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11 The Police
Ask yourself why the cries for law and order come from conservative whites, most of who live safely in the suburbs. The very people who are least affected by crime are the most vocal about it. It is my people who are most affected by crime. "Affected" means brutalized. Crime's victims are the murdered, the raped, the beaten, the robbed. The black community pleads for police protection, and what it gets is indifference, or patrols by men looking for an excuse to get violent themselves. For black people, the local police are not to be supported, they are to be controlled. I took my election as a mandate to reform the Police Department. I saw as one of my most important tasks the reform of the police, the return to having our police as our protectors, men who would enforce the law, do their job, be responsive to the needs of the people. This great hope became my greatest frustration, my greatest failure. If Cleveland's Police Department is only an exaggerated version of what is wrong with most big-city police departments, that is because even the minimal controls brought to other cities in the 1960's were unavailable in Cleveland. Cleveland was in the hands of ethnics, the immigrants from Middle and East European countries. Every people has its own view of the world, a
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view wrought out of the conditions of life. Just as black Americans have a view of the world based on their being colonialized within their own country, so the ethnics brought to America a world view based on centuries of the alternating sovereignty of empire and province. These two world views came to clash in Cleveland -- quite naturally, it seems to me. I don't mean to disparage the point of view of the Middle Europeans; I am not accusing them of being congenitally stupid or lazy or not having rhythm or of eating kielbasi all the time. But I think it is unassailably true that their idea of good government for Cleveland was grossly inappropriate to an American city in the second half of the twentieth century. They had learned to respect and fear the army, and they found it all too easy to transfer that respect and fear to the police in this country. In Europe, they had learned that the symbol of authority was the man in uniform. He was the instrument of whoever happened to be in charge at the time, and he was to be feared and respected. The man in uniform was also traditionally presented as the protector, the bastion against the forces from beyond the border. That kind of respect transferred to city police becomes an aberration. Unfortunately, it happened. In 1967, when I ran for mayor, I knew about the Little Hoover Commission report, and knew from my own experience about how ingrown, defensive and isolated the department had become. And I knew that it had to become a public issue. I knew that the police, under attack, would resort to seeking public support, and I naively thought that I could, by the force of the rightness of my views, bring the public to support me. Police were no strangers to me. I had worked with them as a probation officer, during the time when I was in private practice as a lawyer, and when I was a prosecutor. I knew the department, knew the men who were corrupt and those who were clean and honest. I knew the gambling joints, horserace bookies, after-hours joints and policy and numbers operators who flourished by paying off the police. I knew the police who cooperated in fixing
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court cases, those who made a good living referring cases to lawyers, and those who had close friendships with known underworld figures. But there were men in the department for whom I had tremendous respect, and that shouldn't be forgotten. Also, to the best of my knowledge, there hasn't been such depth of corruption in the Cleveland department that its members are tied to organized crime, the selling of drugs themselves, etc., as has been proven in the police departments of New York and Chicago. I chose for my security men policemen whom I knew were among the best in the department, real professionals, the kind of men that others in the department would call "all cop." And I never felt more sick at heart than when I visited the wounded policemen after Glenville. Most were men for whom I had great respect; they were extraordinarily find police officers, and at least three of them I counted as my friends. They looked up at me from those hospital beds with what appeared to me to be withering hatred and resentment. They made me feel miserable. There was nothing I could say to them that would help. The fact is, though, that our police department happened to be a federation of fellows, some good, some bad, most conservative, some reactionary, but all almost totally lacking in the training in human relations that some departments have at least made a beginning to provide. The most obvious, and to me the most important, failure of the police was in their dealings with the black community. Black people were systematically kept out of the department, since the ruling clique was able to pass on who was accepted or rejected for appointment. The blacks who were on the force were segregated into all-black patrols and were always assigned to the ghetto. And all the police knew that few policemen faced charges or an appearance before the grand jury for shooting a black man while on duty. After four years in office, I could tell myself that the department was better equipped, had better cars and a better communications system, and that the men had more opportunities for training and education. But that's about all. The indictment of the department contained in the suppressed chapter of the 1966
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Little Hoover study is about as accurate today as it was then. The determination of those men to live by the old ways won out, we were never able to penetrate their inward ways, their cohesive hostility to any change. Part of the problem was a legacy of legal mechanics that grew out of former Mayor Tom Burke's fight with the department. When Burke went after the corruption, the police maneuvered the operational control of the department out of the mayor's hands. Under the guise of keeping the Police Department safe from political appointments, the police forced a public vote on a redefinition of the chief's and the safety director's responsibilities that stripped the director from direct control. As the charter read when I took office, the safety director merely presided over matters of policy. He could make a policy change and order the chief to implement it, but then the chief was free to do as he saw fit. The Little Hoover Commission had recommended that the job be abolished. I fully agreed with that, but, again, I knew that would take change in the city's charter, which would require a vote of the people. By the time such a move might have been available to me, Glenville had already happened, and there was no way I could take those issues into the public arena and win. Police have an amazing political power, a power that has mushroomed in the last few years with the advent of the big-city crime scare. The mental attitude on the part of the people that gives the police that power is reminiscent of the Cold War attitudes of the American public in the early 1950's, when a politician could be ruined if he got stuck with the label "soft on Communism." I think today's fear of crime, which is also a thinly disguised fear of black people, is very like that older fear of the menace of internal Communism. The police today are able to exploit that fear of crime into public support of themselves as an institution, even when, as in Cleveland, the very things they are trying to perpetuate are the things that keep them from being able to effectively attack crime. Fear is not subject to rational discourse, so legitimate issues of reform can be quickly confused
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and discredited with an emotionally charged rhetoric of danger. All I ever asked of the police was that they enforce the law. I wanted it enforced evenly, fairly, vigorously, and with some understanding of the society we have come to live in. I wanted the hand to come down on all who were doing wrong, even were it someone close to me. To every one of my appointees I gave the same story: "You are going to have the opportunity to do wrong, to make money under the table. If you take it, keep that first dollar and frame it, because when you get caught you're going to taste the full measure of the law." I told the black radical militants: "I want you to work with me, cooperate with me, The extent to which you will, I am going to help you all I can. But when you go past me, you better understand that I am going to step back and you are going to have to face that white cop." And to my police chiefs I gave one basic instruction: "Make your men enforce the law. You do that and you will never get any interference from me." I was so concerned with the fairness and even-handedness from the police because I knew that law and order was the most sensitive issue for the first big-city black mayor. Even though the overwhelming majority of crimes were committed against black people, and were allowed to go almost uninvestigated because the white police had long ago decided to vigorously enforce the law only when the victims of crime were white, the white majority was afraid I was going to let all those blacks take up guns and run around killing white people. So my first move, on the very night of my election, was to appoint my safety director. Joseph McManamon and I shared a commitment to reforming the department, and I knew his closeness to me. And he was an Irishman. The two of us sat down to pick out a police chief. Michael J. Blackwell had picked up the nickname "Iron Mike" during probation days, when he led a bunch of theatricalized raids on bootleg joints. He made a great picture, swinging axes against garage doors and barrels of booze. He was the picture of the Irish cop, tall and straight, with a big square bright-red face. When I came into office he had long since made full
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inspector, but he had repeatedly passed over when other mayors were looking for police chiefs. That, by itself, made me think there was probably something good to be said for him. But that wasn't enough. There was a lesson to be learned through my experience with Iron Mike. You don't take a man who has spent his life with uniforms, rules and regimentation and ask him to go out and wrench the very system that has given him his living. Mike Blackwell was a good man, but we got him too late. He was sixty-six and set in his ways. Our first attempt to change things was to reassign the men so that we would have more patrolmen on the streets. The Little Hoover Commission report -- in the suppressed chapter -- bore me out. And later it said, "Almost six percent of the sworn personnel are classified as light-duty personnel. Those on light duty during the study had been so classified an average of more than four years; one has been on light duty for 40 years. Many able personnel are assigned to unimportant duties." I made my move, and we began to learn the truth of the first two sentences of the last paragraph of the report: "Cleveland must look forward to a difficult period. The exponents of the status quo will be articulate, a period of confusion is inevitable, and some mistakes will be made." Using the commission's recommendations as guidelines, McManamon ordered the transfer of more then 280 men. He created twenty-five new basic patrol zones, taking men out of the Traffic Bureau, the Ports and Harbors Unit, the Task Force (which had developed techniques that honed harassment and brutality to a fine edge), the administrative and technical services, and the Detective Bureau. He also ordered the transfer of some black police to the all-white West Side, and put some police who had been working in civilian dress back into uniform. All this was to be accomplished by December 1, 1967, about two weeks after I took office. Blackwell was supposed to supervise the transfers, but in fact all he did was sign the transfer papers prepared by the ruling
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clique, and they made the transfers as awkward, embarrassing and infuriating to the police as possible. They would take a busy intersection where the same policeman had been stationed for years and had become not only efficient but popular, and move the man out, leaving a wake of angry motorists and pedestrians. They took long-time veterans from the far West Side and transferred them to the far northeast side -- just as white, but ten miles farther from their homes. Men were taken from enforcing traffic laws on the West Side to enforcing rape, murder, and robbery laws in the heart of the ghetto. The department's ability to comply with an order and thwart its purpose at the same time was uncanny. The police began feeding reporters stories about low morale, and insinuations of police problems began regularly appearing on the evening television news and in the newspapers. The public began to be concerned for their safety. That damn black mayor was going after their protection. Poor Mike Blackwell. I believe his sympathies were with me, but he was simply not in control. A clique of senior police officers actually ran the Cleveland Police Department -- no matter who was chief. (it is a measure of my failure that three years later, when I realized I could do no more, I achieved a measure of peace with the department only by appointing one of the clique, Lewis Coffey, chief.) I had done more for Blackwell than any mayor in his forty-three years on the force. But the clique held more power over him than I. We began to have Blackwell-McManamon feuds, all dutifully reported in the media. The editorial writers were demanding that the mayor step in and put things in order. When Glenville hit, I saw how hopeless things were. Blackwell had absolutely no control over his men, and in a crisis he had no idea what to do. His loyalty to me during the week of Glenville was great, but it was simple loyalty -- no imagination, no drive. It was a great opportunity to single out the most vicious men on the force and transfer them to posts where they couldn't exercise their hatreds, but he let it pass. Glenville had released all the hatreds, and the men felt no compunction about voicing them
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publicly. McManamon saw it and made one public announcement in which he said he was going to find the "snakes under the rocks" and get them off the streets. The day after McManamon said that, Lieutenant Harry Leisman was sitting in a bar about a block from the police station talking to a lawyer and a couple of reporters. It was shortly after Glenville, and Leisman had been quoted in the newspapers as saying that on the night of July 23 he had "shot at shadows." "You know when McManamom said that about snakes under rocks?" he said that night. "He meant me." And he laughed. Harry Leisman was no laughing matter. Known as "Harry the Cop." Leisman was the epitome of everything you don't want in a cop. Leisman attributed society's ills to "Jews, niggers and Commies," and could quote at length from the 1928 manifesto of the American Communist Party to prove his points. He pointed with pride to his car trunk containing a variety of weapons. On or off duty, he always carried a private gun in his hip pocket. Harry was perfectly right: McManamon did mean him. Joe transferred him downtown, out of the ghetto where he had been stationed. But it takes more drastic action to rid a department of the Harry Leismans. McManamon tried his best. I saw the mess we were in and saw no way we could beat the police at their political game. We couldn't break up the clique. McManamon wanted to throw the rules away, beat them and bring them under control. But I had to ask him, "How can we win?" The charter put the operative power into the hands of the chief, not the safety director and not the mayor. We had only one move: fire the chief. I gave McManamon authority to begin looking for a candidate to replace him, but I advised him to move cautiously; we knew about the repercussions that would follow if the men found out about it before it was a fact. I was reluctant to get into public fights with the department, because I knew we didn't have the ear of the media. They have police reporters who work with them every day. They plant stories to their hearts' content. If they found out we
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wanted to replace Blackwell, I would have taken another beating in the newspapers. My hands would have been tied. Joe and I agreed that we should try to get a man from within the department -- one that Joe felt was honest and could be trusted. My next chief of police was widely known as the straightest cop in the city. Patrick L Gerity and Joe McManamon had gone to the Police Academy together and had served together. Joe was very high on him. Gerity had never been part of the clique, and for his rectitude he had been given a captain's rank and a desk in the Detective Bureau and everything was routed around him. No one could say he had ever been on the take. And he was a loner. Gerity went to work. He transferred Inspector Lawrence Choura and Lieutenant Henry Doberstyn, who, Gerity told me, had given him hell in the past. Within the next week he made several more transfers; within the week after that he somehow got turned around by the department; and withint two weeks after that he was holding news conferences giving me hell for trying to interfere with the way the Police Department was being run. I don't know which turned him on more, working with the police against me or seeing himself on television, but whichever it was, it transmogrified the straightest cop in the city into just another politician for the police. For the next eight months we fought almost constantly and in public. It was fast ruining everything I hoped to do in the department. I remember that after one fight there was a meeting of the Fraternal Order of Police, and when Gerity entered the room all the men stood up and cheered him. It was clearly an ovation for his opposing me. A day or two after that he was talking to me and he said, "Mayor, I want you to know every man in that room stood up and cheered when I walked in." "Gee," I said, "don't policemen always stand up when the chief comes in?" "They didn't for Blackwell," he said We had lost him forever -- the loner had found friends. Meanwhile, all this was taking its toll on Joe McManamon. He had chosen two men, both good men, and they had both
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turned on him. It was beginning to affect his health. But he never turned away. Right to the last he kept asking me to turn him loose, let him take on the department. The fact that such a man could not function in the job points up the need to look seriously at the job of safety director or police commissioner. It has no power, only frustration. There is apparently room for only one person between the mayor and the Police Department. He can either be the chief or the safety director. Since we couldn't do that, we tried to do the next best thing -- hire a safety director who would pick his own chief, let them both be from outside the city, let them take over at the same time, and see if we could clean house. Just at the time that we were beginning to look for a replacement for Joe, Richard Peters, one of my executive assistants, and former editor of the New York World-Telegram, read that one of the military's remarkable men, Air Force Lieutenant General Benjamin O. Davis Jr., was retiring. The general had spent part of his youth in Cleveland. Peters wondered aloud whether such a man, a military man, a leader of men, and, beyond that, a black man, might not be just what Cleveland needed. The possibilities struck me. A military man! A general! Black or no, the police would have to respect him. And, being black, he would have to be the kind of man who would agree with what I wanted to do. In retrospect, I can only say that it was my desperate need that drove me to such foolishness. I had in my own mind only one memory that concerned him, and that was a memory of not him but his father. I remembered how, when I was young, his father had sent a tremor of revulsion through America's black community by standing up as the nation's first black general and addressing his all-black troops with these inspiring words: "I may be your color, but I am not your kind." I ignored the memory and allowed myself to be carried into the greatest personal debacle of my career. I called a local black physician, Dr. Middleton Lambright, who I had heard was a friend of the general. He said their families had grown up together. We said nothing more on the
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phone, but I added that we would talk more later. I had learned that it was unwise to conduct business on the phone; I assumed that the phone and my office were bugged by the police. I had been told that Captain George Sperber, head of the Intelligence unit, had my office bugged. I have no way of knowing whether that was true of not, and I never let John Little call in an expert to examine the office. My thinking was that if they were determined to listen, they would find a way, and calling in experts every couple of weeks to debug the office wouldn't solve anything. I simply resolved to conduct my business elsewhere, and in unpredictable patterns. In this case, I sent Dick Peters out to ask Dr. Lambright to call the general and ask him if he would be willing to talk to us about the possibility of taking the job of safety director. The general said he would talk. Peters went to Florida to talk to him and came back impressed. Next, Joe and Ann McManamon went to interview him and came back impressed. He said absolutely the right things, exuded confidence, saw the Cleveland situation as a challenge, was a great admirer of mine, etc. Then I did something I had not done before, I left the city without my security men. It was imperative that nobody learn that we were considering a replacement for Joe until we actually had somebody; the police would have become impossible to deal with under such circumstances. John Little drove me to the airport. I carried no bags and paid cash for my ticket to Tampa. After I was on the plan, John Little called the people in Florida and told them when and where I would arrive so that they could pick me up. When I arrived at the general's office, he said, "I want you to meet my boss." It had never occurred to me he had a boss, but of course it had to be true. There are generals and then there are generals. Davis had three stars, and his boss had four. I was struck by his subservient manner to the white general with four stars, but then I thought, what the hell, I don't understand the military, never have and never will, maybe that's the way things have to be done. Then we went to the general's home, a very nice ranch-style
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house. He had an aide (which rhymes with maid), a sergeant, working there, and now I was struck at how authoritative, clipped and overbearing he was with the black sergeant. I couldn't understand how anybody could take such a tone with someone working in his own home, but again I thought, it's the military, we'll let this one pass. I patiently explained to him the problems I had been having with the police department, the quandary we were in, told him what I thought the department needed, explained that we wanted to bring him and a new police chief in at the same time, that he would have approval of the new chief. He replied: "Had a situation like that in the Army, knew how to handle it. Don't worry. Glad to come. We'll take care of it, Mr. Mayor. Great admirer of yours. Delighted to handle this for you. I understand it. Something has to be done, we'll do it." He promised to be in Cleveland by January 31, 1970, the date his retirement became effective. Talk about crisp. The guy talked like a telegram. Sitting there so straight he looked like he was still standing up, Davis exuded a confidence that quite simply overwhelmed me. Now I knew what a "commanding presence" was. And he was physically perfect for the part. More than six feet tall, slim, fine featured and light-skinned, wavy gray hair, just the sort of appearance to offset the fears of the white police. When I left Tampa I was on cloud nine. I had them now. That damn Police Department wouldn't have a chance. Now that we had our safety director, we needed advice about a new chief of police. How do you get a police chief without the police knowing about it? Police have what amounts to a national grapevine. We knew that as soon as we started making inquiries about any individual the word would get back to Cleveland. We called in Patrick V. Murphy, later the police commissioner of New York. We sneaked him into town, rushed him to my brother's law office, and later sneaked him back out. He approved of what we were doing and made a pitch for us to get James Ahern, then police chief in New Haven and one of the most
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outstanding law-enforcement men in the country. Ahern has since left police work, but he was an exemplar of what a police officer must be in these times. We contacted Ahern. He agreed to come to Cleveland and discuss the matter. He warned against any publicity that would compromise his situation in New Haven. The night he arrived, John Little and Joe McManamon went over and talked to him in his room. I was to meet him the next morning for breakfast. When I arrived that morning, he told me that he had gone down to one of the hotel restaurants for dinner that night before and that a man had walked over to him there and asked whether he was James Ahern. He had tried to disavow who he was, he said, but the stranger clearly knew him. By the time we finished our breakfast, the first edition of the Press was out and there it was, a front-page article about how Ahern of New Haven was in town to talk to Stokes about becoming police chief. That made it impossible for us to talk further. A lousy newspaper article and we lost the chance of getting the best police chief in the country. In December, I went to the annual meeting of the National League of Cities in San Diego and poured out my troubles to Jerome Cavanagh, who was finishing his last year as mayor of Detroit. Cavanagh was the dean of our breed, the first of the liberal, activist big-city mayors -- a man who had been able to take the reins at the height of the movement in the 1960s and had drawn bright young people to his government. He was in a position to teach the basics to the rest of us. In 1969, though, he was on the way down. His personal life had fallen apart, his city had suffered the worst riot in the country in the terrible summer of 1967, he had been tied to scandal, and he didn't stand for reelection. The mayor-elect, Roman Gribbs, was also at the San Diego meeting. I didn't have to spell it all out to Cavanagh, because Cleveland's Police Department troubles were already known amoung the mayors. Cavanagh knew how backward the department was and how difficult it was for me to attack. He knew, too, that I needed a new chief who would be clean and tough, a man who could resist the pressures of the clique. He
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gave me two names and said both men had excellent records. I gave the names to Dick Peters and told him to check them out. The first man turned out to be too old, no longer interested in taking a challenge as tough as Cleveland's. The other man was William O. Ellenburg, a police chief and safety director of Grosse Point, Detroit's most exclusive suburb. Until four years earlier, Ellenburg had been an officer in the Detroit Police Department. Peters went to the library files of the Detroit newspapers and found nothing but good stories about Ellenburg, cases he had broken, numerous awards and citations he received, and a story on his retirement dinner, attended by two thousand and presided over by Roman Gribbs, who at that time had been Wayne County sheriff. At this point in our search, my paranoia left us vulnerable. I was mortally afraid of having the Cleveland police find out we were looking for a replacement for Gerity -- I didn't want any more damn newspaper stories. We had had enough. And I knew that if we started asking around the law-enforcement agencies about Ellenburg the word would get back to our own department with dispatch. The grapevine would kill us. It seemed to me the newspaper clippings, coupled with Cavanagh's strong recommendation, were good enough evidence that we had a good man. Peters talked with Ellenburg and reported that he was eager to take on the Cleveland department, that he understood the needs and agreed that we had to bring in more black police and to work with instead of at the community. Ellenburg flew to Tampa and had a day-long meeting with General Davis. The General phones me afterwards to say Ellenburg seemed to be a good man. That sealed it. I told Ellenburg he was hired. My package was complete. The public knew General Davis was coming but didn't know specifically when, nor whether he'd be police chief or safety director. On Monday, January 26, 1970, at about 11 A.M. I let the other shoe drop. I announced that William Ellenburg was our new police chief and that he would begin his duties immediately. Earlier that day, prior to the
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announcement, Ellenburg and I had met with all the top police command officers and I introduced them to their new chief. They were shocked and startled but understood it was now a fait accompli. Chief Gerity's usually florid face turned ashen. But when Ellenburg turned in his resignation to the Grosse Point mayor, the word began to move around Detroit, and as the reporters at the Detroit Free Press got wind of it, and old story about Ellenburg, one that had been lying around just under the surface for seven years, reared its head. Had Ellenberg stayed in Grosse Point, had he not been appointed by this black mayor in Cleveland, I have no doubt the story would have never become public. The source of the Ellenburg story was a notoriously discredited Detroit figure. He claimed that in 1963, seven years ago, Ellenburg and two other Detroit cops had been paid off to allow an abortion operation to flourish in the city. The authorities had previously checked rumors of this story out and, apparently, found nothing, because Ellenburg continued to work for the department for three more years, and retired with honor and a testimonial dinner. When the story of his appointment in Cleveland started going around, the source surfaced again, telling his story to the Free Press and to Lou Gordon, a talk-show host on a UHF television station in Detroit. The Free Press people put in a call to the Plain Dealer in Cleveland about the middle of the week, and they immediately dispatched Donald Bartlett, then their chief investigative reporter, to Detroit. The Sunday before Ellenburg was to be sworn in as chief in Cleveland, both the Free Press and the Plain Dealer ran their articles on the charges although they did disclose the doubtful reliability of their source. And that night the taped interview with Lou Gordon was played on the television station. The most significant thing about all these stories was that there was absolutely no evidence brought forth beyond the bare allegations. The seven-year-old allegations of a desperate and disreputable man suddenly became page-one banner headlines
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on Sunday, February 1, just six days after my appointment of Ellenburg. It was one of the greatest journalistic disservices done during my four years as mayor. The Plain Dealer broke the story obviously knowing it dubious reliability, since admittedly it rest solely on the word of an alcoholic Mafia informer under indictment. It was pure sensationalism. They could only reply to me that they had a duty to report the news. The other policemen that the source said were linked to Ellenberg and the abortion operation continued to serve with the Detroit Police Department. They served under Patrick Murphy, one of the finest, toughest, and fairest police chiefs in the country, a man who went on to try to weed out the bad cops in the police Department of New York City. It seems obvious that there was no basis in fact for the charges. That Sunday night I went on television, denounced the Plain Dealer roundly and said that until something solidly factual was turned up about Ellenburg, he was gong to be my police chief. I told them that following Monday night's City Council meeting I'd go to Detroit and investigate this matter myself. I was understandably distressed over the entire matter, but even more so because on Monday, February 2, we were having this massive civic luncheon to welcome the General back to his home town and present him to the public as our new safety director. The luncheon went off well nonetheless. Ellenburg accompanied me, the General, and Mrs. Davis to the luncheon. The papers said the Statler Hotel Grand ballroom had never had so many people in it before. The General was absolutely unperturbed over the Ellenburg affair. I swore him in and he delivered a ringing and applause-evoking acceptance speech. Earlier that morning, Ellenburg had had a press conference to respond to the Plain Dealer story. That afternoon, I watched a replay of the conference. The reporters descended on him like hungry mice on a piece of cheese. I knew my trip to Detroit was imperative. I left that night accompanied by Detective Tony Midolo, who had for long been a top investigator in the Homicide Unit. Immediately upon my arrival in Detroit I called Jerry Cavanagh.
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"Jerry I have to talk to you about this," I told him. "Let's have breakfast downtown tomorrow," he said. "If I have you come out to the house they may be watching." "I don't care if they are watching you, Jerry. If this guy is all right, what difference does it make if I'm seen coming to your house?" "I just think it will be best all around if we meet in public," he said. I hung up. He certainly wasn't talking the way he had in San Diego. I didn't know what problems he had, but he was obviously not being forthright about the situation. The next morning we met in a Detroit hotel restaurant for breakfast. The newsmen were all around, and while we ate they took their pictures and asked their questions, to which we gave noncommittal answers. Finally they left and I said to Cavanagh, "What is this stuff about Ellenburg?" "Hell, that story's been around for years, there's nothing to it." He said. There was nothing more to say. He had known and hadn't told me about it. The breakfast was over. So was my last chance to get an outside police chief to clean up our department. I then made the rounds of all the law-enforcement agencies. I talked to Pat Murphy and to Mayor Gribbs, who had presided at Ellenburg's dinner while sheriff, and although I turned up nothing to substantiate the charges, I knew that the ugly aspects of the story would stick to me. I flew back to Cleveland with my mind full of questions, trying to reason out whether I could afford to take both the department and the newspapers over this issue. Fortunately, I didn't have to make the decision. I returned home to a meeting of my closet advisers. We held the meeting at my house. There were about eight of us, including the general and Ellenburg. We discussed the matter for a while and then Ellenburg said he wanted to talk to me privately. We went into another room. "I could have gone anywhere in the United States." He said, "and this story never would have broken. But you happen to be a black mayor and you appointed me. I have known about this
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story for the longest time. It never meant a damn thing to anybody, but I don't think you can survive with me here." A great weight had been lifted. I thanked him for offering his resignation and apologized for having to accept it. We went back into the room with the others and I told them what Ellenburg had said. Everybody agreed it was the right move. Wednesday, February 4, ten days after his appointment, Ellenburg announced his resignation. I called the general in to talk about a new police chief." "Don't worry, Mr. Mayor," he said. "Just give me a man. I don't care who he is. We'll get the job done." The next day we called in Inspector Lewis Coffey and offered him the job, and he accepted. It was the one right move I made. I came to love the guy. With the kinds of problems I had with the department, Coffey was the perfect man to settle things down. He just kept on doing things the way they had always been done, but he wasn't to be drawn into those debilitating fights with the administration. He was a cop, not a politician. And he was a gentleman. He became the fourth and last Police Chief I was to appoint. The political costs of changing chiefs had run their gamut. I told Coffey to go out and enforce the law and I would not interfere. I resolved to turn my mind to other things. I had the general our there; if any reform was to come, it would be through his doing. I just had to let him carry the ball. But what happened was that after two years of constant fights between my safety director and the Police Department, I found that I had made one of them one of us. The signs had been there. First of all, there was my own memory of the general's father. Then when the appointment was announced, a newspaper in Tampa reported that in his two years there the general had never attended an affair given by the black community. Something I didn't know about until later was that when rumors of his appointment got around, the Police Department people did their own check of his background and told Tom Boardman at the Press, "This is the kind of man we can
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live with." Later, after Davis had left, I received a number of calls and letters from black servicemen who had served with him, and they al said essentially the same thing: We never understood why you hired him in the first place. He never was any damn good. I should say here that I bear the general no personal animosity. The difficulties we had have to be recounted because they point up precisely the problems with the Police Department. That the general was hopelessly the wrong man for the job I had in mind should have been apparent to me before I ever appointed him. But it wasn't. I kept fixing on the point of his being both a general and a black. It has not occurred to me that success in the military is almost totally unrelated to success in the rest of the world. I came to understand that only as I watched the general in action and realized he hadn't the slightest conception of what civilian life was like -- that authority and power cannot be unquestioned in the civilian world. The military had left him with a catechism understanding of human life. He had to read it from the book. The book gave status, authority, and it bestowed all rights. The general had quickly demonstrated an extraordinary ability for public relations. He called in Chief Coffey and informed him that not only was the mayor determined to keep out of the chief's handling of the operational functions but the, the safety director, was equally determined to keep out of it. He told the chief he just wanted to be kept informed. Within a matter of weeks, he had arranged his schedule so that he arrived at seven-thirty in the morning, took care of his mail, dictated replies, made his phone calls and was gone by early afternoon. When the weather turned, he was gone by noon to play golf at least two days a week. The police fell madly in love with him. At first, he had kept an open door. When he discovered that the citizenry included bushy-haired, ill-spoken, angry young men wearing dashikis and carrying absolutely no respect for him, his position or status, he changed his policy. He was appalled at the very idea of having to listen to people that he would never
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deign to recognize socially. Jim Stanton loved him, the newspapers loved him, the white community loved him. When it all came down around my ears six months later, Tom Vail's bat boy, Tom Guthrie (who later became executive editor of the Plain Dealer), wrote a column about playing golf with the general. Allowing that he didn't want to judge the situation between the general and the mayor, he said that the general was certainly a straight shooter on the course, and such a man is usually a straight shooter in life. One evening I was listening to the six-o'clock news. Paul Briggs, superintendent of public schools, announced there had been an escalation of violence by adult whites against young black children being bused to school in Collinwood, a predominantly Italian and Slovenian neighborhood. Briggs said the school would not open the next day because the police said they couldn't guarantee the safety of the black youngsters. I immediately phoned Briggs and asked him to meet me at City Hall at 8 P.M., then called General Davis and requested that he and Chief Coffey come to the Hall and also send out police cars to bring all members of the school board to my office. At the Hall, I told all of them I'd be damned if I was going to let the school be closed in my city because the police wouldn't safeguard little black boys and girls from white hoodlums. In their presence, I called Governor Rhodes, related the facts and requested that the National Guard be sent in. Rhodes called me back in fifteen minutes and said there'd be six hundred guardsmen in the area by 6 A.M. Paul Briggs and I went to the television station and announced that the troops would be in Collinwood the next day, the school would be open and the children being bused in would be protected. I then ordered the general and Chief Coffey to personally be on the scene and see to it that the police did their job. The general said, "I will send an observer, Mr. Mayor." "No, General, I want you out there," I told him. "If the observer sees a need for me, sir, I will go," he said. "General," I said, "there is nothing that it going to substitute
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for the chief of police, the head of the National Guard and your presence out there." "Well, if you are insisting that I go." "General, I am ordering you to go." " Yes, sir. I will be there, sir." And he became a hero. There is nothing quite so impressive as that tall, ramrod figure of the general, and there he was, out in the thick of things. The media picked it up, of course, but they could never have know that the general had to be ordered to go out there. Shortly after that, Kimber Wald, my purchasing commissioner, came into my office and said, "Mayor, did you know the Safety Department was ordering dumdum bullets?" I certainly didn't, but I said I would get to the bottom of it. I called the general in and asked him about it. "No, sir. Certainly not. Under no circumstance would we use dumdum bullets. No use for them." I called Kim Wald back and assured him the matter was taken care of and not to worry about it. Three weeks later, Wald came into my office with a requisition form and said, "Mayor, I thought you said that the police weren't going to order the dumdum bullets." He handed me the form and there it was, right in the middle of the department's shopping list, and order for dumdum bullets. I immediately sat down and had -- wrote a note and told a secretary to carry it to the general. It said, in effect: "General Davis, approximately three weeks ago I brought to your attention the fact that it was understood that dumdum bullets were being purchased by the Police Department for general use. I had told you then that the policy of this administration was that the police would not have and would not use dumdum bullets in this city. You are ordered to take whatever steps are necessary to revoke the request of your department for these bullets. About fifteen minutes later, I was sitting in Dick Murway's office when the general strode in and said, "Mr. Mayor, I have gotten your memorandum and I want you to know I was telling you the truth when I told you the department was not ordering
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dumdum bullets. The department was ordering bullets for general use on the target ranges." "General," I said, "what would they be having target practice with dumdum bullets for?" "There is less danger of ricocheting when you shoot dumdum bullets." I said, "General, do you understand that we are not to use dumdum bullets for any reason in this city while I am mayor and you are safety director?" He went into his West Point act, an amazing sight. His waist drew in, his chest expanded, his chin tucked in, his face went red and he grew about three inches and said, "Yes. Sir." He wheeled and strode out into the corridor. After that, my relations with the general deteriorated. I was tired of fights with the police, but at this time there just didn't seem to be any way of avoiding them. One of the most important fights -- and one that was still going on last year in Cleveland -- was over the country's new Criminal Justice Center, a forward-looking concept that grew out of President Lyndon Johnson's Law Enforcement Assistance Agency proposals. After Johnson announced the LEAA, New York's John V. Lindsay immediately moved to set up a Criminal Justice Coordinating Council in his city, made up of representatives of every part of the justice system. For a time, Lindsay's council was the only one in the country. My law director, Clarence James, came across the concept at a criminal law seminar and returned to Cleveland very excited about it. We sent him to New York to study its systems and then proceed to establish our own with LEAA funds. One of the first study committees we appointed produced the concept of a criminal-justice center in which all the different components of the justice system would be housed and, presumably, coordinated -- the courts, the probation and parole departments, the sheriff, the police and the jail. We went on to lay out plans for the center, came up with a $60-million bond issue to build it, submitted it to the voters and,
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happily, got it approved. But the police did their best to avoid being coordinated. They wanted to keep their own little fiefdom away from everybody else. The City Council had already approved $10 million in bonds for a new central police station, and we had to decide whether the police would be included in the justice center to know whether those $10 million would go toward making up the cost of the center. The issue had to be settled. The general and the police had been meeting, and the rest of us had been meeting. Finally, we had a joint meeting -- the general, Chief Coffey and several police officers, County Commissioner Hugh Corrigan, H. Chapman Rose of the Greater Cleveland Growth Association (our form of Chamber of Commerce), and myself. One of the police pulled out a tape recorder and put it on the table. "What is the purpose of that?" I asked. Coffey said, "Well, Mayor, we just wanted to know where everybody stands, and we thought we would have it on record." "I think that is not necessary in a meeting like this, and I would rather that you not use it, if you don't mind." Clearly, we were off to a fine start. The police presented their response to a traffic study we had to do on the area of the proposed center. They had earlier advanced the idea that they couldn't be in the center because the traffic was too heavy in the immediate downtown area. We had had a study done which showed that their objections were not without basis. They presented more objections. There was no question in my mind that the police headquarters belonged in the justice center, and there was no doubt in my mind about why the police didn't want to be there. The wanted to be off by themselves. I think of a description of their attitude later given me by George O'Connor, my last safety director: "These fellows are still thinking about the old police days when huge doors would roll up and Black Marias would come screaming out with their lights flashing, zooming off somewhere into the night. They may not have known where they were going, but it was at least out of there." We sat tossing around the police objections, and finally I told them we would
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meet again and at that time I would give a definitive answer on the issue of whether to include the Police Department in the justice center. The next day, June 30, I wrote General Davis a memo:
The following day I received this reply from the general:
This from the man who had been heading the project for us for the last six months. He refused to oppose the Police Department. This avoidance of responsibility was typical of the military establishment in which he had been such a success. His apparent strength had come from the institution, not himself. This big, strong, crisp man, placed in a position of having to depend on conviction and personal strength, had wilted. He was the safety director; if the problem was beyond his ken, who was supposed to understand it? I immediately called for another meeting of the Coordinating Council that Friday. When we met, I told them that I had reviewed
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the situation and that my decision was that the best interests of the total justice process required the presence of the police in the justice-center complex; therefore, the city would build their headquarters within the justice center. "Mr. Mayor," the general said as he rose from his seat, "do I understand that your decision is to ignore the written objections of the police to this center?" This was the first of two times that the man totally confounded me. He had an ability to wait for a situation when we were on public view and then take a position so blatantly odd that I didn't know how to deal with it. "Yes Mr. Davis," I answered, "and it will be your responsibility to see that the Safety Department gives the proper cooperation to the planners of this project. Do you understand that?" "Yes, sir. I just wanted to know, Mr. Mayor, that you made the decision against police objections." The general's identification with the department had become thorough. When a friend of mine in the Service Department told me he had heard that the General had authorized the police to carry personally owned weapons, I called him in, I sent and order. Our relations had descended to the level of my dealing with him as a commanding officer. I sent him a memo:
This was a subject we had specifically discussed in Florida when I first interviewed him. You can't have police out there with guns that can't be identified later. When a man is shot, it is of the utmost importance that the police officer at he situation not be using a weapon that is not immediately identifiable. If he
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does carry such a weapon, he is in fact violating the concealed weapons laws, because although he is authorized to carry a gun, that authorization carries with it the responsibility of the government agency he works for to make certain that the gun is used only in the line of its own responsibilities. The authorization must be accountable. The abuses that carrying private weapons can give rise to are obvious. The general immediately hand-carried my memo back to me and said, "Mr. Mayor, I have to confess my being unable to carry through an instruction of yours. I received this memo. There are some very practical things in life sometimes that one has to face. Whatever I tell those police, whether I tell them to carry these weapons or not to carry them, they are going to carry them anyway. So since they are carrying them anyway, why don't we show our cooperation with them? After all, Mr. Mayor, you did have Glenville, you know." I told him that perhaps at the risk of alienating the department, the lives and welfare of the people had a greater value, that even though it was true that they would carry the guns anyway, if the policy was secure and a man was traced to the use of an unauthorized weapon, we at least had a way of bring hum up for disciplinary action. "Mr. Mayor, I do not agree with you, sir, but your instructions will be conveyed to the police." The stage was now set for the final act. The general was loved by all the white media, but the Call & Post had begun to report some of the experiences people in the black community. The general came into my office in early July and said that the Call & Post was becoming an increasingly difficult factor for him to work with as he was trying to do this job for me. Usually
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I respond when people say things to me, but I couldn't think of anything to say to that, so I just sat there. He went on to say the paper was creating tensions and made a few more remarks in that vein. Again I sat there. "Well, Mr. Mayor?" "Well, what, General?" "What are you going to do?" "What am I going to do about a newspaper? Are you kidding? Tell me this: Have they written a story that did not reflect the facts?" "I think so." "Show me that story you're talking about." "Mr. Mayor, if I have to show you the story, then I doubt very much that there is very much you would do." "General, I think you're right." "Thank you, Mr. Mayor." He got up and left. I didn't realize it, but he was building a case. He came back later and said, "Mr. Mayor, I want to talk with you about a few other people who are making it very difficult for me." He proceeded to name the Cleveland Council of Churches, the Friendly Inn Settlement House (one of a number of neighborhood centers funded by a welfare group), the Reverend Baxter Hill, a vocal militant, and the Reverend Arthur Le Mon, my own community-relations director. "Baxter Hill," he said, "must go. He makes my job impossible. He is a menace to the community." "What about Harllel?" I said. It is important to understand the difference between the two men we were discussing. Baxter Hill was head of a youth group called Pride, Inc. In the middle 1960s he had been president of the local chapter of CORE. He was sometimes loud, and fond of the "shit that's going down" rhetoric. But Pride, Inc. was basically an organization for finding summer jobs for inner-city kids, and Hill had no more real power than the director of the YMCA. Later, in 1972, he was convicted of stealing federal funds that had gone into his jobs program. He was a petty thief. I
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mention that just to point up the difference. Harllel X (formerly Jones) is a currently serving a life sentence for conspiracy to commit murder. He was a powerful force in the ghetto. Unquestioned leader of the Afro Set, a group so strong locally that they were able to keep the Black Panthers from even establishing a local chapter, Harllel didn't fool around. "Harllel I can live with," the general said, demonstrating a gross naivete about his subject, "but Baxter Hill must go." "How do you suggest I make him go?" "Well, doesn't he have this organization, Pride?" "Yes." "Are they not funded by Cleveland: NOW?" "Either that or the Mayor's Council on Youth Opportunity." "Then it's very simple, Mr. Mayor -- just cut off his money." "General, everything I know about Baxter Hill can be summed up in his being vexatious and contentious. But he has been one of those who has been helpful in the resolution of community tensions." "But he's causing me tensions, Mr. Mayor, and if I'm going to do my job, he will have to go." "General. What about these others you mentioned. Are they in the same position?" "Yes, sir." "What about the Council of Churches?" What do you suggest I do with them?" "This metropolitan council of theirs, aren't they funded by the United Appeal?" "Yes, I think so." "Mr. Mayor, you have some very close ties with heavy financial contributors to the United Appeal, and if you would talk with them, telling them that maybe this is an organization that maybe they shouldn't be contributing to, I am sure they would be responsive to you." "General, do you realize what you are asking?" "Yes, sir." "Now, just a minute. The United Appeal is made up of some of
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the most respected organizations in the city, and when they fund an agency it is only after a very careful review by several agencies within their framework." "I understand that." "This metropolitan council is an integral part of a federation of churches that consists of more than seven hundred of Greater Cleveland's most respected, stable Protestant churches." "That has nothing to do with it, Mr. Mayor. If you make the request, I am sure they would honor your request." "I'm just not going to do that. That isn't even in the periphery of the kinds of things I am willing to do." "Fine. Is your answer the same about Reverend Le Mon?" "Will you please tell me what Reverend Le Mon has done wrong?" "He's one of the organizers." "Organizers of what?" "Of those people out there. And he is directly under your control, Mr. Mayor. You don't have to ask anybody about firing him." "Well, General, I am not going to fire him." "Fine. Thank you sir." And he got up and walked out. It was clear to me that I had a problem. But I still didn't realize what the man could do. One week later I found out. On Sunday I got a phone call from a friend who had been at a party the night before given by Art Modell, the owner of the Cleveland Browns. The general had been at the party and had spoken to several people about resigning as safety director. I couldn't believe it. In the first place, we had an agreement that he would stay one year. I learned sometime in the spring that he had already committed himself to take a job the Pepperdine College in California later that same year, but I still expected him to serve out most of his agreement with me. More than that, I had to assume that if he was seriously thinking about quitting, he would give me an indication. However, I realized I had better talk to him about what he was saying at that party. The next morning I talked to John Little about it and then sent him over
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to see the general. He returned to tell me that the general had left work, was going to see his dentist, and would be back at 11 A.M. Then I saw the Plain Dealer. One of their executives had apparently been at the party, too. The paper banner-headlined a speculative article, without comment from Davis, that he was going to resign that day. I went in to the cabinet meeting. The general's executive assistant, William Hendrickson, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, came in and handed me an envelope. I opened the cabinet meeting, and as things began to proceed I opened the envelope. In it was a handwritten letter, very short, very devasating:
I called Dick Murway over, handed him the letter and told him to alert the press that I would have a news conference after I talked with the general. We finished the cabinet meeting and then I called in Bill Silverman, Sid Spector, John Little and Murway, and kicked the problem around with them for about an hour. We came to no conclusions. At that time we didn't know how bad it was. Then the first edition of the Press came out carrying the full story, with the general's letter quoted in full. Now we knew how bad it was. This damn hero was accusing me of harboring criminals; suddenly all the racist rumors about me were confirmed. At 11 A.M., Colonel Hendrickson was called over again. Where was the general? Well the general had finished with the dentist and was now out taking his wife to lunch. I wrote out a short message that said, "Dear General, I have read the newspapers. You are requested to be in my office at 3 P.M."then I told Hendrickson, "You find him and deliver this to him." About ten minutes to three, the general appeared in my office,
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looking pleased, as if he were coming over to wish me happy birthday. "Mr. Mayor?" "General, we have been looking for you." "Well, Mr. Mayor, I had thought that my letter was sufficient and there really wasn't much need of our talking." "I just thought that it would be a kind of courtesy that would have been afforded anyone." "No slight intended. What can I do for you?" I wish the language had some equivalent for those exclamation points and question marks they used to signal strange moves in the reporting of chess matches. Words aren't good enough at a time like this. I looked at him a moment and said, "You use some very strong language in your letter." "Yes, sir." "I am sure you appreciated the impact it would have in this city on my relationships with the people." "Yes, sir." "Will you tell me why you wrote the letter this way?" "Mr. Mayor, I have told you many times why I wrote that letter that way. "We haven't had that many conversations since you have been here. Are you referring to the talk we had about the Call & Post?" "Yes, sir." "Baxter Hill?" "Yes, sir." "The Council of Churches?" "Yes, sir." "The Friendly Inn?" "Yes, sir, Mr. Mayor, that is just what I'm talking about." "You are saying that the enemies of law enforcement are these people?" "Mr. Mayor, they are enemies of mine. Therefore they are enemies of law enforcement." We went out into the Tapestry Room to face the reporters.
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and I simply turned it over to the general. Bill Silverman had strongly advised me against a public fight with the general. The general handled the questions with the usual stiff aplomb, refusing to elaborate on the language of the letter. Never in my life was I at a lower point than during that news conference. The general had neatly ruined me. I went out to lunch with my advisers after the news conference. We talked some more about what could be done, but, for the first time, none of the possibilities seemed to make any sense. We were supposed to be brainstorming, but it was all storm and no brain. I told them I wasn't going back to City Hall and went home. Fortunately, Shirley and the children were in El Paso vacationing. I went home and let solitude do its work. I put on some records and built a fire. It was the twenty-seventh of July, middle of the afternoon, but I build a fire. I respond to a fire in the hearth; there is something soothing and contemplative about a fire that released me from my ties to my troubles. I listed to some gospel music, then to a record of Martin Luther Ling's speeches. For four hours until after 8 P.M., I sat there listening to records, drinking brandy, watching my fire and turning things over in my mined. Then I just went to bed. I woke up about 1:30 A.M. Something had come to me. I wasn't certain what it was yet, but I sat down with a legal pad and began writing; when I finished I had sixteen pages of legal pad filled (this may sound life more than it was -- I write in a huge script). I went back to sleep until seven the next morning, when I called Dick Murway and told him to get Little and Silverman to meet me with him at City Hall at 8:30 A.M. I had them read my notes and the two-phase plan I'd come up with and asked them if they could agree to that approach. They said they could, so I had Murway cut it down, make it a simple statement, and told him to call a news conference for that afternoon. Then I went for a ride and went to see a movie. And I had him. Once I understood what my problem was, I knew which way to go. I knew that Ben Davis thought the incident was over, and he was the one who wouldn't be looking for
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any public fight. But I couldn't let the thing drop with those innuendoes up in the air, feeding rumors. The general knew what he was doing, and he knew he had hit me where I suffered most. The soft underbelly of any politician's career is the set of rumors or accusations of illegal activity that stick to him. It was particularly bad for me, being black and going further to work with black militant groups than anyone else had. The general's letter, with that key phrase that all the bigots and Stokes haters could react to, had confirmed the rumors and suspicions. Within three days after the general's resignation, I had turned it around. You can go anywhere today, to any black community in the country, and ask for opinions about the general and I think I know what you will hear: the general may be just right for the Nixon Administration, but he isn't right for black folks. And I did it simply enough. The first day after his resignation, I publicly called on the general to name the enemies of law enforcement. He refused, as I knew he would. Whetting everyone's interest in why he wouldn't name names. The next day, I did so myself. At a widely attended press conference, I spelled out his so called "enemies of law enforcement" as being the Greater Cleveland Council of Churches, the Call & Post, Reverend Arthur Le Mon, Baxter Hill and the Friendly Inn Settlement House. The news reporters could hardly believe it. They dashed to find the general. But he had no other names to give them. The white clergy rose up en masse because they knew the Council of Churches was, if anything, more conservative than liberal and not at all militant. The Baptist clergy knew there was no more gentle and law-abiding member among them than Le Mon. The black community wasn't about to accept this undeserving attack on their only newspaper which had fought their battles for over forty years. Too many black people and United Appeal members knew the Friendly Inn to accept such a charge. And those who knew him only smiled at the thought of elevating Baxter Hill to the level of a danger to law enforcement. Even Tom Vail felt compelled to editorially lament the general's failure to substantiate his charges.
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This public mixture of rage, disbelief and scorn was best illustrated when General Davis literally ran down Euclid Avenue to escape an interracial group of women demanding that he retract his defamatory and dishonest statement. Shortly afterwards, the General made a quiet and ignominious retreat from Cleveland. That same week I appointed a five-man committee to search for another safety director. It was clear to me that the decision on a new man had to be out of my hands. I had brought in the general and Ellenburg, and both had turned out to be disastrous. This time, we couldn't afford the slightest shadow over the appointment. I appointed Judge Perry B. Jackson, and a councilman and three businessmen to search for a man. Three months later they came up with George W. O'Connor. O'Connor was then serving as chief of the police administrator and as an academic. He had a master's degree in criminology from the University of California. With his easy manner and impeccable credentials, O'Connor was the perfect guy to settle things down. It was a shame that we couldn't put his expertise to better use. Although he was committed to the same kind of reforms I had been looking for all along, the politics of the situation had so far deteriorated that he had no room in which to move. Besides, his arrival coincided with the defeat of our desperately needed income tax increase, and his budget was so severely cut that he had to spend most of his time trying to preserve the semblance of a police force. It was not a time for reform. Perhaps it's not true that I accomplished nothing with the police. I got some black policemen on the West Side where they had never been before, got the Civil Service Commission to revise the hiring practices to bring in better men and to make it more open to black and Spanish-speaking people. And I appointed a black chief police prosecutor, who was able to put a stop to a number of practices that had brutalized the black community. It was no longer easy to get warrants for harassment purposes, nor could police protect themselves quite so easily with
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counter prosecution when they found themselves in trouble. And every time a cop shot somebody, his case went to the grand jury, no matter what the circumstances. When the police realize such policies are unbending, they act with a little more restraint. But it is true that I accomplished none of the substantive, structural reforms of the department that I had hoped for. The department was still, as most police departments, virtually autonomous, without effective civilian control, and building exotic arsenals of vicious weapons. In 1972, as part of its $360,000 request for ordnance, the department was requesting a supply of the new nine-millimeter machine guns being made by Smith & Wesson. The order also included grenade launchers and dozens of high-powered rifles for shooting long distances. Meanwhile, though I had left them with a brand-new $6.5- million communications system they had failed to significantly reduce response time. Emergency calls were still not getting through. But no one was attacking the police for it. The mayor, Ralph Perk, was a return to European ethnic ways, sympathetic to the police Department. In fact, seeing how Perk worked with the department, I realized that my own desire to bring it under closer control by the mayor is not in itself altogether desirable. The point has to be, finally, that we need some sort of civilian control that is not subject to the routine pressures of politics. Just how that is to be set up will have to be worked out on a local basis. But the need is desperate. This country cannot afford the growth of an indigenous paramilitary privileged class getting ready for war.
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