Politico.com

The Capital’s Top Cop

2015-07-17

Police chief Cathy Lanier is tooling around the rougher regions of the nation’s capital on an idyllic summer afternoon when she slows down to point out an intersection where she encountered a guy spaced out on synthetic drugs a week before. “He was lying in the middle of the street, eyes rolled back, drooling,” she says. “This stuff does strange things to people. It’s the new scourge.” Earlier this month, Jasper Spires is thought by police to have been high on synthetic drugs when he allegedly stabbed a recent American University graduate 40 times and left him dying on a crowded Metro subway car over the July 4 th weekend. It was, by all accounts, a senseless crime reminiscent of an earlier era in Washington when drug markets flourished—the type of crime that horrified waves of recent D.C. arrivals who have known only gentrifying neighborhoods, trendy restaurants and rising home prices. The new drugs have Lanier worried. “They’re imported from China,” she says. “Drug markets are changing by the day. It’s hard to keep up.” The District’s 47-year-old top cop is behind the wheel of her spit-shined, personal patrol car. She’s wearing a starched, white, short sleeve shirt, regulation blue trousers, black leather boots polished to a high sheen. Her chief of staff, Inspector Ralph Ennis, rides in the back, with me at shotgun. Her Glock 17 is strapped to her belt. We’re cruising Bladensburg Road, an industrial stretch in the city’s Fifth Ward, along the eastern border with Maryland. This is the Washington that tourists—and even local politicians—fear to tread. You can see the Capitol dome from high points along Bladensburg, but the intersection by Benning Road is decidedly down at the heels, lined with tire dealers, empty lots, fast food joints and store-front churches. The neighborhood is both synthetic drug central and ripe for redevelopment; real estate speculators are snapping up corner lots. “Not fast enough for me,” Lanier says. She hooks a left onto a side street and heads into Trinidad. Seven years ago these streets ran with blood. Thugs would drive in, shoot rivals and speed off. Lanier threw up roadblocks. A judge would later rule them unconstitutional, but they helped stem the violence. Now row houses in Trinidad are going for seven figures. Lanier rolls down her window and flashes her winning smile. “Hey ladies,” she says to a pair of young women sitting in a car. “Hey, chief!” they respond. They dish about the enormous house under construction across the street. “Crazy,” Lanier says. This is how Chief Lanier presents herself to Washingtonians: folksy, accessible, unadorned. Casual conversations like this help explain why she remains the most popular public official in Washington, D.C. She shows up at public hearings, community meetings or the occasional gala absent an entourage. No security, no phalanx of deputy chiefs, no body woman. Many big city chiefs scowl. Lanier hugs. At nearly six feet, with thick, shaggy blond hair, cocoa brown eyes, and a habit of embracing cops, pols and community leaders, she packs plenty of presence. Even as other major cities have in the last year struggled with police-community relations, and protest movements like Black Lives Matter have spread nationwide, Lanier has presided over a capital that has remained relatively free of conflict between cops and the community—largely the result of stringent use-of-force regulations the Metropolitan Police Department implemented years ago following its own controversies. Even as police chiefs across the country are under siege—defending police practices in Ferguson, North Charleston, New York and Baltimore that have resulted in the killing of unarmed black men, Cathy Lanier is unassailable, roundly revered and breezing through her eighth year as chief under what is now her third mayor. Lanier is so well thought of that bestselling thriller writer David Baldacci created a character based on her a starring role in his 2009 novel True Blue. One public opinion poll pegged her approval rating at 84 percent in the District. “Being a chief of a major city for eight years is way beyond normal,” says Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a national nonprofit research group. “The average is three to four years. She’s had a remarkable run.” She’s represented a cool and competent presence in the capital during a period where many of the city’s other major institutions bordered on deplorable. The city’s fire chief stepped down last year after reports of glaring mismanagement, including a jury-rigged ambulance fleet where one truck spontaneously combusted. The region’s transit system is beset by financial woes and systemic failures—including an incident earlier this year where a rider died after the subway train was caught in a smoke-filled tunnel. The city’s elected leadership has had its own struggles: Three D.C. city council members have pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges since 2012, and two others have been investigated. Last year Mayor Vincent Gray lost reelection amidst a wide-ranging F.B.I. investigation into his 2010 campaign finances that netted a half dozen of his closest aides. Through much of that period, Lanier presided over a steadily falling crime rate. Homicides stood at 181 in 2007, the year Lanier became chief. They dropped to a historic low of 88 in 2012. The number of murders is now climbing, but it’s nowhere near what it was. Some parts of the city are still plagued with shootings, robberies and theft, but the city feels safer. <ul><li> <div class="story-interrupt format-s pos-right inset-content"> <aside class="widget widget-supplement-stories"> <div class="widget-content"> <article> <figure class="thumb is-photo"> <div class="fig-graphic"> <img src="http://images.politico.com/global/2015/07/16/150716_bruno_dc_mp_630x342.jpg" /> </div> </figure> <div class="summary"> <header> <a href="http://www.politico.com/p/magazine/tag/what-works">What Works</a> <h3> <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/charter-schools-dc-what-works-120222.html?ml=m_ms">‘You’re Not Going to Give Up’</a></h3> </header> <div class="meta"> By DEBRA BRUNO </div> </div> </article> </div></aside></div></li></ul> Today, though, Lanier faces some of the most challenging terrain she’s encountered in her career—violent crime, after years of remarkable decreases, is beginning to tick back up, largely because of the new wave of synthetic drugs. And Cathy Lanier knows that in an era of increased public sensitivity and YouTube videos, she and the capital are just one bad shooting or police encounter away from tragedy. *** As we cruise the city, I ask Lanier how she has managed to keep her job through three mayors, stay in good standing with the community and avoid the pitfalls that have broken other chiefs. She slows down, places her arm across the top of my seat and says, “Responsiveness is huge. Everybody has to be responsive. I give out the cell phone numbers of watch commanders on duty. If someone doesn’t get a response from 911, they can call their watch commander.” Her personal style of community relations has been key to her success. Mark Tuohey, a veteran prosecutor and white-collar litigator who has worked with many police departments and is now counsel to Mayor Muriel Bowser, explains: “Cathy is a good listener. A lot of chiefs don’t have that quality. She talks with you, not to you.” During her first two years as chief, Lanier says she tried to show up at every murder. Now she or an assistant chief makes every homicide scene. “Homicide is the worst thing that can happen to a community,” she says. “You need to be there. You’re a lot more passionate about a crime if you witness the horrible outcome.” Take the Shaquita Bell case. Bell disappeared in 1996, leaving her mother, Jackie Winbourne to care for her three children. Every June, near the date of her daughter’s disappearance, Winbourne showed up at police headquarters and pleaded cops to investigate, to no avail. “I couldn’t figure out why no one even spoke to this woman,” Lanier tells me. When she became chief, she reopened the case. “If we recover Shaquita,” she said on TV, “it’ll be the best day in the 18 years of law enforcement for me.” At Lanier’s urging, cops fingered the killer and prosecutors got him to plead to her death. Lanier’s attention resonated in the community. The sources of Lanier’s success run far deeper than being responsive, showing up around town and getting along with D.C.’s political class. She’s benefited from changes far beyond her control. While she’s ruled the D.C. police, the capital city has undergone head-snapping demographic changes. Once known as “Chocolate City” when 80 percent of its residents were African American, the black population has dropped below half. The District bulldozed or redeveloped hundreds of public housing complexes. Many poor blacks were pushed out. The city called it urban renewal; activists preferred urban removal. “The number of public housing units has dropped off dramatically,” she says. “You have to acknowledge that that has had an impact on concentrated poverty.” And thus on crime, she allows. The District she patrols is whiter, more middle class, still dangerous generally only in smaller sections of the city. As the city changed around her, Lanier took firm control of her police department. As popular as she is in the city at large, her firm management style has earned her plenty of enmity inside the department. “She’s crushed all internal opposition,” says retired Lt. Lowell K. Duckett, Jr. “You cross the chief once, you’re gone.” Chalk that up to management 101, especially in a paramilitary organization, but Lanier’s style has driven fear into the troops, according to interviews with union members, street cops and detectives. Since January 2014, 542 police officers have left the department. Most retired, but 191 resigned and 75 were terminated, according to MPD records. That leaves the department hustling to hire and train cops to maintain the target of 3,900 officers, when crime rates are now heading north. D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson chaired the Judiciary Committee during Lanier’s first five years as chief. “She’s done and is doing a really good job,” he says. “She is skilled at public relations, dealing with the rank and file and handling the political dimensions.” Mendelson might be overstating Lanier’s rosy relations with street cops. You would think Lanier would be tight with detectives and have the respect of street cops. “She paid her dues in a scout car,” says Duckett, who helped train her when she was climbing the ranks. But more than a few officers believe the department’s top brass does not have their backs, and the police union has fought some of her more theatrical anti-crime measures, like her “All Hands On Deck” weekends that put the entire force out on the streets. Many officers are still peeved that Lanier kept getting raises while their paychecks were flat for seven years thanks to stalemated labor negotiations. “We had to suffer while she got raises,” says a patrol officer in the Seventh District, where crime is perennially high. “That’s crazy.” Crazy or not, Lanier negotiated a package that put her annual pay at $253,000 and an increase this year that should raise it closer to $270,000, which puts her among the country’s best paid chiefs. It’s money, though, that all three of mayors she’s served have been happy to pay to keep someone they’ve all viewed as a huge political asset and community leader. *** Lanier is the opposite of itinerant, celebrity chiefs like New York’s Bill Bratton, Chicago’s Garry McCarthy or Anthony Batts, who served in Long Beach and Oakland, California, before getting cashiered out of Baltimore following this spring’s death of Freddie Gray and the resulting riots. <div class="story-interrupt format-m pos-right"> <aside class="story-related"> <figure class="related-media is-photo"> <div class="fig-graphic"> <img src="http://images.politico.com/global/2015/07/16/20150716-jaffe-cathylanier08scotus.jpg" /> </div> <figcaption> Lanier speaks at a press conference after the Supreme Court struck down DC's ban on handguns in 2008, with then-Mayor Adrian Fenty looking on. | Getty Images </figcaption> </figure> </aside> </div> Lanier was born in the District, grew up just across the line in Maryland and has spent her entire adult career in the Metropolitan Police Department. “I was a single mom working as a secretary and taking courses at the community college,” she says. “I answered an ad for the MPD in part because they paid for college courses.” The year was 1990. Lanier was 23. Her father, Walter, a deputy fire chief in Maryland’s neighboring Prince Georges County, had died when she was a kid. Her mother had raised her and her brothers in Tuxedo, Maryland, an industrial zone with a handful of houses just across the District line. Lanier landed the MPD job, passed the training academy and loved police work. The next year as Lanier worked patrol, the murder count reached 479, the highest in history. Police lost control of entire neighborhoods, controlled by crack markets and heavily-armed gangs from Jamaica. The city had plummeted to its nadir after Marion Barry’s three terms as mayor: schools were deplorable, health care was minimal, unemployment was at an all-time high. In that environment, Lanier rose through the ranks. The crack wars subsided and crime began to decline. Mayor Anthony Williams brought order to the municipal government and hired Charles Ramsey to run the police department. Like Williams, Ramsey was a technocrat. He also plucked Lanier from the ranks and became her mentor. From 1998 to 2006, Ramsey promoted Lanier from sergeant to captain to head of the narcotics and special operations divisions and finally to commander of the Fourth District, a community undergoing wrenching demographic changes in the city’s center, just west of Rock Creek Park. In 1998—nearly two decades before the latest national controversies over police use of force—the Washington Post published an investigative series detailing how D.C. police officers shot and killed more people per resident than cops in any other large American city. In the previous five years, the Post wrote, cops had killed 57 people “in a pattern of reckless and indiscriminate gunplay.” Ramsey invited in the U.S. Justice Department to investigate and create a new use of force protocol. In 2000 the MPD accepted a system that, among other things, required a cop to file a “use of force” report every time a detainee complained of everything from a shove to a twisted wrist, let alone an actual discharge of a service weapon. Force investigation teams showed up at every incident and issued a report that could be passed up the chain of command up the chief. Good cops suffered reprimands, suspensions and terminations in performing their basic duties—and they still do. “In many ways this was Washington, D.C.’s, Ferguson moment,” says Delroy Burton, president of the Fraternal Order of Police. “Many officers are still gun-shy about doing basic police work. They’re afraid of falling into the disciplinary system or becoming the next viral clip on YouTube.” In 2007 Mayor Adrian Fenty took office and surprised the cops and city at large by asking Cathy Lanier, then 39, to be his police chief. “Are you kidding me?” Lanier responded. By that time she had earned undergraduate and masters degrees from Johns Hopkins, as well as a master of arts in homeland security from the Naval Postgraduate School. To Fenty she was the trusted commander of the Fourth District that policed his ward; for Washingtonians she represented the first permanent female chief who also happened to be white. Lanier embraced the disciplinary system established under Ramsey and the Justice Department, and the reforms worked. In 2010, she says proudly, there were no fatal police shootings in the District. “We don’t use force nearly as much as we used to,” she says. “On average we have five or less police shootings a year, and a lot of them where the officers are fired on.” *** The biggest political hot potato Lanier has confronted in the last year was the District’s legalization of marijuana—an initiative that brought her and city officials into direct confrontation in February with a Republican-led Congress that still has broad oversight powers over the federal capital. The legalization movement, which has confronted police departments across the country as the nation’s attitudes towards drugs have shifted, came to D.C. via a voter initiative that won overwhelming support from the city’s white neighborhoods. The District last year had already moved to decriminalize possession of an ounce or less of pot—a move spurred in part by recognition of the huge costs to many young black and Hispanic men swept up into the criminal justice system by nonviolent marijuana offenses. The city’s new law allows the possession of up to two ounces of marijuana, as well as allowing residents to grow privately up to six marijuana plants. (Because of congressional interference, though, the new law has no measure to allow for the sale or legal distribution of marijuana as states like Colorado have done.) It remains illegal to smoke weed in public. “People think I legalized marijuana,” Lanier tells me. “They say ‘Chief, why do I have to send my kids through a group of guys smoking dope on their way to school? You wouldn’t let that happen in Georgetown.’” Has she ordered cops to arrest people getting high on the street? “If it’s small amounts, we say, ‘Dude, put it out,’” she says. “You have to go inside your house to smoke that. It’s not worth your time to arrest someone smoking in public if it’s a misunderstanding.” In translation, cops rarely bust someone for smoking in public. In fact, over her long tenure, her greatest controversies have risen not from politics but from the courts and her own aggressive, high-profile enforcement techniques: Lanier has been brought up short only when she crossed judicial lines. For example, she was commander of the Special Operations Division during the mass arrest of peaceful demonstrators in 2000 and 2002. In that role she was responsible for ordering the “handcuff technique” where police pulled the detainee’s wrist behind him or her and secured it to the opposite ankle. Cops left people hogtied in this manner for as long as 24 hours. According to a 2003 internal report, Lanier told an investigator she used the technique “to prevent escape, protect the protesters from one another, and to prevent then from committing sexual acts with each other.” A federal court ruled the mass arrest illegal, ordered the District to pay millions in restitution and mandated a new set of procedures for dealing with protesters. The council specifically prohibited hogtying prisoners. Yet because the scandal revolved around political protests linked to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, it didn’t particularly affect the police department’s reputation in the community and hardly dented Lanier’s sterling local reputation. A federal judge’s order to stop Lanier from setting up random roadblocks that allowed cops to stop and question residents for no apparent reason proved more damaging—the roadblocks, as well-intentioned as they may have been to stem a 2008 summer epidemic of violence, were seen by many as over the line. Mara Verheyden-Hillard, executive director of the Partnership of Civil Justice Fund that brought both suits, says Lanier is responsible for the culture within the MPD which “evades responsibility and accountability and withholds information the public has a right to know.” What the public knows now is that homicides and crime in general are creeping up, especially in the Fifth Ward, where Lanier takes her regular rides. She has responded by taking vice units out of the seven police districts and forming a unified squad to specifically combat drugs, she explains, to take down networks from the top down. That redeployment doesn’t sit well with street cops and detectives, who have been taking down drug networks from the bottom up for decades. And taking plainclothes vice units off the streets has upset residents, as well. “We have so many small pockets of crime,” says Tiffani Nicole Johnson, who runs the New Brightwood blog that covers neighborhoods in transition in the city’s wealthier Northwest quadrant. “We have nickel and dime crews that set up on corners and shoot up cars and houses. Taking away the vice squads with ears to the ground is a detriment to our safety.” So many crimes—from prostitution to drug dealing—have gone inside and gone high tech. “You know what keeps me awake at night?” she asks. “Technology. Every year we have to add new tools to our toolbox to keep up. Needless to say, criminals use new technology, too.” Like the drug dealers using the Internet and email to score the latest mind-bending chemicals from China to spray or sprinkle on crushed leaves and roll into joints. “They’re cheap and easy to sell one joint at a time,” she says. “It can make people do crazy things.” In confronting drug-addled suspects, like the one who allegedly stabbed the AU grad on the Metro, will one D.C. cop feel threatened, shoot an unarmed suspect and cause the next viral outrage, akin to Freddie Gray in Baltimore? “The threat is present every single day,” says Lanier, as she rolls her scout car by a pair of late night clubs, where the wrong shooting at the wrong time just might blow up the internet. “Even a justified police shooting with an officer who’s defending himself from gunshots from an offender can turn into a Ferguson if it’s not handled properly.”