by Phil Campbell
What about Walter Winfrey?
The question doesn't
hang in the air for long, but its implications do. Memphis Mayor
Willie Herenton had given his decree to the Memphis Police
Department director several months ago. That declaration had Old
Testament overtones, an angry god demanding an immediate reply.
It had three parts:
Re-create the Memphis Police Department in just seven days.
Bring down crime.
Or else.
Herenton came down hard on the department when he saw several uniformed police officers eating together in a restaurant during their shift. Had that not happened, things might still be the way they were the year before. No special "zero-tolerance" police unit, no accountability plan. The administrative staff might not be trying to learn how to come up with better solutions to the city's problems, using private-sector mottos as incentives to improve itself. A department that seems adrift as crime continues to rise.
So September comes, and the mayor is asked during an interview to publicly evaluate his police director. The initial crime statistics have shown some progress. Arrests are up for the first quarter. The crime rate is down slightly, one of the first drops in a long time. If things continue this way, Memphis just might catch up with some other major cities across the nation, which have been seeing massive drops in their crime levels.
But Herenton chooses to answer with a political non-answer. "Let's put it this way," the mayor said. "The police department still has a long way to go." Even after several months, Herenton was still using a Machiavellian approach to keep his director working hard. As a leader, it's better to be feared than loved, goes the philosophy. By avoiding a direct comment about Winfrey, Herenton is keeping the pressure high.
The abridged version of how Walter Winfrey got to where he is today starts last January with the mayor's outraged mandate. The real story is considerably longer, beginning 29 years ago with a young officer fresh out of the Memphis Police Training Academy, a rookie who followed orders as best as he could. The story would follow him through years of work out on the streets fighting crime and investigating fellow officers for potential misconduct in the internal-affairs division. It's a story about carefully climbing through the ranks of a para-military organization, never rocking the boat too much, maintaining a spotless record, and holding so firm to the ideas of duty, loyalty, and proper police procedure that, come one day in 1994, he reached the top of the department.
After the mayor made his demands last winter, Winfrey dutifully took the responsibility and the blame for his department's complacency. He would never contradict his boss. That was out of the question. "I told the mayor and our people that he hadn't asked us to do anything that was impossible," the 53-year-old director said shortly after the seven-day deadline had passed. At the centerpiece of restructuring was something called an accountability plan.
"The accountability plan that we've adopted is a mechanism to measure what a patrol officer does during his shift, and what his supervisor does -- and it goes all the way up to the director's office," Winfrey added.
A few weeks after Herenton gives him a ringing non-endorsement, Winfrey himself is being interviewed. He's uncomfortable. He doesn't like being the center of scrutiny. Even though the endless questions are making him late for a lunch appointment, he continues to answer them. Responding to questions from the media is part of his job, and he takes it seriously.
Before the subject of Herenton can even come up, though, Winfrey lets slip something that's on his mind. He prefaces one answer by saying: "Now, next year, if I'm here or somebody else, or whoever, they come in and they say ..."
Then, when his relationship with the mayor is brought up, Winfrey's voice wavers slightly. There's no telling what kind of private conversations the director has had with Herenton in the past several months, but it's obvious what the public relationship has been.
Winfrey answers the question slowly.
"I think [Herenton's] concerned about crime just as an individual. As the mayor, and as an individual. I am, too. I'm concerned about it. If I wasn't, I could leave, I don't have to stay. I could retire. But I made a commitment to try to reduce crime in the city, and that's why I'm hanging in there, and trying to do something. I think I can make an impact."
Judging by the way he answers, however, he's looking down almost three full decades of service, and he's not quite sure how he feels.
"No. I'm fine," he adds, somewhat tentatively.
But there is one thing that he knows,
just as everybody else does. If he's to survive, it all comes
down to one thing: lowering the crime statistics.
"This is going to be what we call a CompStat operational meeting," Winfrey tells his senior command staff. The officers are seated behind long tables at the Police Academy. The tables are formed in a horseshoe, and all eyes are directed toward Winfrey and the wall that the overhead projector is making dance with elusive numbers and crime abbreviations. CompStat, which means computer statistics, is an idea stolen from the New York Police Department, where precinct commanders are grilled each week to see if they've brought their crime incidents down. If it worked well there, popular wisdom says it will work here, too.
The next hour and a half consists of a slow process in which the heads of the six precincts are made to look at their individual wards, each marked with two numbers: arrests and incidents. These commanders can name all the streets in their area and can easily identify the busiest ward, but they don't really know what they're looking at today. Some of the wards are obviously more poverty-stricken and crime-ridden than others. What numbers should be "acceptable" for each ward? What exactly is the relationship between arrests and incidents? How quickly will the director expect results?
The CompStat concept is a new one for all, and Winfrey readily admits this. "Nothing is etched in stone. It's not concrete," he says. The director walks around the space within the horseshoe, his uniform framing his heavyset body, accentuating his desk-nurtured paunch. He carefully asks questions which might take everybody in the direction they want to go. Overbearing is not the Winfrey way. Seeing Inspector Mike Dodd show the best results in the West Precinct (Midtown), he makes those numbers a standard for the others to follow. With the others, he listens patiently to their excuses and/or concerns. After the meeting, he says, "See? I'm going to put a little pressure on them." Winfrey has been known to act with firmness, but for him to promise pressure so easily, with a knowing smile, seems out of character.
Before Winfrey leaves the CompStat meeting, he and Deputy Director William Oldham give the inspectors and deputy chiefs a new catchphrase to chew on: "Think outside of the box." The corny slogan, derived from corporate management how-to books, is meant to inspire everyone to think radically. The veteran officers crack small jokes about it, but the reasoning behind it is no laughing matter. For years, the basic theory of law enforcement had little to do with fighting crime and a lot to do with reacting to it. Police thought they could make the squad car a self-contained precinct. It took more than a decade to learn, but just responding to 911 calls wasn't enough. Things got worse in the nation's cities as drug abuse rose, crack cocaine and gangs mixed together in the inner city made one intractable, often bloody, conundrum, and the crime rate soared. Now, with other cities leading the way, Winfrey is trying to "get out of the box" of this "traditional" crime-fighting concept, and move his department to proactively fighting crime by making traffic stops, breaking up corner-store loiterers, and making sure the uniformed officers are busy from the moment they strap their gun to their side to the time their shift ends. It's the difference between bailing out a boat and patching its leak.
Put yourself in Winfrey's position. You've been working for the same organization for 29 years. Though you continue to rise through the company's ranks, the basic philosophies of that company remain unchanged. The practices which you've been using for almost three decades have, for at least that same length of time, been the basic industry standard, nationwide.
Then try to change everything you've been doing overnight because your boss promises you a pink slip if you don't.
Twenty-nine years on the force. If he had been a street cop all that time, he probably would have retired by now, a burnout from all the shootings, aggravated assaults, rapes, and other lamentable human inventions that cops are required to see. Instead, Winfrey completed officer-training seminars sponsored by the FBI. He went back to school after a decade of full-time work and got his bachelor's degree in criminal justice at the University of Memphis; his cumulative grade point average was a C+, but his performance in individual classes varied wildly, from A's in "Techniques of Crime Investigation" and in "Music Appreciation," to C's in Ethics and Elementary Spanish, to an F in Intermediate Algebra. He also got an F in Basic Marketing, which may help put some of his current political troubles into context.
Ask the people who used to work with or for Winfrey during any of those years and you pretty much get the same response. A great guy, really friendly. A good cop, street-wise and efficient. As a manager, decent, proficient, and easy to work with, never bullheaded or too demanding.
"He's hands-on, police-savvy, and street-wise," says Melvin Burgess, who was Winfrey's precinct commander in the early 1980s. Burgess later made Winfrey his deputy chief over uniformed officers when he became Herenton's first police director. "[Winfrey] knows his way around the police department. He was able to integrate as a manager as well as a policeman."
The people who have directly worked with Winfrey have a positive image. It's his broader public image that Winfrey has to worry about. First, Herenton comes down hard on him and shows no sign of removing the pressure, and the mayor gets credit for taking initiative, while Winfrey seems complacent and out of touch. Second, other political actors are beginning to dominate the law-enforcement scene. The Memphis Police Association's Steve Brown continues to be a perennial critic, and District Attorney General Bill Gibbons has been incorporating into all his speeches the idea that the MPD needs hundreds more uniformed officers, even writing a column about it in a Sunday Commercial Appeal.
Robert Bryden is the newest player. The head of the recently established Memphis/Shelby County Crime Commission has the sole task of lobbying for reform in all parts of the criminal-justice system. Bryden downplays conflict with the organizations he hopes to help, but it's a fact that the commission head's job is financially independent of city government, that he currently has far more support from Herenton than Winfrey himself, and that, as a former head of the Drug Enforcement Agency in New York, it is unlikely he will be quiet if Winfrey were to reject any restructuring proposals he believes to be important.
Finally, Winfrey's own approach to the media has been one of relative indifference. He's never courted the press, never tried to do anything more than answer the questions of individual journalists when they called upon him. It's a mark of the politically unambitious, but that idea gets lost when you have a DA like Gibbons, who has called several news conferences this year to show off the latest law-enforcement program that he plans to run from his own office. "I cannot recall a single time over the last year where I have asked [Winfrey] to do something where he has said no," Gibbons says. "We have a very good relationship."
Take all these things into account, and the police director comes across as woefully superfluous.
Winfrey himself doesn't declare these days to be his finest on the force. Asked to recount the favorite part of his career, he will tell you it was the early years that were most enjoyable. He spent 11 years in police internal affairs, a sergeant investigating the actions of fellow officers. It fits with Winfrey's philosophy of straight-laced professionalism and integrity, and it explains why the department has been able to bring down citizen complaints against officers. Those years in internal affairs taught Winfrey that about 10 percent of the force should be fired for laziness and a tendency toward misconduct, a number he maintains is still true today.
Winfrey's career has been a methodical climb, the details of which are obscured by the years. After internal affairs, he was promoted to lieutenant and transferred to the West Precinct.That was in 1983.
Four years later, Winfrey became a captain in the North Precinct, evening and early late shift. In 1990, he was promoted to a commander of the security squad, which oversees internal affairs. Then Herenton came into power and made Melvin Burgess his first police director. Two years after that, Winfrey was pushed up to the deputy chief position.
Twice in his career the promotions contained elements of controversy: As a young officer in 1975, he was bumped up to sergeant after successful lawsuits by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Afro-American Police Association forced the MPD administration to promote as many black officers as white officers.
The second incident put him where he is today, a stroke of fortune Winfrey probably would have preferred not having. Herenton canned Burgess and Deputy Director Eddie Adair because they were reluctant to fire Lt. Mike Wagner, a white police officer who had pepper-sprayed two black undercover officers. The incident had become a political flashpoint for Herenton, and he wanted to act decisively, but Burgess and Adair wanted Wagner to be able to appeal his termination, as police procedure dictated. Had Winfrey been involved in that case, he probably would have reacted just as Burgess and Adair initially had: with confusion. Winfrey's devotion to procedure would have conflicted with his loyalty, the two most important things in Winfrey's value system.
But Winfrey wasn't involved; he didn't
have to make any painful decisions. And when Herenton sacked
Burgess and Adair in mid-1994, Winfrey rose to the top. The
political winds blow much stronger up there, though it's not
something he'll talk about with a reporter.
POLITICALLY SPEAKING, HEREN-ton couldn't have done wrong by coming down hard on the police department. His critics wondered why he hadn't done it before.
The statistics backed up the need for action. In late January of 1997, the crime rate in Memphis was ripping bullet holes through previous statistical records. Since 1992, Herenton's first full year in office, the multiple crime index -- the homicides, aggravated assaults, forcible rapes, auto thefts, robberies, burglaries, larcenies, and arsons -- increased by 13 percent. The murder rate held steady, but aggravated assaults rose by 67 percent, rape increased by 15 percent, and auto thefts by 8 percent.
This may have been politically acceptable if other major cities were experiencing uncontrollable increases in crime, but they weren't. Overall, crime was dropping. Between 1992 --Herenton's first full year in office -- and 1996, in the nation's 50 most populous cities, crime dropped an average of 8.5 percent, according to a Flyer analysis of FBI crime reports. Some cities were showing spectacular decreases and bragging about them endlessly in the national media. New York's crime rate dipped 39 percent, Los Angeles fell 30 percent, Pittsburgh's crime was reduced by 38 percent, San Francisco's by 25 percent, and Dallas' by 22 percent.
When Herenton saw several cops eating in a restaurant together, he went ballistic. First he gave the department his ultimatum, then he publicized it. Like slouching soldiers whose drill sergeant had just entered the room, Winfrey and his command staff snapped to attention. For the next week, contact with the media was carefully controlled as the police administration attempted to evaluate itself and the practices of its department. It came back with five major changes. A new, proactive law-enforcement unit was created. The Street Crime Abatement Team (SCAT) would rove around the city, helping the six precincts attack hot spots. Nearly three dozen 30-year captains would be shoved out of their desk jobs and back onto the streets. The department would try to find out what was wrong with its $1.8 million software system, which was meant to help track crime; close attention would now be paid to the minutiae of crime stats, as other cities have been doing for years. The community policing units that the Memphis Police Association roundly criticized would not be touched, but a system of accountability would be established to make sure everyone was doing their job.
Winfrey also eliminated the chief inspector position, and with it dumped three veteran officers who filled that position. Winfrey seems to have handled the situation poorly, firing the officers over the phone instead of in person. "He apologized to me," says James Bolden Jr. "He said that it wasn't his choice, that he wouldn't have done it if it had been left up to him." Bolden and (ex-)chief inspector Orlander Franklin, who both had spent more than two decades on the force, say Winfrey kept the conversation short, hanging up after barely a minute.
The news conference called to announce
the restructuring started late because Herenton and Winfrey were
still discussing proposal details in private. When it did begin,
Herenton, serious and imposing, made his entrance like a solemn
general come to lay down surrender terms from the losing side. He
gave quiet acknowledgments to the reporters who lined the hallway
waiting for him. Winfrey's face was also grim, but for different
reasons; he trailed the mayor into the director's own conference
room. Winfrey kept a respectful silence as Herenton gave his
this-plan-is-a-good-start speech. Herenton had promised to come
up with some proposals of his own for the department, but there
was no indication that he had actually contributed anything. The
restructuring plan would go forward, though, and accountability
would start at the top, with Winfrey.
DESPITE THE PRESSURE,
WIN-frey has held on. Like the head coach of a pro football team,
he may be popular only when he can turn his team around. Since
early February, it appears that he has been doing exactly that.
"You've got to maintain a level of control in an organization like this," he says. "Just this year, 1997, we've increased arrests across the city by about 35 percent. We've increased community contact by the police since the accountablity plan started by about 60 precent. Complaints are down. The officers are working. They're interacting with the community. They're enforcing the law. That's a true indicator that we're doing something right." This despite a serious understaffing problem that won't be resolved for years to come.
Morale seems to be up, too. Winfrey helped reinstitute the promotions process after seven long years in which the department's policies were questioned in the courts, and suspended until a judge deemed them satisfactory. In addition, the precincts are making greater use of the computer technology at hand to follow the crimes and respond accordingly.
And the concept of accountability seems to be working. From the director on down, almost everyone in the department is more conscious of the job they have to be doing. "I'm probably keeping more statistical information than ever before," says Inspector Mike Dodd, who commands the West Precinct. "I gotta stay below 36 [criminal incidents] a day. If I come in this morning and see that I have less than 36 complaints, I know I'm in good shape. If I don't, I'm in bad shape."
"We all feel the pressure," adds South Precinct commander Bobby Todd. "We all are doing what we need to do to get the job done." Todd's overall assessment is cautious optimism.
"If you're dealing with the whole police department, you're 40 percent there," assesses Todd. "But if you're dealing with the administration and the precinct commanders, you're more than 70 to 75 percent there." That seems to be Winfrey's strength, keeping open the communication lines within his command staff. How far the messages he gives can filter down to the rank and file is another question, but one best left to the precinct commanders to solve.
The police may be able to do a better
job at reducing crime, but they can't eliminate it altogether.
Take New York, the national media's new, shining model of a safe
city. Though the crime rate has indeed been dropping rapidly in
New York, tabloids like the New York Daily News
still had 983 murders to write about last year, almost three a
day. The national media doesn't chronicle that very well, so
non-New Yorkers tend to forget about them.
AS EARLY NOVEMBER ROLLS around, Winfrey once again is to sit down with Herenton, this time to discuss his second quarterly report since the fallout of last January. Arrests are high, citizen complaints against police are down, the homicide rate is 17 percent down compared to the same three months -- July through September -- last year. Auto thefts are 22 percent lower. Rape, however, is up 26 percent. "That's what's killing us," Winfrey marvels. He doesn't know how to respond to that problem. Arson is up, too, but Winfrey points out that that is the responsibility of the Memphis Fire Department. Still, the director is relaxed and confident this Wednesday morning, and he answers questions with far more ease than the month before. After eight months of intensive, proactive law enforcement, there's reason to be optimistic. "See? Things are looking good," he boasts. In the next couple of weeks, he will be meeting with his command staff again to hear their specific plans for fighting their biggest crime problems.
"I can't think traditionally anymore," he says. "I work for a man who is not a law-enforcement man. He's a politician because he's elected, but truly, and what I know of him, he's not a seasoned politician. He's an educator. See? He doesn't think traditionally, and surely he doesn't think traditionally of law enforcement. I say that because that forced me to get out of the box, out of that police-thinking box. I did get out of the box."
The day of the scheduled meeting, the Flyer calls Carey Hoffman, Herenton's executive assistant. Hoffman is told that the Flyer is doing a cover story about the pressure the mayor is putting on the director. Is Herenton happy with the latest crime numbers?
Hoffman consults with her boss, and after a few hours she calls the newsweekly back.
The mayor has no comment, she says.
by Phil Campbell
THE DEBATE CONTINUES: HOW MANY POLICE officers does Memphis really need?
For years, the Memphis Police Association has been calling for hundreds more uniformed officers, but that's old news. Now the District Attorney General has gotten on board. In speeches and in a recent Sunday column in The Commercial Appeal, Gibbons argues for as many cops, proportionally, as New York or Boston have. Both cities have been able to reduce their crime rates significantly.
Robert Bryden of the
Memphis/Shelby County Crime Commission is saying the same thing.
When he first arrived in Memphis, Bryden says his immediate
reaction upon arriving in Memphis was that the Bluff City does
not have enough cops. "Crime didn't get where it was in
Memphis for the last 15 months," he says. "It's been
heading this way for the last 15 years. Without additional
resources, I don't know how much more efficient they can
get." The commission was created as an independent body to
offer advice to all aspects of law enforcement and the
criminal-justice system. Bryden says some of his ideas for the
police department probably won't work without more cops to
implement them.
The police director, however, is taking the politically unpopular stance. While Walter Winfrey sees the need for more officers, he doesn't think Memphis needs as many as Gibbons and Bryden believe.
The DA and the commission head would like to see 3,600 to 3,800 officers. Winfrey set the department's "full complement" at 1,640 when he assumed his position in 1994, and he isn't considering changing that number radically.
"Well, we'll have to wait and see," Winfrey says, "If the crime trend continues the way it's been in the last four or five years, then you might need to up your complement again. But I think it's going to table off. I don't know. That's just a gut feeling. I don't have any empirical data to support that. Right now we've been working on the five-year plan. We've been working on this five-year plan since I've been the director. There's nothing scientific about this. It's all judgment."
It's not that Gibbons and Bryden are fighting Winfrey openly about this. Gibbons says he has had only a few conversations with Winfrey on the subject, and he didn't seem to know what the director's stance has been. Bryden, who used to head the Drug Enforcement Agency in New York, has only been in town a few months, and is still trying to get the right kind of furniture in his new office in the Morgan-Keegan building downtown. He doesn't want to pick a fight with Winfrey. (That may change if Bryden is successful in getting the 100,000 crime-commission members he's targeting. He'd have some political clout then). Nevertheless, this war of ideas is worth examining.
Ask Winfrey why he thinks the department only needs about 140 more uniformed officers than it has now, and he'll cite the same examples that Gibbons and Bryden use to make the opposite argument. New York has 38,000 officers for a population of 7 million people. Boston has about 2,200 officers for 550,000 people. If you make a proportional comparison, then Memphis would need as few as 1,300 more officers and as many as 2,300 more.
Winfrey's response? "I don't mean to sit here and put down what they're doing in New York, but a lot of people across the country will tell you [crime there] had to go down because it's been so high for so long."
There is some evidence that can be reviewed, however. Bryden points to a study by the National Institute of Justice. This 10-chapter report -- which can be found on the Internet at http://ncjrs.org/works/index.html -- is not original research but instead a comprehensive compilation of previous studies on law enforcement. The study asserts that for each officer added to a police force in a big city, 24 "Part 1" crimes are prevented annually. "Part 1" crimes are murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, auto theft, arson, burglary, and larceny.
And if such a radical increase in staff is required, how has Winfrey's department been able to show tentative signs of success in recent months? The latest crime statistics show Memphis officers have been making more arrests while the crime rate gets smaller.
Using FBI crime statistics for 1992 and 1996, the Flyer created a computer spreadsheet to compare the number of officers in the nation's 50 largest cities with the crime rate. Did cities with a higher number of police officers have greater success in lowering their crime rates?
In this study, Memphis ranks No. 28, claiming a ratio of 2.2 officers for every 1,000 residents. Washington, D.C., had the highest ratio, with 6.4 cops per 1,000 citizens. Fresno, California, had the lowest ratio, with only 1.3 officers per 1,000 residents.
Between 1992 and 1996,
Memphis' crime rate rose 13 percent. Of the 27 cities with higher
police-to-population ratios than Memphis, only seven weren't able
to lower their crime rate. Some of the decreases were quite
impressive. New York lowered its crime statistics by 39 percent,
and Boston dropped it by 19 percent, for example. The average
reduction in crime among these 27 cities was 10.3 percent.
But Las Vegas had a 14 percent jump in its crime rate, and it had the second-highest proportion of officers. That suggests either that the Las Vegas Police Department isn't effectively using its officers or its problems are so intractable that cops alone can't help it.
Also, the cities that had proportionally fewer officers than Memphis were also able to lower their crime rates. San Diego. which had only 1.7 cops per 1,000 residents, saw a 33 percent drop in crime between 1992 and 1996. Austin saw a 20 percent drop. The average drop in crime among these cities was 7.2 percent.
Among this grouping of cities, there were some significant increases, too. Nashville, with two officers per 1,000, saw a 19 percent jump in crime. Phoenix's crime rose by 17 percent.
Another thing to note: The cities with the highest populations tended to have the highest ratio of officers to population, so the numerical drop in crime tended to be higher as well.
Of course, this study doesn't adjust for a wide array of problems big cities face, such as unemployment rates, concentrations of poverty in the inner city, high-school graduation rates, and juvenile crime. Memphis has its fair share of these problems, as do Detroit and New Orleans, which all bucked the national trend by seeing crime increases in recent years. And if Winfrey changes his mind about the need for a greater increase in uniformed officers, it will be years before Memphis can achieve a ratio as high as Boston's or New York's.
Still, crime-commission head Bryden says, the numbers are revealing. "Seeing that, I feel even more convinced that Memphis needs to add more people," he says.