Selecting a police chief

by Tony Bouza

Intuitively, what could be easier than selecting a police chief? Why, there must be scads of prime candidates everywhere, right? But everybody has his/her favorite. In the end, the person picked (and it can now, thankfully, be a woman) is likeliest to be someone the decision makers feel most comfortable with. Is this right? No.

Why not?

There’s nothing comfortable about picking a competent manager—and that’s what you’re looking for, and there shouldn’t be any comfort in dealing with that person. The model is of someone who’s willing to take on the ten or so tough issues everybody is sedulously avoiding.

Nothing like getting along and going along to produce comfort levels. Unfortunately, reform means taking on entrenched interests.

Like which?

Well, let’s take making a complaint about police brutality for example.

While chief, I entertained any complaint from any source and investigated to the point of being personally satisfied I knew what had happened. I supervised every single one—not a tough chore if you don’t waste time on coffee klatches and endless, pointless meetings— whether made anonymously, appearing in the press or made by a street person. My listing my name in the phone book and not having my calls screened and seeing every caller at my office insured accessibility, and reduced the prospects of gate keepers controlling my agenda.

Burdensome? Not at all, I got plenty of rest, took all my vacations and usually had a good night’s sleep.

My successors undid all this and, just to top it off, allowed the creation of a Civilian Review Board that does nothing but soak up taxpayer dollars.
And then there’s the work day. Yep, that prosaic little item. Who’d even think of that?

I allowed a very few cops to work four day ten hour shifts. A real privilege, cops love it, they get three days off each week. The few dozen I allowed had to justify their privileged status with high productivity— lots of arrests; very fast responses to emergencies and very aggressive traffic enforcement. The overwhelming majority worked eight hour tours of rotated days, evenings and nights—every month. And they were prodded to produce too.

I never asked for additional cops, feeling that my challenge was to increase the productivity of the ones we had. We implemented 911, went to one-person patrols, hired women—but a disappointing number of blacks and Indians—reduced the number of precincts from six to four and attacked the real issues of police brutality: corruption and—particularly virulent within the Minneapolis department of the seventies—partisan politics that resulted in a rotten spoils system.

There were no promotions—except for two lieutenants I was compelled to promote early on—for nine years and, at the end of that time there were still too many supervisors, most of whom didn’t really supervise anything.

Tough issues? You betcha. But they constitute just a few of the problems a chief must take on.

It all sounds self-aggrandizing and self-congratulatory but the fact is I didn’t identify these and other issues alone, I had a lot of help in every reform! The central point is to select a manager. A person who gets the mission accomplished fast, effectively and cheaply. I returned budget surpluses eight of the nine years I served and took a lot of grief from members of the city council for it. Managers get short-shrift in the bureaucracy, but you’ve got to soldier on if you believe as Cicero did, “that the good of the people is the chief voice.”

In my prejudiced view, my successors were caretakers who preferred comfort to reforms: complacent and happy to survive—and they were very good at it; one an insider and the other a compromise; neither subjected to a rigorous search process.

What might a rigorous search process look like?

Mayor Don Fraser showed us in 1979, when he went through the process of selecting an executive who would take over the problems of a totally politicized department.

Fraser created a citizen’s committee, chaired by a talented ex-FBI agent, that, with guidance and support from a personnel firm specializing in such affairs, reduced a national pool of applicants to 14 high-powered executives, not one of whom was from within the ranks of the MPD. I knew most of them—many of whom went on to become chief’s elsewhere—and they represented the cream of the police management roster in 1979.

The committee reduced the number of candidates from 14 to two after in-depth three hour-interviews. Those two then met extensively with the mayor, council and citizens. The City probably spent about $50,000 on the process.

That I was selected may well prove the fallibility of even such a careful process, but it does not invalidate its worth. There ain’t never been a horse that couldn’t be rode or a cowboy who couldn’t be throwed. I would not hold out my selection as validation of the process but it seemed to some that it produced the best prospect for a successful selection most of the time.

Think of the agony that goes into the selection of the Vikings head coach. Now, that is a process: a national search (usually) and a vigorous and informed public debate with a careful and open selection process.

I know a police chief doesn’t rise to such lofty eminence as that—but I can dream, can’t I?

In the meantime the politicians spin their wheels, urinate all over us and convince us that it’s raining.

Look up—that ain’t rain!

Tony Bouza served as Minneapolis Chief of Police from 1980 to 1989.