The Washington Post last Thursday inadvertently underscored the challenge presented to Charles Ramsey, the city’s new police chief.
In a weekly section rather patronizingly devoted to the same District of Columbia in which the paper is located, it interviewed Ramsey, a deputy police superintendent in Chicago. But on the following page, a reader found this consumer-friendly notice, nicely boxed and referring to a regular feature found in the section:
“No crime report was available this week from the District police, due to their computer problems.”
It’s a cheery reminder: Not only is there a greater chance here you’ll be whacked on the noggin by some drug-induced malcontent, but there is also the possibility that nobody will know except, perhaps, your significant others and an overworked emergency room attendant.
Therefore, if you’re looking for any formal statistical commemoration of your victimization, you should carry your own modem, not just Mace. “Well, computers are a problem,” conceded Ramsey. “They (Washington police offices) are in a place where we were five or six years ago, just becoming automated.”
Computers are far from the only resource deficiency in the nation’s capital. Indeed, Ramsey may be fortunate that he has been given the law enforcement equivalent of coaching pro basketball’s woeful Denver Nuggets (10-67 as of Friday). He has an easy act to follow.
“We really are not structured for success,” Larry Soulsby, a department lifer and then-police chief, said a year ago after more evidence of administrative ennui. The declaration should be nominated for the Euphemism Hall of Fame.
Soulsby was not around for Ramsey’s anointment last week because he abruptly split Nov. 25. In fact, he headed for the exits about two hours after another top cop, who just happened to be Soulsby’s roommate in a sweetheart lodging deal in an exclusive high-rise, was indicted for extortion and embezzlement.
Soulsby left behind a department with scant credibility and the slim vestiges of efficiency.
Crime in Washington has outpaced that of other major cities, and the rate of closing cases is poor. Some patrol officers and detectives have to use their own cars. Leadership has been a politicized jest, with Mayor Marion Barry having controlled appointments to the rank of captain and above.
Two-thirds of the officers make fewer than 10 arrests a year. It can take half an officer’s shift (four hours) to book somebody because there isn’t an automated system. Scant time is spent trying to prevent crime, a fact bemoaned in one of several withering critiques done for the city by an outside consultant.
There are no written performance reviews, and there are chronic shortages of bulletproof vests and other equipment. Morale may be far worse than even normal for big-city cops, and domestic violence is a real problem on the force. Despite the highest youth homicide rate, it has failed to spend $3.2 million in federal money for combating such crime.
Half the 3,600 officers are not certified to use their guns. Those assigned to crime-ridden Capitol Hill no longer dust for fingerprints in car theft cases. The city morgue is a joke, with bodies stacking up from last year and sheets used in some cases due to a shortage of body bags.
It goes on. It’s a dismally fitting complement to other indices of disorder: the nation’s highest rate of infant mortality, tuberculosis and new AIDS cases, not to mention the sea of potholes and the broken street and traffic lights.
Charles Ramsey, welcome. And what exactly are you telling your buds back in Chicago when they ask, “What’s the deal in D.C.?”
“I’m telling them you’re talking about a troubled department with a lot of issues, ranging from questions about how it’s being managed to questions of integrity, lack of funds for computers and training. It’s a department in crisis.”
“For instance, take vehicles. It’s my understanding that many are in a state of disrepair. That is something we can’t relate to in Chicago–detectives taking their own cars to crime scenes. That really is difficult to relate to, and I’ve been here (in Chicago) for 29 years.
“Then there are the radios. It’s not so much insufficient numbers but the need for a system that allows police, fire and other agencies to communicate with one another. The police have a system pretty much all their own.”
For sure, the district does not suffer from paltry numbers of cops. The ratio of men and women in blue to citizens is said to be the nation’s highest, around 7.1 per 1,000.
“I ask, `Where are they?’ ” said their new boss. “Something seems not right. If you have that many sworn numbers, the question is if they are being placed where they are needed the most.”
Ramsey would not venture an opinion on some matters, saying he simply had far more research to complete. But if he has one overall diagnosis, it involves the breadth of the malady.
“Many problems seem systemic. So if we don’t fix what’s wrong with the whole organization, we will spend most of the time putting out fires.”
Mayor Barry, the nimble boss, has lost most of his sway over the department. In his stead, there seem to be several layers of potentially restrictive oversight, including a congressionally imposed financial control board that has suffered its own stumbles of late.
” I didn’t hear many tales about Barry. I had some people claim that more civilian officials peer over the shoulders of the D.C. police than probably any other department in the country. I didn’t focus on that. I focused on the power I would have. As long as I had the power to hire and fire, I felt comfortable.”
Ramsey, 48, is divorced and the father of an 11-year-old boy. “He’s my life,” Ramsey said as he explained plans to return regularly to Chicago.
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Oh, and what about the morgue? He does know about the mess there, with the broken cooling system, the flies and standing water, doesn’t he?
“Yeah, I heard about the morgue. I read an article in Vanity Fair about it.”
Vanity Fair? Well, if Ramsey doesn’t turn this mess around, maybe he can at least hire Annie Leibovitz as department photographer.
A grand old red flag
Notoriety makes a TV booker’s heart grow ever so fonder. Thus it was no surprise that A-list legal journalist Stuart Taylor Jr. last week was again beckoned for pundit duty on ABC’s “This Week with Sam and You Know Who” and CNN.
In the ethical cesspool of Washington, the disclosure inspired modest notice and scant public condemnation. Perhaps that explains a call I received from the editor of Legal Times, a weekly publication that runs Taylor’s column, after lauding the decision to yank Taylor’s latest column, which effusively praised independent counsel Kenneth Starr. It turns out that Taylor had been negotiating a job with Starr, although he didn’t take it.
The editor thanked me, in part because he had noticed a general silence and wondered if he were daft.
Well, the National Journal is belatedly taking notice via omission. It decided on a “cooling off” period and not to run a Taylor opus this week.
“As far as disclosure, I was caught napping, I was preoccupied helping Stuart think through the Starr offer,” Stephen Smith, the editor of National Journal said last week.
Smith said that “even if I had the presence of mind,” he felt he would face a Catch-22. While Smith wants to “always be as straight as possible with readers, Stuart had promised Starr to keep the conversations confidential.”
By week’s end, even Taylor was moved to a vague contrition, saying he should have been more forthcoming to his employer. As for whether the whole matter compromised him, he remains offended at the mere suggestion.
“I would have been embarrassed not to have talked to him,” he told Sam and You Know Who. “The man was making a call on me to do a patriotic service as he saw it and as I saw it.”
So just consider Taylor a pinstriped George M. Cohan, a journalism Yankee Doodle Dandy.