Incoming D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier has listened to advice of the country’s top crime fighters and spent sleepless nights sifting through suggestions from the rank-and-file to figure out how to boost morale, protect the nation’s capital and prevent crime without resorting to costly crime emergencies.
The goals, she admits, are not new.
“I just think that I’m going to be the one that finds it,” Lanier said.
Lanier, 39, today becomes the city’s first female police chief, a single mom who dropped out of school at the age of 15 to have her baby. In 16 years, she’s rose from a foot patrol officer to district commander to commander of special operations to the department’s first head of homeland security. She also earned two master’s degrees.
Now, Lanier’s being charged with increasing the visibility of the 3,800-member force and ending the need for expensive crime emergencies while keeping violent crime at 20-year lows.
The night before her predecessor, Police Chief Charles Ramsey, stepped down last week, Lanier couldn’t sleep, so she stayed up until 4 a.m., reading more than 300 e-mails she’s received from the men and women she’ll lead, she said.
“The more I read,” Lanier said, “the more awake I became.”
One idea that she wants to implement is allowing patrol officers who live in D.C. to take home police cruisers. That’ll put more marked police cars in the community and will be an incentive to keep officers in patrol, she said.
“Take-home cars make the police officer feel proud,” she said. “A police officer who is proud of what he does is going to be a better police officer.”
Lanier has vowed to fix the court-papering issue that takes hundreds of police officers off the streets each day and costs millions in overtime. A patrol officer working 3 to 11 p.m. who makes an arrest at 10:30 p.m. will be processing the arrest until 1 a.m. and must get to court by 7 a.m. to have a prosecutor review the case and present it for arraignment. Then the officer has to catch a few hours of sleep before returning to duty that afternoon.
“It’s a morale buster,” Lanier said. “We’re going to fix that, or I’m going to die trying.”
Lanier said the District can’t sustain the crime emergencies that have been called to stem the spikes in violence. The emergencies, which allow the police chief to order mandatory six-day work weeks to put an additional 500 officers on the streets each night, are effective, but they burn out the police force and cost tens of millions of dollars.
“We need to put as much effort in stopping the crime from spiking in the first place,” Lanier said. “That’s what we all want; that’s the goal.”
