Politics
Cop-out
Why is it so hard for big cities—in Texas and elsewhere—to hire a police chief?
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What’s behind the high turnover? In many communities police chiefs are fall guys for everything from failed public-safety initiatives to political gaffes. If they were promoted from within, the chiefs are often faulted for being too entangled in insular fraternities that resist change; if they were brought in from outside, the problem is said to be their inability to win over old-timers. Former Los Angeles police chief Willie Williams—the first chief from outside the LAPD in forty years—was pushed out of office this spring despite lower crime rates because he had not restructured the department’s top brass quickly enough. Even wildly successful chiefs like former New York City police commissioner William Bratton have no guarantees. Bratton, whose innovative policing methods resulted in the steepest two-year decline in crime in the city’s history, was a victim of his own stellar record; when his popularity began to eclipse Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s in 1996, he was forced to step down.
In these and other cities—including several big cities in Texas—such potential land mines have greatly crippled the process of finding a new chief. Dallas, for instance, went without a chief for nearly six months in 1993, and the unwieldiness of the search was the last of a series of clashes over police issues that ended with city manager Jan Hart resigning from her post. El Paso went for almost a year without a chief in 1993 and 1994 because candidates were recruited from far and wide. But of all the Keystone Kops—style searches conducted in recent years, Austin’s may be the clearest indicator of how complicated things have become.
At first, though, it didn’t seem complicated at all. On January 29 Elizabeth Watson announced she was taking a job with the U.S. Justice Department, and city man -ager Jesus Garza began his search for a replacement. Garza announced that he would nominate a candidate by the end of February, and former Travis County sheriff Doyne Bailey, now the director of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, was widely seen as a shoo-in. But when then-mayor Bruce Todd and other influential pols began exerting behind-the-scenes pressure on Bailey’s behalf, Garza bristled. And when Todd wrote an op-ed piece in the Austin American-Statesman pointedly suggesting that Garza should look “close to home” for a candidate, Garza asserted his independence. First he extended the application deadline until late March; then, in May, when he named eight primary candidates, he announced that he would not pick the three front-runners until July—implicitly cutting Todd out of the selection process, because his term as mayor ended June 15. “I’m never surprised at anything becoming a mess in Austin politics, and this became a big mess,” says city council member Daryl Slusher. “The mayor’s lobbying got the process off to a bad start, and it hasn’t recovered.”
Garza really began to feel the heat in mid-July when—instead of naming three front-runners—he announced that he was reopening the search. Upon learning of Garza’s decision through the media, at least two would-be chiefs withdrew their applications in a huff. “It was handled in a deplorable fashion,” says one former candidate, Jerry Williams, the executive director of the Bill Blackwood Law Enforcement Management Institute at Sam Houston State University. “Instead of a professional, well-oiled process, there was just indecision.” Garza denies it, but most likely his hemming and hawing was a result of his inability to settle on a racially diverse trio of candidates. Four of the eight potential front-runners were black, yet according to one council member, the three who scored highest in psychological tests and interviews were all white. When Garza reopened the search, he tried to recruit Richard Williams, the chief in Madison, Wisconsin, who is black, and Salt Lake City chief Ruben Ortega, who is Hispanic, but both declined.
Then, in an abrupt turnaround at the end of July, Garza announced that he had concluded his search and settled on three front-runners, all of them white: Chief Knee of Garden Grove; Austin’s interim chief, Bruce Mills; and Chief Donald Carey of Independence, Missouri. Mills, who was well liked at the APD, was expected to get the job, since Knee and Carey had each overseen fewer than one fifth the number of officers in Austin’s force. But Garza was unwilling to name him outright; first, he said, he wanted input from a 25-person committee of community leaders, and he wanted to put on a town meeting featuring the three candidates at the Austin Convention Center—kind of a Miss Congeniality contest—so interested citizens could meet them and greet them and choose their favorite. But on August 22, just before the reception was to be held, the American-Statesman reported that Mills had chosen a once-suspended officer to head up the APD’s internal affairs division. The officer had also been cited in a whistle-blower lawsuit, which was particularly troublesome since federal investigators have been looking into obstruction-of-justice charges against the department. Then there was the race issue. According to APD insiders, the Austin branch of the NAACP was rumored to have a “bombshell” regarding Mills that would destroy his candidacy, though nothing ever materialized. (NAACP officials did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.)
In early August a coalition of black and Hispanic East Austinites, as well as city council member Willie Lewis, who is black, separately called for Garza to reopen the search yet again, ostensibly because they were not pleased with the three white finalists. Garza, however, held his ground and refused to start the search anew—a rare show of decisiveness in a process characterized by anything but. “There’s no doubt that this has been painful,” he told me wearily before he made his decision. “Most selections of administrators are internal. I sit down and talk with individuals, I figure out who the best person is, I make the appointment, and it’s done. I hired Milton Lee to be general manager of the electric utility, which is the city’s largest department, the one with the most resources. Here’s a man who controls a $500 million—plus budget, and nobody paid much attention to that. On the police chief search, I’ve heard everything. But this is going to be done right, and it’s not going to be rushed. If that means that our time line has changed again, so be it. We’re finished when we’re finished.”
As it happened, Garza was finished on August 26, choosing Knee over the others—but true to form, the grumbling continued. “I am concerned about the candidate’s lack of experience managing a force with a large number of officers of color,” said Councilman Lewis. And Mike Lummus, the president of the Austin Police Association, could barely muster any enthusiasm. “While Mr. Knee would not have been our first choice,” he said, “we recognize that the decision was the city manager’s, not ours.” When it comes to hiring a chief, it seems, cities like Austin simply can’t cop a break.
Pamela Colloff has written for Details and OnPatrol magazines. 
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