengthen the child’s belief that hostile behavior is the normative mode of adult functioning.” In other words, rude cops lead to dangerous kids.

To offset this effect, police officers were told to refer children who had been exposed to violence to the center’s psychiatrists and psychologists for counseling. Officers were expected to send to the center not only the victims of violence, but the perpetrators of it as well. In one case, police brought a 13-year-old girl arrested for killing her baby to the center for complimentary “evaluation and treatment.” In another instance, a teenage boy was “referred by the police after suffering a panic attack while being arraigned for the shooting death of a close friend.”

The program was an instant hit with the Clinton administration, which awarded grants to a number of other cities hoping to replicate it. Back in New Haven, however, many citizens were beginning to voice concerns about Pastore’s judgment. In 1993, the chief invited a film crew from CBS’s 60 Minutes to accompany him on a driving tour of the city’s tougher neighborhoods. As the car passed two figures standing on a corner, Pastore asked reporter Steve Kroft if he wanted to meet “one of the most dangerous criminals in the city.” Pastore turned the car around and approached the man, a well-known local thug named Donald Bailey. Bailey immediately asked the chief for money. Pastore produced a $ 10 bill and gave it to him. “I love you, man,” said Bailey.

Pastore frequently appeared unwilling to distinguish between legitimate citizens’ organizations and street hustlers. Not long before the 60 Minutes taping, Pastore joined the New Haven chapter of Zulu Nation, a para- street gang from the South Bronx whose leader, T. C. Islam, had an extensive criminal record. In one incident, Islam was accused of hitting his girlfriend, “shoving a handgun between her legs and threatening to kill her.” After he was arrested, Islam mocked the woman he was accused of tormenting, bragging that Chief Pastore was going to “take care of” the charges.

Complaints poured in when Islam’s criminal record became public, but Pastore continued to defend Zulu Nation and its leader, and he continued to talk to Islam by phone several times a week. During an appearance on a cable- television show, the two chatted and flashed gang signs. Islam described Pastore as like a “brother.” “We’re like Starsky and Hutch,” he said. Pastore returned the compliment, explaining his affection for Zulu Nation: “Why do I like Zulu? Because that’s [its] doctrine: Respect your brother and sister, and get away from the dissing, the violence, the resolving things with guns.” When a member of Zulu Nation was shot, Pastore publicly berated a police supervisor for describing the shooting as “drug-related.”

For the chief, this was only the beginning. In 1994, Pastore took a double- murder suspect, who was being sought as a fugitive, out for a pizza dinner. When a convicted felon and gang leader named Montez Diamond ended up in the hospital with a gunshot wound, Pastore sent him a get-well card. Two police officers who were in the hospital at the same time received nothing from the chief. When members of the Latin Kings street gang asked to meet with him weekly to discuss “the lack of recreation and jobs, and the problem of teen suicide,” Pastore enthusiastically agreed, creating a joint committee to ponder the issues: “I’m encouraged by their new bylaws, which require that members stay in school,” he said.

Pastore maintained that his overtures to gangs like the Latin Kings and Zulu Nation would help convince their members not to commit crimes. Yet at the same time Pastore was talking about “the problem of teen suicide” with the Latin Kings, the gang’s leader, Maria Vidro, was sitting in prison awaiting trial on a homicide charge. Vidro later received life in prison. By 1995, just about every Latin Kings leader in New Haven — some of them close acquaintances of Pastore’s — had been indicted by federal prosecutors for murder and drug trafficking. Virtually all were convicted.

Ultimately, the Latin Kings were subdued in New Haven, mostly through the efforts of the federal government. The city’s longtime drug crisis, however, remained. By the time Pastore became chief, according to some estimates, one out of every 10 New Haven residents was addicted to heroin or cocaine. In a 1990 interview published in High Times magazine, he offered his solution: “Let’s decriminalize and medicalize the problems.” According to the magazine’s executive editor, Peter Gorman, the interview gave Pastore “a national forum. Prior to that he was just police chief of stinky little New Haven.”

Indeed, Pastore was soon well known beyond his hometown. In 1991, the chief won a $ 10,000 grant from the pro-legalization Drug Policy Foundation in Washington and later joined the group’s board of directors. Two years later, the Clinton administration flew Pastore to Washington to help draft federal drug-control policy.

Back in New Haven, Pastore’s views on drugs also were being received warmly, mostly by drug sellers. The chief made a habit of handing out his business card to street dealers, telling them to call if they experienced police brutality. At Pastore’s direction, the department all but stopped raiding drug houses. Raids, said the chief, “intimidate the community. They make people hate us.” When asked why he did not arrest kids he believed were holding drugs, Pastore told Parade magazine, “An arrest would only make them distrust the police.”

Arresting drug dealers, said Pastore, would be a sign of failure — failure to cure social ills like racism, poverty, and addiction, and the failure of society to provide “job opportunities, housing, drug treatment.” The police department didn’t stop hauling in low-level drug dealers — some were too blatant to ignore — but it slowed the pace considerably. In 1989, the year before Pastore arrived, New Haven police made a total of 3,159 drug arrests. By 1992, three years into Pastore’s term, the number had dropped by more than 40 percent. Pastore was pleased by the decrease: “There are too many people presently incarcerated for this medical problem known as substance abuse.”

Instead of taking them to jail, Pastore tried to get dealers and addicts to accept medical treatment. Using information culled from previous investigations and confidential informants, the department compiled a list of the addresses of people suspected of using and selling drugs. Uniformed officers arrived at their houses, not with warrants but “to encourage [drug] treatment in a culturally sensitive atmosphere.”

By some measures, the effort succeeded: A small number of people who needed help to quit using drugs got it. (It is not clear how many quit permanently.) But putting addicts in a clinic did not solve New Haven’s drug problem. Emboldened by Pastore’s stand on drugs, dealers became more brazen, selling cocaine openly in the streets. “Without the arrests at the low level,” said Louis Cavalier, head of the department’s police union, “it’s almost as if New Haven is an open-air market.”

In the middle-income Edgewood neighborhood, residents complained to the chief about groups of increasingly aggressive drug dealers that had descended on the area. In response, Pastore temporarily assigned a beat cop to the corner of a local intersection. Because department regulations forbade the officer to pursue suspects without permission, however, his presence did little to deter drug dealers. One resident said he was amazed to find that the cop “was not allowed to move. I was literally standing on the corner with him, there were drug dealers a block away. He knew they were there, I knew they were there, everybody knew they were there, but he could not move. There was a crime in progress, but those were his orders.”

With police officers unable or unwilling to intervene to maintain order, the Edgewood neighborhood began to decline. Gangs of young men roamed the streets intimidating residents. Hookers arrived in groups. By late 1994, the chief’s own mother, a resident of the area, told the Hartford Courant she was afraid to go outside. “I used to walk around the block or to the pizza place or go out to get ice cream,” she said. Now, “I can’t even go get my medication.”

At the same time that Pastore’s drug policies were leaving the city’s neighborhoods exposed to drug dealers, his anguished overtures to New Haven’s black residents seemed, if anything, only to inflame racial tensions. Over the course of two months in 1993, on a single street in New Haven, police were confronted by mobs of young black men five times. The crowds, newly sensitized to police brutality by Pastore, threw rocks, bottles, and sticks at cops to protest racism in the department. Two officers were injured and at least eight squad cars damaged in the violence.

Pastore did little to defend his officers. In June 1991, two cops patrolling New Haven’s tough Hill neighborhood spotted a man in a station wagon involved in an apparent drug deal. As the cops approached, the suspect, Anthony Laudano, hit the accelerator, aiming his car at the officers. One of the policemen ended up on the hood. Both of the officers drew their pistols and fired a total of ten shots, killing Laudano.

The state’s attorney investigated the incident and cleared the cops of any criminal wrongdoing. But Pastore decided to press misconduct charges anyway, and the officers were brought before the city’s Board of Police Commissioners. Although the officers ultimately were acquitted, the rank and file exploded, incensed by what they believed was Pastore’s abandonment of his men. Police officers picketed and held protests. Many called in sick.

Pastore’s relations with his force reached their lowest point in the aftermath of a 1993 shooting at a nightclub. According to a number of witnesses, as a group of cops came through the door of the Social Unity Club, a 22-year-old named Michael Allen pulled out a gun and shot officer Reggie Sutton. Sutton’s partner landed on Allen and tried to handcuff him. As he did, a third cop jumped on the back of the arresting officer.

The third cop was a black woman named Angela Augustine-Daye. She screamed and accused her fellow officer of racist brutality, and tried to separate him from the suspected gunman. Four people were shot in the melee.

Pastore’s response to the event further alienated him from most of his officers. Though a bulletproof vest had saved Reggie Sutton’s life, the chief refused to buy body armor for the department, saying cops could afford their own. Then, at a forum on police brutality several months later, the chief commended Angela Augustine-Daye as a model police officer. Michael Allen, facing charges for the attempted murder of Reggie Sutton, was also at the meeting. In front of the crowd, the chief hugged Allen twice.

The uproar over the embraces eventually died, but the resentment of Pastore remained. A retired assistant chief of the department put it bluntly: “The cops hate his guts.” The police union made the animosity official by giving Pastore an overwhelming vote of no confidence.

The lasting effect of Pastore’s behavior, however, went deeper than hurt feelings. Aware that the chief would not stand behind them if their dealings with citizens turned violent, police officers began to hesitate before becoming involved in even the most minor altercations. Pastore made his officers afraid to act decisively, or even at all, in ambiguous situations. One cop described his thoughts when faced with unruly citizens: “Why am I going to risk my butt to get into that situation when I know that even if I handle it well, I may face a departmental inquiry?”

As a result of this reticence, laws intended to help keep the city’s neighborhoods orderly went almost unenforced in Pastore’s version of ” community policing.” In 1986, for example, New Haven police arrested 2,389 people for drinking in public. Seven years later, in 1993, Pastore’s department arrested only 34 people for the same crime.

The decline did not go unnoticed. At a community meeting in New Haven’s Dixwell neighborhood, residents demanded that the department do something about the knots of derelicts lining their streets. Odell Cohens, one of Pastore’s community-policing experts, explained to the mostly black audience that laws against public drinking are racist, since getting drunk on the street is part of black culture. Unconvinced, the audience again demanded that the chief make his officers enforce anti-drinking laws. Pastore declined, suggesting “more alcohol treatment” instead.

The enforcement of other laws saw a similar decrease under Pastore. In 1985, police took into custody 648 people on charges of vandalism. From 1990 to 1993, not a single person was arrested for the crime. Arrests for “disorderly conduct” — a catchall term long used by police departments to move drunk and threatening people off the streets — fell from 5,171 in 1989 to 1,179 in 1993, a drop of more than 75 percent.

Needless to say, New Haven had not become 75 percent more orderly in the space of four years. Indeed, many of its residents were more frightened and harassed than ever.

Pastore defended himself by pointing out that the number of murders in the city had dropped from 34 in 1991 to 22 in 1996, though the consensus among the region’s experts seems to be that the decline was primarily the result of federally sponsored anti-gang efforts in New Haven. But ultimately the point may be irrelevant, at least to those whose neighborhoods were disintegrating under Pastore’s neglect. For non-criminals, the odds of being murdered in New Haven — or any other American city — have always been low. Murder is by far the easiest crime to measure, but it is also among the least likely to affect ordinary people. The average person in New Haven is much more likely to have his life made miserable by the sorts of low-level “quality of life” crime that Pastore chose to ignore — crimes that “community policing” originally was meant first and foremost to prevent.

Elizabeth McCormack, a New Haven alderwoman, says it was not necessarily the prevalence of violent crime that created “the perception in the community that the police aren’t doing anything.” Instead, she says, it was the “little things” — like “a homeowner coming home and finding 20 young men on her porch who don’t live there and not being able to get the police to come and make them move away. That’s when you wonder whose rights were being ignored.”

Last month, Nicholas Pastore’s experiment with New Haven came to an end. In an interview with the New Haven Register, the 59-year-old married father of three admitted having an affair with a 24-year-old, possibly mentally impaired hooker. He then left the child she bore to languish in foster care without financial support. Pastore resigned soon after. Despite the seedy circumstances, the press coverage of the scandal was uniform: Nearly every account expressed sorrow at Pastore’s resignation.

“Sadly, Mr. Pastore committed one too many acts of kindness,” lamented the Hartford Courant without a trace of sarcasm. “The revelation” that such a “popular” and “widely respected” figure could have done such a thing, explained the New York Times, “has shaken” New Haven. Amidst this spasm of grief, not one major media outlet bothered to notice the havoc Pastore had wreaked upon New Haven and its police department during his seven years as chief. But perhaps the omission should not have been surprising. Pastore was, after all, as the Times put it, “one of the leading national advocates of community policing.”

Tucker Carlson is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.