The Trouble With Troubleshooting

by Mary Ellen Leary

DARK had settled in, the night of July 25, 1959, when a car pulled to the curb in the 2200 block on Bush Street, where shops crowd frame houses once the heart of San Francisco’s Japanese community but filled since World War II with Negroes. The driver was reaching for parcels in the back-seat when a cruising police car came by.

“Hey, boy,”a policeman shouted, “what you got in those bundles? Where d’ ya’ think you’re going?”

How common an occurrence. Common, still, in San Francisco and in most of urban America. But this particular incident contained combustible ingredients which dramatically altered the pattern of police performance in a city that didn’t know it was sitting on a panther leg. In response the man addressed gave voice to years of pent-up resentment against discourtesy and denigration suffered from the white community, most pointedly from white policemen.

He was grabbed, arrested, thrown into the police car, and jailed for “abusive language to a police officer.”The man was one of San Francisco’s most prominent Negro civic leaders, Dr. Carlton Goodlett, M.D., publisher of the widely read and powerful weekly newspaper the Sun Reporter, and a first-name acquaintance of most newsmen, politicians, and public leaders. To the arresting officers, he was just another black man, by chance well dressed.

Like any culprit, Dr. Goodlett was allowed to make a phone call, and he put through to the state capital, to his close friend in Governor Edmund G. Brown’s secretariat, Cecil Poole, later U.S. attorney in San Francisco. At a meeting two days later in the office of San Francisco Mayor George Christopher, half a dozen civil rights leaders, some highly embarrassed policemen, and San Francisco’s police chief learned firsthand the intensity of black anger in a city which had prided itself on its tolerance.

Dr. Goodlett’s experience showed that local police could “brutalize" the black man by derision quite as well as by physical blows. This incident of itself did not bring about change. But it conditioned the community. And a step was taken: the creation of San Francisco’s Police Community Relations Unit. It is a remarkable operation, credited with having prevented serious racial turmoil in a city with potentially explosive racial alignments.

After the Goodlett incident, the Jesuit University of San Francisco initiated a series of conferences aimed at getting police and community into communication. It was a providential conjunction of time, place, and personnel. USF is an institution which incubates most San Francisco politicians. Its president, Reverend Charles Dullea, S. J., was the son of a popular former San Francisco police chief and it was natural that Chief Dullea’s son should be interested in police problems. When sociologist Ralph Lane came along with the conference proposals, local newspapers gave them a big play, and a number of high-ranking police and civic officials participated.

At one such session, San Francisco Police Chief Thomas Cahill heard Joseph Lohman, dynamic dean of the University of California School of Criminology, outline the “community relations” concept as it relates to police work, and tell how it was being put into use elsewhere.

No one claims Chief Cahill jumped at the idea. His view was that “social work isn’t police work.” But a near riot just after the conference changed the picture. A lone policeman was chasing a black thief on foot, in a poor neighborhood, when the street people suddenly took sides. They caught the policeman, took away his gun and handed it to the man he’d been chasing. “Shoot him,” men said, gathering around. “Go ahead, kid, kill him.” The gun wasn’t fired, but that ended lone police patrols and made clear how grave a menace to community safety and normal police work resentment in the Negro neighborhoods could be. Upsct by the ominous spectacle ot a neighborhood turning on its own police, the Hearst press demanded a police community relations unit. Unexpectedly, Chief Cahill approved it. Its mission, he charged, was to no out “to teach the minorities respect for law and order.”That isn’t quite what happened.

Lieutenant Dante Andreotti was plucked off the night desk at Central Station to take charge, with a sergeant and one patrolman. He was sent to inspect community relations programs in St. Lotus and other cities, then left on his own to figure out what none of the experts agreed on: what is community relations? One thing he knew without being told: it must not be a system of informants, and it must not settle for “public relations.”

Andreotti proved to be a remarkable choice “a primitive,”one sociologist said, a man with a natural empathy for people. A respected police veteran, with twenty-one years on the force, Andreotti was scrappy, virile, an amateur boxer and fine ballplayer, and a man quick with his fists. (His record also included one fatal shooting of a fleeing criminal.) The son of an Italian grocer, with three years of college, Andreotti acted instinctively in the field of race relations.

“Dan is the only policeman I’ve ever known who asks. ‘What do the people say?’ “ one officer noted. “I’ve heard others ask, ‘What are they yakking about?’ or ‘What are they asking for now?’ “ But Dan just asked, “What are they saying?" and he listened. He was open to them.

Andreotti’s discovery of the urgency and importance of the ghetto message, his fervor, his ebullient Italian personal warmth infused his men with a remarkable spirit. That spirit persists today, and so does their adulation of Andreotti.

“He was the greatest.” “He was magic.” “He would tell it like it is.” In the ghetto they came to calling him “soul.”

“None of us knew what we were doing,” one of the earliest members recalls. “We were flying by the seat of our pants. We’d just ask ourselves, ‘What would Dan do in this circumstance?’ That was guideline enough.”

Another unit member says: “A policeman can find out the ghetto needs by living there. That’s the only way. Even if he only lives there the eighthour shift, he’s got to become part. To identify.”

This unit consists of thirteen men (five added last year at Mayor Joseph Alioto’s insistence). What they do now is very like what they did at first with Andreotti, who has since moved on to community relations work with the U.S. Justice Department. Five work out of tiny offices partitioned in OEO neighborhood headquarters. Two work particularly with black youth gangs, another with MexicanAmericans, another with Chinese: two keep liaison with high school and college students. One is a “hippie" specialist, and another works the harrowing, tragic “central city,”the abode of dope addicts, pimps, prostitutes, homosexuals.

POLICE Community Relations officers function as all-purpose ombudsmen, to bring available, but ordinarily unreachable, public or private services to the poor. The greater proportion of their time is spent with the teen-agers and with the jobless in their twenties.

Says Officer David Roche, the unit veteran: “A fellow comes in, in a real lather. He’s about to be deported. Well, I go down with him to Immigration to find out the beef. What are his legitimate avenues of appeal, what formalities will give him more time? If I work with him, he can probably keep his job while the issue is being wrestled around by one of the neighborhood legal assistance lawyers. If he was alone, he’d probably panic and run away and be in a bigger mess.”

Says Officer Julio Hernandez: “There aren’t many police who speak Spanish. Language is the big problem for the Mexican-Americans. Otherwise, their problems are about like the Negroes’— living in a rat-and-roach-infested flat, drunks urinating in the doorway, kid sisters learning sex on the streets, all fearing the cops from infancy. Why not? The first encounter they have with a policeman is when he comes up, ‘OK, punk, take a hike or I’ll hook ya.‘ It’s always ‘greaser’ or ‘wetback.’ The policeman can’t figure why these strong, smartlooking young men are always loitering on a corner. He doesn’t realize the language harrier kept them from getting enough out of school to hold a job. And they haven’t any place to go.

“I’ve got this group, the New Breed. They were causing a lot of trouble. I got a church opened up to give them a meeting place. The kids started some music going and got a pool table. Complaints from the merchants dropped go percent. Then down the street a ways is the Lucky Group, And the Meduca Group. You get acquainted with them. You try to find a place for them to meet.”

One Sunday the gawky tourists turned hippieland, the Haight-Ashbury, into a worse traffic nightmare than usual. The newspapers delighted next day telling how one of the hippies stepped into an intersection to direct traffic. It wasn’t a hippie. It was just Officer Dick Hongisto doing his thing, solving problems, this time more openly than usual.

Take what Troy Dangerfield did in South Park, a little island of tenements inside an industrial zone. The neighborhood’s sole community center, rented with EOC funds, burned down accidentally last August. Dangerfield came up with a plan to create a general contracting company made up of men in the neighborhood, nearly all unemployed. He worked out bonding arrangements, took on the paper work, and bid competitively to build the replacement, coming in $3000 lower than the nearest rival. Under his supervision, the men did the job under the estimate, meeting code specifications. The employment was kept in the neighborhood, and the group could undertake other jobs as a result.

Elliott Blackstone deals with the “tenderloin.”The “meat route” police call it, the sorriest side of the underworld. A white man, he has been on the force twenty years and at last he is doing something that is creative and helpful to people.

“This is for real, this kind of police work. I can serve. And boy, do my clientele need service!" Their biggest need was to break down police hostility toward homosexuals, estimated to number from 40,000 to 90,000 in San Francisco. “Police generally don’t exactly understand, but they are definitely more tolerant,” Blackstone says.

In this sensitive area it is necessary, as others in the unit find, to make it clear that community relations does not mean informing. If trouble is brewing, headquarters gets an alarm. But no suspect is fingered.

“If the narc squad comes out,”says Blackstone, “and they pick up some of my clients, that’s the way it is, that’s all. But if I’m working with someone and he’s on the stuff, I’m not running to tell them. That’s not my bag. Getting him off the stuff is.”

One of the most heartbreaking problems in such sordid urban centers today is the number of runaway boys, some as young as ten, who loiter the streets as prostitutes to homosexuals. Blackstone encounters them continually.

“They won’t talk to you until they’ve been around awhile, gotten ditched, disillusioned, hungry. Then they’d give anything to go home, but they’re scared. I can tell when they hit that stage, and I used to talk to ‘em. Easy like. Take a few days at it. Then I’d say, ‘Let me get your old man on the phone.’ Sometimes I’ve driven kids to the airport and stayed with them until the nonstop flight took off, then phoned the folks.”

Not any more, though. Juvenile Court discovered policemen were sending runaways home without routing them through the detention process. “That’s police work for you: go by the book!” He shakes his head.

Normally police work is strictly controlled by the manual. Procedure is fixed. Phone in every hour. Make a report. This item on the first line, that on the second. If something unexpected occurs, ask the sergeant. If it is new to him, he’ll ask the lieutenant.

But there is no routine to community relations. “Hell, we’re writing the book. Nobody knows from one minute to the next what will come up. We haven’t time to ask the sergeant, and he’d have to guess, like we do. We just try. We make a lot of mistakes, but those are our guidelines for next time.”

Andreotti developed an impressive range of resources. He knew where to find a new suit of clothes for a job-seeker, rings for impoverished brides, bus transportation for picnics. He got a foundation to put up petty cash for domestic crises. His men became experts in making balky government machinery work.

But their efforts inevitably concentrated in two areas: helping men cope with past arrest records, anil advising them with complaints against police. In both cases their alliance with disheartened or disgruntled citizens seemed to pit them against the rest of the force. Both were special sources of antagonism between PCR and the force.

Work on arrest records was an extremely sensitive area. For juveniles, it is sometimes possible to get arrest records “sealed.” For adults, sleuthing will often turn up from the district attorney the extenuating circumstance that puts a conviction in proper perspective. Arrests frequently lead to no conviction, and often the charges are dismissed. Yet the record stands. Community relations officers, urging employers to take a chance on a young man, found themselves belittling the significance ot arrests in a way their fellow officers could only interpret as nullification of police efforts. PCR officers even got city employment forms to drop all reference to arrest and ask only about convictions.

A ten-year veteran of law enforcement work, Robert Jeffries, was enormously effective in this work. His chief effort was to get jobs for young blacks, and all too often that involved explaining arrest records. In one sixty-day period he “explained" 200 men into employment.

“Look at me,”the black officer would tell businessmen. “As a kid in the ghetto, I got arrested. Somebody took a chance on me.”But when he quit the department, it was to say publicly he could no longer stomach the hostility of his fellow officers.

The handling of citizen complaints became a particular irritant within the force. Because of their close work with minorities, complaints about “brutality,” whether physical or psychological, poured in to PCR officers. Chief Cahill early gave the unit authority to receive the complaints in full, then turn them in for investigation. Never once has a complaint so routed resulted in a rebuke to an officer, the men say. But the system has fed fires of animosity. Said one PCR member, “I’m not up tight about my brother officers. But they do entertain a lot of fantasies about us. We do not investigate complaints against them. We just take complaints, like they tell it. The complaint division investigates.”

But taking down a complaint in the everyday environment of the ghetto, poured out in uninhibited terms to a man who seems part of the scene, produces a far more pointed report than one entered by some timid citizen venturing into a Hall of Justice and filling in the correct lines on a form. So much did the system rankle that it has lately been curbed. Now PCR men may accompany a complainant to the proper office.

Courageous and creative as the unit was, it became a victim of communication failure with police colleagues. There are precinct stations in San Francisco which community relations men never enter. A considerable number of policemen don’t speak to community relations officers, even in an elevator. Every black officer in the unit has experienced hostility from his brother officers.

One white officer in the unit found his own classmates no longer fraternize with him. Passing him in their patrol car, he said, they would roll down the window and jeer, “Nigger lover!”

“I’ve heard about this before, but I didn’t believe it,” he shook his head. “No, I’m not sorry I’m in the unit. This is what police work is going to be in the future. We’re setting the pattern it has to take. But what worries me is how we are going to get over this hurdle of hostility.”

UNDER new leadership now, the Police Community Relations Unit is trying to change attitudes and procedures within the force itself. Supporting the unit’s new leader, Lieutenant William J. Osterloh, is the city administration. Police community relations is popular politically. It suggests an answer when answers are desperately needed. Ordinarily, a lieutenant might find it hard to catch a captain’s ear, or a chief’s, on a matter as delicate as police racial hostility. But what is being heard in San Francisco is the voice of Lieutenant Osterloh, and the message comes straight from the mayor.

When Joseph Alioto was campaigning for election in 1967, some of the bright young men he assembled as aides discovered the community relations unit was a gold mine of information about minority neighborhood needs. Candidate Alioto wooed and won many of these minority votes. And although his loyalty to the elite police “TAC Squad” (tactical) has sometimes disconcerted the black community, the mayor has kept his office responsive to the black, brown, and yellow neighborhoods.

“There are three elements to effective police work,” says Mayor Alioto. “One is diligence about keeping order and bringing arrests necessary for protection of life and property. The second is intensification of police community relations. We intend to augment this work in any way possible. The third is beyond control of the police department itself. It is governmental effectiveness in dealing with social issues. Remove one of these, and police work is hampered.”

In the manner of big-city mayors these days, Alioto has not waited for his police to deal with the dissident. He has gone out as a one-man community relations operation, meeting gang leaders, closeted sometimes for hours with twenty or thirty young blacks or Mexican-Americans, to hear out their complaints and suggestions for remedy. His office keeps a sort of hot line open to PCR offices, and there is a close link between Lieutenant Osterloh and the mayor’s office in time of tension. He was delighted to find Eldridge Cleaver complaining in print that San Francisco’s helpful thrust into Hunter s Point had diminished the revolutionary tensions there.

Hunter’s Point is the ghetto area that erupted in a five-day riot in September, 1966. Some police never forgave the PCR because the riot occurred; some never forgave them for having predicted it would. But most officials, including Mayor Alioto, credit PCR for having defused such minority wrath.

The most important single step Mayor Alioto has taken to prove good faith to minorities was naming, for the first time in San Francisco history, a black man, Dr. Washington Garner, to the three-member, all-powerful police commission.

Each of the three commissioners deems community relations important, but Dr. Garner and Elmo Ferrari, the commissioner closest to the mayor, are particularly anxious to make it work. Modernizing the force rates Ferrari’s first attention. But community relations is a close second.

When the unit’s founder, Andreotti, left San Francisco, piqued by diminishing departmental support, Chief Cahill named as his successor Lieutenant Augustus Bruneman, chosen because he had successfully steered youngsters in the police athletic league. Unfortunately, Bruneman had also successfully developed the police dog unit, creating for himself an image no minority could tolerate.

The Bruneman appointment was a serious rupture in San Francisco’s community relations program. “The blacks just drifted away.” Men working in the Negro neighborhoods kept on as usual. But prestige had gone out of the unit. It lacked impact.

To revive the PCR program Chief Cahill named as unit head, Captain Willison Lingefelter, who had earned Negro leaders’ respect for his courtesy in handling civil rights demonstrations. But Lingefelter would have had to take a cut in pay, and declined the appointment. The next nominee was Lieutenant Osterloh.

Osterloh, a long, lean, egg-bald loner nearly thirty years on the force, has a reputation as “an intellectual.” His fellow officers are skeptical but awed. Osterloh graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, studying in his spare time, and he has completed most of his work toward a doctorate in criminology from the same institution. With the late Dean Lohman, Osterloh participated in some of the studies for the presidential Crime Commission report. Most of his recent San Francisco work has been in personnel, especially in rookie training. He was largely responsible for expanding courses in mental health, in problems of alcoholism, and in the handling of suicides. Osterloh’s route toward community relations is likely to take some similar creative educational direction. For one thing, he hopes to expand the sociology and psychology teaching in the police academy, and include group “gripe” sessions with local psychiatrists.

He also has enlisted an ad hoc legal committee, including the federally supported neighborhood legal services and Clifton Jeffers, local NAACP head, who is a California deputy attorney general. This team hopes to develop a new complaint procedure acceptable to police but far more satisfactory to minorities. In addition, he hopes community

relations can have a voice in station assignments and other personnel decisions.

One device created in the unit’s first days will probably see some changes under Lieutenant Osterloh: the neighborhood police community relations councils. In imitation of the St. Louis pattern, in which minority representatives attend informal discussions at precinct stations, Andreotti originated district groups in San Francisco intended as liaisons between the community relations officers, the neighborhood, and the local police captain and his patrol. Initially they were successful.

The pattern, however, has often run to wholesale airing of hostilities against police—“hollering sessions,” Osterloh calls them. He suspects they exacerbate instead of allay ill will, even if the antagonists do share coffee and cookies afterward. Police Commissioner Garner also considers the meetings “unfairly hard on the uniformed policeman.” Two years ago Chief Cahill ordered each station to name two community relations officers to attend the sessions. Most captains also attend. To some they are welcome opportunities to meet local people. But if hippies or other disaffected groups move in, the hostility focuses upon the man with the badge and gun in view. They take it, but they can’t like it. The fact that station police were assigned to community relations, with no preparation, no briefing, and no coordination with the central PCR Unit, diminished unit prestige. It was partly this climate that led Andreotti to leave.

The Black Panther movement, among black militants the most ostentatiously gun-oriented and the most anti-police, has been a new complication for the PCR Unit. The Panthers originated three years ago in Oakland, just across San Francisco Bay, and enmity between Panthers and the San Francisco police force has never approached the level of open warfare it reached in the East Bay, the scene of continuous harassment on both sides.

While Oakland officials were denouncing Panthers as a threat to society, community relations officers in San Francisco were patiently making private efforts to establish communications. It took almost three months before a San Francisco Panther captain and three lieutenants agreed to meet a pair of PCR Unit members in a private home.

“They aired their feelings and we expressed ours, and there was a hell of a gap,” said one of the officers. “But at least we were talking.”

This communication link is largely the fashion in which the unit functioned through the San Francisco State College turmoil. Many unit members were former students or had close friends among the rebel students. The PCR Unit, along with ministers and local civil rights leaders, helped persuade TAC Squad leaders (in the interest of the police “image”) to end head-beatings and violence in student confrontations. They also tried to explain police tactics and regulations to students.

Probably the touchiest situation affected by the unit’s sensitivity to community views arose with the shooting of Negro truck driver George Baskett last October by San Francisco police officer Michael O’Brien in a Sunday afternoon off-duty traffic altercation. Almost immediately top police officials called it “self-defense” and “accidental.” and four Negro witnesses, including the victim’s brother, were arrested on various assault charges.

Within a few hours community relations officers reported to the Hall of Justice that the black community was in a fury over the case. Lieutenant Osterloh decided the unit should carry out its customary function of accepting complaints and investigating a race problem. The result was a parade of evidence that led to release of the four within twenty hours and a completely unprecedented charge of murder lodged against Officer O’Brien by his own department.

The Grand Jury later reduced the charge against O’Brien to manslaughter. But PCR Unit members are confident that if they had not acted in this instance to get release of the arrested blacks and to focus responsibility for the death upon the allegedly intoxicated policeman, San Francisco would have been swept by riot.

Today disaffection with the unit varies. Some stations are beginning to refer people with problems to the community relations officers. But there is a nagging question: is it too late?

Eugene Brown, at one time with the unit and now with the U.S. Department of Justice, thinks it is. “The rise of black pride, the insistence upon self-determination, point new ways to the future. We may not be sure what will develop, but in the average American police department today community relations doesn’t seem relevant.”