Refinery Town Read online

  THREE

  RICHMOND’S COMMUNITY POLICEMAN

  FIFTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD CHRIS MAGNUS, a fair-haired Midwesterner, circulated through the crowd with no visible sign of Richmond Police Department rank. Twenty-five hundred people had just completed the largest protest march in Richmond’s history, walking from downtown to the Chevron refinery. Magnus greeted people in friendly, low-key fashion. He was hatless, wearing blue jeans and a windbreaker with a barely noticeable RPD logo on it. When he approached a small group of us chatting about the large turnout, he smiled broadly. As if already attuned to the topic of our conversation, he stopped and declared, “Isn’t this a terrific crowd? What a great day for our city!”

  Despite his calm, even stolid, appearance, Magnus has often been described in the media as being unconventional. That characterization does apply to his personal background, which includes no other cops in the family tree. A native of Lansing, Michigan, Magnus grew up in university circles. His father was a professor at Michigan State (MSU); his mother, a local piano teacher. He first worked as a police dispatcher and later became a paramedic. After joining his hometown police force as a patrol officer, he rose to the rank of captain in sixteen years. Along the way, he earned a master’s degree in labor relations at MSU. Then he departed to serve as police chief in Fargo, North Dakota.

  Six years later, when Magnus was forty-five, he applied to become Richmond’s new chief. That was in 2005, when the city was rightly notorious for its violent crime, youth gangs, drug trafficking, and troubled relations between police and the public. Richmond’s city hall search committee wanted to hire someone who could reduce crime by reconnecting the RPD to the community it serves. Community policing, as that approach is known, now has many boosters, but a decade ago it was still little understood and not so widely embraced.

  Those vetting Magnus for the chief’s job in Richmond were duly impressed with his credentials as a public safety reformer. And they had good reason to act quickly since “in just one two week period in the summer of 2005, a stream of day-time shootings had left eight people dead and many more wounded. By the end of the year, Richmond would record 40 killings, making it the second most violent city in California behind Compton. . . . In response, some residents pleaded for the National Guard to be deployed to the area.”1

  Thanks to a memorable film by the Coen brothers, Magnus had some explaining to do about his previous six-year posting. As police chief of Fargo he was coming from one of the safest and whitest places in America, a community averaging one homicide every two years. As the San Francisco Chronicle noted, “At least four months out of the year, the weather in Fargo falls below zero, sometimes 30 or 40 degrees below zero. Police there believe the frigid temperatures may be partly responsible for the low crime rate.”2 Richmond was not much bigger than real-life Fargo. But its population was largely nonwhite, low-income, and about to experience even more homicides (forty-two) in 2006, making it one of the most dangerous cities in the United States per capita. In neighboring Berkeley there were only four violent deaths during the same period.

  “I really thought Fargo would be a disqualifier for me because of the demographics of the city,” Magnus said.3 In addition, the candidate from North Dakota was not yet known for being one of the few gay police chiefs in America. If that fact had been publicized during Richmond’s search process, Magnus might not have been hired, according to one city hall observer.

  Fortunately, City Manager Bill Lindsay and then city councilor Gayle McLaughlin and others in city government decided to take a chance on a man now celebrated as one of the country’s most effective police reformers. The department Magnus inherited had a sordid history of corruption, brutality, racial division, and hostile interaction with the public, all of which had generated a huge pile of bad press clips. In the early 1980s the stars of this horror show were a group of out-of-control white officers known as “the cowboys.” Their trigger-happy behavior even gained the attention of the New York Times and 60 Minutes. It also cost the city a lot of money.

  In 1983, two African Americans, Johnny Roman and Michael Guillory, were fatally shot by the RPD. The families of the deceased won a $3 million damage award after filing a federal lawsuit, which alleged “a pattern of misconduct that police and city officials ignored or condoned.” The plaintiffs’ attorney, who worked for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), thought he had negotiated a pretrial settlement worth $760,000. But that deal was rejected by five white city councilors, joined by Nat Bates. As Bates explained: “We have a department and a reputation to defend.”4

  Fortunately, some African American officers—then representing only 20 percent of the force—took the stand against their fellow officers when the Roman-Guillory case went to a jury trial in federal court. Sergeant Tony Zanotelli, then president of the Richmond Police Officers Association, denounced these witnesses as “puppets for the NAACP” and their attorneys as “blood sucking.”5 Speaking at a city hall prayer vigil, C. A. Robertson, president of Guardians of Justice, a local black officers’ group, defended their actions: “Our common cause is to stand up and testify and make the city of Richmond better.” To achieve that goal, black community leaders like James McMillan, a local pharmacist, called for the hiring of “a city manager and police chief with the commitment to have the police do their work properly”—a personnel change that was still two decades away in Richmond.

  Long after “the cowboys” were discredited and disbanded, the RPD still deployed overly aggressive “street teams.” A veteran of the department interviewed by Joe Eskenazi for San Francisco Magazine recalled “hopping over fences and chasing people and loving it—walking around the department like I was the baddest guy.” To thwart lookouts posted on corners, this officer and others would jump out of unmarked vehicles to maintain an element of surprise—thus becoming known to civilians on the street as “Jump-Out Boys.” Eskanazi’s source showed him an old departmental publicity photo featuring these same scowling officers “decked out in full tactical gear and toting MP5 submachine guns.” According to Eskenazi, they looked, acted, and felt like members of a paramilitary unit. At best, this pre-Magnus approach left “murderous gangs locked in a futile stalemate with police” in Richmond. Even Eskenazi’s RPD source acknowledged a sense of failure: “I don’t feel like we bettered the city at all, looking back.”6

  Richmond community organizer Tamisha Walker would agree. As recently as the 1990s she even feared being robbed by the Richmond police. “They’d say, ‘If you don’t shut up, we’ll put you in the back of this car, take you somewhere, beat your ass, and no one will do anything about it.’” Meanwhile, the RPD didn’t endear itself to Richmond’s growing Latino community with incidents like the beating and arrest of Andres Soto and his sons on Cinco de Mayo in 2002. For too long, Soto contends, there were “not a lot of professional standards” in the hiring of new Richmond officers. As a result, “too many ex-military, thuggish cops, and rednecks” simply ran roughshod over nonwhite residents. For their part, newly hired veterans of military service abroad were shocked by the level of gun violence they encountered in Richmond. “I couldn’t believe I was in an American city,” recalls Ben Therriault, who spent 2005 assigned to a military police brigade in Iraq. “I thought I was back in Baghdad.”

  Beginning in early 2006, Chris Magnus reshuffled the RPD’s command structure and promoted like-minded senior officers. As he explained much later, “If you’re really committed to community policing, you have to make structural changes within your organization.” As he saw it, Richmond and other cities have the choice between having “community policing officers who are this small cadre within a department that is essentially its public relations wing” or “integrating the larger expectations of community policing into the role of every officer in the department.”

  Magnus pushed the latter, more systemic approach. One major change was relying far less on “street teams” that would “go into high crime neighborho
ods and roust anybody who’s out walking around, doing whatever, with the idea that they might have a warrant outstanding or be holding drugs or something.” According to the new chief, that kind of law enforcement activity, if conducted on a regular basis, only served “to alienate the whole population that lives in those neighborhoods. And 95 percent of those are good people not engaged in crime.”

  Magnus applied the same philosophy to Richmond’s now very restrained handling of political protests, including marches and rallies, which after 2006 often included the mayor and other members of the city council. The RPD became more careful about who was picked to be part of its Mobile Field Force, the unit responsible for dealing with civil unrest or large crowds.

  “I think it’s really important to get the right people both commanding those teams and also on the line,” Magnus said. “They need to be given very clear direction and supervision: if someone behaves badly towards you, you just smile, and you don’t need to respond or take it personally. A successful event is not one where you’ve had to engage and get into a fight with somebody. It’s actually one where everybody leaves, there’s no arrests, no injuries, everyone feels they have been treated fairly and well. . . . That doesn’t mean that people who are protesting necessarily have to agree with us on everything or even care for police in general. But they at least feel they are treated with respect.”

  On a day-to-day basis, the RPD began assigning more officers to regular beats, where they were encouraged to do more foot patrolling. The use of bicycles increased as more officers were trained and became willing to use them in their assigned neighborhoods. Under a new job evaluation system, career advancement became more closely tied to an officer’s ability to build long-term relationships with individual residents, neighborhood groups, and community leaders. Richmond cops were given personalized business cards, with their work cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses, and urged to give them out. The RPD even began hosting Coffee with a Cop conversations in coffee shops and other places where residents could meet officers assigned to their neighborhoods, ask them questions, and get crime-fighting tips.

  “We assign people for longer periods of time to specific geographic areas with the expectation that they get to know and become known by residents,” Magnus explained. “They are in and out of businesses, nonprofits, churches, a wide variety of community organizations, and they come to be seen as a partner in crime reduction. Our idea is that you’re not going to be able to just arrest your way out of crime, but that you have to develop a wide range of strategies that involve community members as partners to really improve public safety.”

  Magnus argues that this approach has a dual benefit. It “not only leads to better outcomes in terms of crime reduction, it also makes for police officers who are a lot more satisfied and productive over the course of their careers because they’re not just arresting the same people over and over again. They’re actually engaged with residents. They’re seeing their work have an impact and make a difference. They’re feeling appreciated and valued.”

  To set a strong personal example, Richmond’s new chief took another unusual step when he first arrived. Although most RPD personnel live outside the city, he bought a home in the area known as the North and East neighborhood. From there he could bicycle to work and, when off duty, was never far from the daily challenges he faced on the job. At home he could hear police sirens late into the night, the occasional shot being fired, and members of his neighborhood association knocking on his door to report nearby crimes. On one occasion a neighborhood activist named Brian Lewis heard a knock on his own door and was amazed to find the chief personally checking in after Lewis’s home had been burglarized.7

  Felix Hunziker, a project manager for an architectural firm, got to know Magnus first as a North and East neighbor. In 2007, four years after Hunziker moved to Richmond, foreclosure-driven blight began to creep into the area, despite its many blocks of well-kept single-family dwellings. Vacant houses multiplied, burglaries increased substantially, several home invasions occurred, an elderly man was murdered, and someone fired twenty-three rounds into a house just up the street from Hunziker’s. “Community policing was just getting off the ground,” Hunziker recalls, but civilian self-help was already being encouraged.

  Working with officers under Magnus’s direction, Hunziker and forty other residents formed a neighborhood patrol. Equipped only with flashlights, vests, and mobile phones, they patrolled the North and East neighborhoods once or twice a week, at night. They applied the “broken windows” theory of policing to any visible signs of littering or disorder, reporting trash pile-ups to Richmond Code Enforcement (an arm of the RPD that grew from six officers to twenty-eight under Magnus). “Curbing blight was part of what we did, but the main focus was to build community,” Hunziker said. “We distributed thousands of multilingual door-hanger flyers, knocked on many hundreds of doors to let people know about the N&E neighborhood council and how to start a neighborhood watch. We showed our community that people cared and they too could get involved.”

  Under Magnus the department began hiring and promoting more women, minorities, and Richmond residents. “When you have a department that doesn’t look anything like the community it serves, you’re asking for trouble, no matter how dedicated and professional your employees are,” he explained. “So an ongoing mission for us here is to hire the highest quality people that represent that diversity of the community, across the board. I don’t even just mean from a racial, ethnic, or gender standpoint. I mean in terms of life experiences, being connected to neighborhoods, growing up either in Richmond or cities like Richmond.”

  As retirements and other openings permitted, Magnus was able to personally select more than 90 of the department’s nearly 140 patrol officers. Over time he appointed all but four of the RPD’s forty-six supervisors as well. By 2015, only twelve officers serving on the force when Magnus arrived remained on its payroll. Budgets prepared by Bill Lindsay and approved by the city council kept the RPD at full strength during a period when fiscal pressures on neighboring cities, like Oakland, led to force reductions and what some residents believed was a related increase in crime.

  The RPD changed its personnel record-keeping system while Magnus was chief, making it difficult to compare diversity figures, before and after, with total precision. But by 2014 about 40 percent of the department’s 182 active police officers were white, while 60 percent were from minority groups. The RPD had twenty-six women on the force, including officers highly visible in the community, like Captain Bisa French and, until her retirement, Lieutenant Lori Curran. As Magnus explained to one reporter, “It’s easier to get new people in a department than it is to get a new culture in a department.”8

  A CASE OF DISCRIMINATION?

  The creativity that Magnus displayed when making personnel decisions was much applauded later. But these changes were extremely controversial at the time. His shake-up of the RPD roster threatened the old departmental hierarchy, its institutional power and perks. Internal opposition began coalescing when Magnus was still just one of six candidates for the chief’s job in 2005. According to Captain Mark Gagen, a later ally of Magnus, two of his fellow officers—lieutenants Cleveland Brown and Arnold Threets—made it clear that they were going to undermine anyone picked from outside the RPD.

  During Magnus’s first six months in office, he created two new deputy chief positions. He filled one post with Lori Ritter, a now-retired white female officer who favored departmental change. This put Ritter in charge of Brown and three African American captains who felt passed over for promotions. Among the other black RPD veterans who were bypassed was Lieutenant Johan Simon. (While serving as a detective in the 1980s, Simon had complained on 60 Minutes that the crime-fighting effectiveness of his white “cowboy” colleagues was being unfairly hampered.) At a command staff retreat in September 2006, internal tensions escalated, and colleagues resentful of Ritter’s promotion accused her of racism.

  Thre
e months later, the attorney representing six of the seven African American police officers who later sued Magnus and the city for racial discrimination called a press conference outside RPD headquarters. The chief was publicly denounced for creating a hostile work environment for black officers, including soon-to-be-plaintiffs Threets, Brown, Simon, and Lieutenant Shawn Pickett, then in charge of RPD detectives. According to Gagen’s subsequent testimony in their case, Pickett viewed Simon and Threets as “the rightful chief and deputy chief” and boasted that their lawyer’s press conference would hit Magnus like a “sledgehammer.” Officers (like Gagen) who sided with the chief faced verbal abuse and veiled threats. At the scene of a homicide, Pickett angrily confronted Gagen, accusing him of being a “kiss ass” for Magnus; on another occasion, Pickett called him “a little snitch bitch.”9

  Robert Rogers, then a reporter for the Contra Costa Times, covered the resulting state and federal court cases, which took five years to resolve. He believes this litigation was part of the broader “struggle between what Richmond was and what it’s becoming,” between its old culture of patronage and insider connections, and the modern practices promoted by newcomers like Magnus and Lindsay. Rogers doubts that the aggrieved officers ever expected to go to trial. They hoped that negative publicity about Magnus would generate sufficient political pressure to trigger a coup within the department and that the new chief would be dumped as too controversial and costly for Richmond. To rally black community support, anonymous supporters of the plaintiffs distributed hundreds of copies of a DVD showing Magnus and Ritter being deposed in the case, but with their taped testimony doctored and distorted.