Whipped Cream Difficulties

Gregory Powell was denied parole for the 11th time a few weeks ago.

That name doesn’t ring a bell, does it?

In 1963, Powell and his buddy Jimmy Lee Smith kidnapped LAPD Officers Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger, and murdered Officer Campbell. Officer Hettinger died in 1994. Smith died a few years ago.

Sound a little more familiar now? Maybe you’ve read Joseph Wambaugh’s The Onion Field. Maybe you’ve seen the movie.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, I want to write a longer post about Wambaugh’s book and what it means to me. I’ll say for now that, at the time I read it, I was deeply moved; I still think that it is Wambaugh’s best work of non-fiction to date.

There’s a section of the book that takes place after Officer Campbell’s murder that I want to call out here. The background is that, after the murder, LAPD issued a new set of policies; among other things, cops were told never to surrender their weapons under any circumstances. Wambaugh tells us (in the third person) how he reacted to these policies. Then he cuts away to another roll call in Central Division, where

a twenty-five year policeman who preferred the one-man beat, a virtuosic beat cop, one of those who fades into police myth and legend, who rules his beat, and is frequently the very best or very worst police work has to offer

stands up and says one word:

(Language after the jump.)

“Balls!”

The entire exchange between the veteran beat cop and his sergeant goes on for four pages in the paperback edition, and is too long to quote fully here (as much as I would like to). At one point, the veteran beat cop describes being in a similar situation as Campbell and Hettinger:

“And I gave him that gun real careful, and if he wanted my Sam Browne he could have it, and if he wanted my fuckin pants and shit-stained skivvies he coulda had them too! But he didn’t, and I was allowed to walk away with my life. One last thing is that if he had told me to get in a car and drive, I woulda done that too.”

You can find this section by using Amazon to search inside the book for “Balls”; that is, if you’re too damn cheap to buy a copy and give Wambaugh a few bucks.

Here’s the end of the exchange, though, which shows the points I want to make:

“The point I’m trying to make, Sergeant,” the beat man thundered, and the sergeant fell silent, his face draining again, “is that you got to leave total fuckin authority with the cop on the street. You go tellin these young tigers here to draw against a brace and you’re goin to be buryin some of these boys one day. Cause they might be stupid enough to believe you. Now I say normally you don’t never draw against a fuckin guy that’s got you cold, or that’s got your partner cold. Sometime you might feel you can get away with it. But normally you gotta be crazy to do such a thing. In any case, you fuckin well leave it up to the man on the spot.”
“Well, the department is of the opinion…”
“One last thing and I’ll shut up,” said the beat cop. “The guys that draft these orders don’t have to live by them. They work in cushy offices and pinch plump little asses that bend over their desks every day to stir their coffee. Now this is a stupid and panicky order with no thought put into it. Everybody’s shook up by this murder and they’re panicked. Christ, it’s all you see in the papers. This order is callin Hettinger and Campbell cowards no matter how you slice it. The thing I’m wonderin is this: Does this order make me a coward too? I’m wonderin if there’s somebody in this room or even on that fuckin sixth floor who’s got enough hangin between his legs to call me a coward too?”

The takeaway from this?

1. Where do you leave your authority? With the managers who sit in cushy offices and have coffee brought to them by cute secretaries? Or do you leave your authority with the “cop on the street”; the people in your office who actually do the work, deal with the customers, and know what’s going on? How much authority and autonomy do you give them?
2. Do you think about the effect of your orders first? Or do you issue “stupid and panicky orders” in response to situations, and then have to amend those orders later?
3. When your people screw up, or even when they make decisions that you may not agree with, do you have the courage to talk to them directly? Or do you sit around and talk smack about them with your buddies in the office?
4. Do you live by the orders you draft? Or do you take the position that rules don’t apply to you?
5. When was the last time you were “out on the street”, if you will? When was the last time you sat with your people and dealt with customers? When was the last time you took incoming phone calls? Do you have any idea what your “cops on the street” deal with every day?

(A side note: there are probably people who are thinking “Hey, many of your examples are drawn from military or para-military organizations. Aren’t there other ways of leading people?” They’re right. Part of this is that I became interested in leadership through reading military history, so many of the examples I know about come from there. I’m not saying the military, or military structured organizations like law enforcement, necessarily have a monopoly on leadership, nor am I a blind worshiper of those organizations. I think they can, and have, screwed up from time to time. But I also think you can learn some pretty good lessons in leadership from organizations that send people into danger every day.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Books, California Über Alles, Law, Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.