SOME COPS ARE NATURALS AT community policing. Without even thinking about it, they chat up residents in their patrol areas and gather information on the neighborhood’s greatest needs. They don’t have to be told to take an approach that’s more proactive than reactive, one in which building trust with citizens is at the front end of the crime-solving equation. Chief Click had, I’m sure, recognized those in the department who had that inclination and assigned them to ICP. Which makes it all the more puzzling why he chose me—a cop who gloried in locking away villains. A lieutenant who preferred drug raids to social mixers. If my old man had been right that Click had big things in mind for me, this was a strange way for him to show it.
Every day began with a foot patrol. I supervised a team of twelve officers, and we’d take turns walking through the complex, around the courtyard, upstairs and downstairs along the corridors. This was one of Dallas’s largest housing developments, so there were hundreds of residents, and I didn’t wait for an invitation to talk to any of them. Since I had to be there, I figured I might as well make things interesting. “How are you-all doing?” I’d ask, wandering up to pairs of older women who sat out on their terraces. “What’s going on?” They’d smile and nod and welcome me with sweet Southern accents. A few residents initially seemed reluctant to talk to me, but the vast majority embraced me. There was an instant familiarity and kinship: When I connected with the people there, I felt like I was talking to my great-grandmother, Mabel. Or my mother, Norma Jean. Or the classmates I’d played sports with. The conversations were as easy and comfortable as they were relaxed and friendly.
Beyond strolling, I did a whole lot of hanging out. I was on hand for barbecues and block parties. I shot hoops with the kids down at a nearby recreation center. My team and I organized a crime watch task force and met with parents from the local PTA. And never once did I answer a 911 call. Like the rest of my team, I was there to gather intel and pass it along to Dispatch so they could send in other officers to handle the emergencies. And on occasion, I did get a tip.
After I’d been on the job for a few months, people began confiding in me, giving me criminal intelligence that officers could act on to improve safety. I noticed that the officers who’d been assigned there had keen insight into people’s lives, knew their kids and other relatives, and could distinguish the criminal element from the good folks whose only crime was being poor, locked in generational poverty. I recall one instance in which a shooting that had happened on the previous night became the talk of the neighborhood the next day. Soon the officers on my team knew the name of the shooter, where he lived, the car he drove, and his baby mama’s name and address. This information came in so quickly because the officers were trusted in the community and people believed that something would be done to capture the shooter if they came forward. They knew our cops wouldn’t give them up as snitches. This incident was a wake-up call for me: Community policing could lead to solving crimes, even violent ones.
Such criminal intelligence and subsequent action was off-putting to lawbreakers. The constant presence of officers sent a message, loud and clear, to thieves and dope dealers: This is no longer your turf. Your community is reclaiming it. Crooks tend to feed off anonymity and fear. They count on their neighbors being scared to call 911 and report them. Even those in my complex who would report a robbery wouldn’t, for instance, reveal that it was their own home that was being robbed. They didn’t want word to get back to the robber, often someone right there in the housing complex. The most powerful way officers can begin reversing that dynamic is to shift the perception of who owns the building. And the corner. You want the citizens there to realize they own it. And when the people take back this ownership, the criminals become paranoid.
Let’s say our police department hosts a block party. Residents are milling around outdoors, enjoying free popcorn and hot dogs. And throughout the afternoon, most of them are stopping by to talk with the cops who are there. There’s little fear of being spotted and singled out for chatting with cops, because dozens of people are doing the same. Believe me, the criminals in the crowd are taking in the whole scene. But they have no idea whether one of their neighbors’ interactions with an officer is an innocuous hello or a tattle session. They’re thinking, Could that person be snitching on me? Maybe all the guy is saying is “Man, that Cowboys game on Sunday was crazy”—but from afar, the criminal can’t hear that conversation.
That’s when paranoia sets in. With all these people potentially running their mouths to cops, it suddenly seems riskier to burglarize a home in that area. A place where, previously, they had broken the law with impunity has now become one in which they have to constantly look over their shoulder. And a little at a time, what once felt like their stomping ground becomes an uncomfortable environment in which to commit a crime.
Oddly, officers can identify with the criminal’s state of mind. They often share a similar psychological profile. Hypervigilance is paranoia by another name. That’s what makes many officers uniquely qualified to use psychological warfare in dealing with offenders. We understand how they view the world and can use that to our advantage. If I’m interviewing a murder suspect, I’m going to bluff that I have far more evidence than I do, just to make him panic and confess. Or in an alternative approach, I’m going to say “You thirsty, man? Here, have a Coke”—and just as he’s reaching for it, you make him first write down his account. Or if I’m trying to get a hostile barricaded person to come out of his house, I’m going to pretend I’ll use force, the way I once did with those robbers hiding in the crawl space. The games we cops play are fun as hell, and especially when I was in SWAT, I got hooked on them.
But I digress. The whole time I was in that apartment complex, as much as I had started to see the value in a different approach, I was itching to get back into the action. I was craving the addictive high of my previous job, and leaving it behind had triggered a slow and painful withdrawal. Nearly every day I still had lunch with my buddies on my former SWAT squad. When I wasn’t with them, I was calling to check in: “What are you-all doing today?” I’d ask. “Any new raids?” In retrospect, it was sad and pathetic, not to mention funny. I was so eager to get out of there that, within a couple months of taking on the job, I started looking for an exit strategy.
It didn’t help that, while I got along well with the residents, I wasn’t a fan of some of the officers on my team. Our personalities didn’t mesh. And aside from that, I’d come in with an attitude, a judgment that the “soft policing” they were doing behind the scenes gave them zero street cred. But I was wrong. Dead wrong.
I FINALLY LEFT THE PROJECTS after a year and a half and skipped around town to various patrol stations. In 2001, I was transferred to South Dallas, then a tough part of the city. Different location and colleagues, same mandate to supervise a team implementing a robust community policing program. I was then transferred to the Northeast patrol division as a lieutenant for a year, and three years later, I was promoted to deputy chief of that division—making me one of about fifteen officers at that rank.
It was during those two ICP assignments that I first noticed my instincts had slowly shifted: I couldn’t do traditional policing without automatically thinking about how to incorporate community policing. I found myself looking for ways to get every cop on my team, even those who were answering 911 calls, to connect with the people they served. And I encouraged my officers to set up neighborhood watch groups. That first assignment in the housing development had clearly planted a seed.
I also started realizing some hard truths about the work I’d done earlier in my career. In the 1980s and ’90s, I’d been part of the major push to lock up hundreds of offenders, starting with the Reagan-era expansion of the War on Drugs and the “Just Say No” campaign, and continuing with the 1994 crime bill during President Bill Clinton’s first term. Zero tolerance was the order of the day as public concern and outcry about drug use reached a point of hysteria. Along with it came draconian three-strikes policies that hit poor communities the hardest and disproportionately impacted black men. During that period, America became the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world.
Dallas was especially hard hit. The reality is that during the 1990s, Dallas experienced the highest crime rate in its history, and that high rate continued through 2004 and beyond, as we locked away more and more people. It would seem, at first glance, that throwing these offenders in jail would be the best approach. And yet my experience after decades on the ground told a different story. While keeping prisons full has lined the pockets of those who run the prison industry, it hasn’t necessarily made us safer—particularly inner-city residents. As a beat cop, I’d send someone to jail, only to see that person right back on the street a week or a month later, committing the same crime. Prison was a revolving door. While murderers and bank robbers usually received long sentences, drug offenders were often released within days, soon after they’d been probated and paroled. They’d then get out and look for work, and when no one would hire them because of their criminal records, they’d rob to get money. Instead of rehabilitating them, our system had set them up to become career criminals. Over time, these realizations got me thinking: If locking people up is so effective, then why do I keep throwing the exact same people in jail? And what is the alternative?
THERE’S NO PERFECT ANSWER or cure-all. Mass incarceration did not happen in a vacuum; its beginnings coincided with a public school system that was beginning to deteriorate at the moment we started putting more people in prison. It also coincided with the defunding of mental health and drug treatment programs for the one-third of prisoners who are mentally ill. These factors, among others, converged to form a perfect storm that ultimately left certain neighborhoods broken and in disarray.
During my back-to-back community policing assignments, I hadn’t been there to put anyone in jail. In place of hauling off dealers to prison, I was building relationships with young kids, trying to put them on the right path years before they could be sucked into a life of crime. I was just talking to people—or at least that’s what it seemed like on the surface. And yet one interaction at a time, many of those residents began to see us as part of their community’s extended family. On a daily basis, I was reminded of all the reasons I got into policing in the first place—to serve others and to change lives. I’d been doing that, of course, by tracking down criminals. But this brand of policing was less about a foot chase and more about face time. It required me to put aside my need for the adrenaline rush of locking away criminals, which, in retrospect, seems driven more by self-aggrandizement than by a desire to serve. The whole point of community policing is to create safer communities, and it had slowly dawned on me that that doesn’t have to involve a gun. In fact, the greatest weapon in an officer’s arsenal can be a passing conversation with a resident on the block. That brief connection can be a significant source of power.
CHIEF DAVID KUNKLE STEPPED into the top job in 2004. Years earlier he’d joined DPD as a rookie before eventually moving on to the police department in Arlington, a suburb just outside the city. There he’d worked his way up the ranks to become deputy city manager. He traded that job to take on the most significant in his career: slashing crime in Dallas, which then, as I’ve said, had the highest violent crime rate among the nation’s big cities. He’d started by implementing a CompStat model of policing—a statistical metric system, introduced in 1994 by Commissioner Bill Bratton of the New York City Police Department. It was used to track crime, combat petty offenses as a way to reduce bigger ones, and foster officer accountability. I call it the show-me approach to law enforcement: Don’t just tell me how good you are at your job—demonstrate it by revealing how many fewer robberies you had last week.
Not long after Chief Kunkle took the helm, he called a CompStat meeting with the department’s commanders. After laying out his vision for expanding our community policing efforts, he concluded by giving us a challenge.
“Bring me one win,” he told the group. “I need one small win from every one of you. Just one.” He didn’t define what a “win” would look like; nor did he give an example. He simply left it open for our interpretation. When I heard the chief’s request, I took it seriously. Right then and there in that conference room, I quietly resolved that I would somehow create a small miracle. After leaving the housing development, I’d been assigned to Lake Highlands, a community in the northeast patrol division of Dallas. I would make it my personal mission to deliver a win there.
Historically, Lake Highlands hadn’t been a particularly crime-ridden suburb. In fact, I’d always known it to be affluent. As a kid when I passed through the mostly white area on a bus ride, the people I spotted on the front lawns of luxurious homes always felt a world away from my own neighborhood—and their world was one I dreamed of inhabiting. But the scene there changed when, in the late 1990s, a cluster of apartment complexes that had been built a decade earlier were opened to low-income residents. As they moved in, that pocket of the neighborhood became an eyesore and an aggravation for those whose nice homes butted up against the dilapidated buildings. The crime rate inched up. Burglaries and drug deals became commonplace. And longtime residents had no shortage of complaints.
For days after Chief Kunkle’s challenge, I drove around thinking about what my win could be. I talked to community members and called up city council members. I knew most wanted to generally cut crime in that disruptive area, but I wanted to get more specific. “What is the one place where we most need to make a change?” I asked. A consensus emerged: The street corner at the intersection of Forest Lane and Audelia Road was the epicenter, the place from which much of the neighborhood’s crime emanated. “If you can get us a win there,” council members Bill Blaydes and Gary Griffith told me, “we’ll be one hundred percent behind you from now on.”
Many residents said the same. Up until then, officers had tried just about every strategy to clean up that intersection, even bringing in narcotics officers to host community gatherings. And yet that corner was still giving everyone the blues. “Nothing has worked,” one sergeant admitted. “We’ve thrown everything but the kitchen sink at the problem.” His comment gave me an idea: Why not at last throw the kitchen sink at the situation? That’s how Operation Kitchen Sink came to life. It would be my plan for scoring a win.
Many communities have a corner exactly like the one at Forest and Audelia. The criminals are there, operating in broad daylight, because they feel they can. Who is going to stop them? No one. And in Lake Highlands, they’d gotten particularly bold: Even when patrol cops rode by, they’d keep right on doing what they were doing. Officers had been working hard to combat crime in the area, but their efforts weren’t moving the needle—and the problem had become so overwhelming that they didn’t know how to proceed. What had been true during my assignment in the housing development was also true here: When criminals feel comfortable, they wreak havoc. They act like they own the place, and if no one stops them, they will expand their territory. That’s what happened in New Jack City, when Nino Brown took over an entire apartment building and ran his crack operation from there. I wasn’t having it. That’s why my kitchen sink strategy began with 24/7 supervision of that corner. With the help of the officers in my substation, I was determined to take back that intersection by, for starters, never leaving it.
And that is what my team and I did. At the start of my shift, I’d stop in at the convenience store there and buy myself a bottle of Big Red soda or an RC and a large bag of Lay’s potato chips, my favorite. I’d then return to my nearby squad car and wait. And watch. And wait some more. The same way I used to wait for drug users to back out too fast from a driveway. The absence of activity became our first triumph. Within days after we began our around-the-clock coverage, crime plummeted. The 911 calls dissipated. The dealers traded their dope elsewhere. After just two weeks of constant surveillance, that intersection went from a bustling superhighway of criminal activity to one of the safest and quietest corners in the city. A second win soon followed: The crime dip spread from that corner to other parts of the area. Our efforts had a ripple effect. The results were specific, measurable, and undeniable.
With our triumph came a lesson that became the premise of my policing strategy: To reduce crime, you needn’t target an entire substation or even a hundred blocks. Rather, you have to focus on transforming the hot spot—the one place, like that intersection, that has become ground zero for criminal activity in the area. By transforming it, you will automatically put criminals on edge. And in that window immediately after they scatter or go underground, officers have an opportunity to engage and empower community members. The citizens of Lake Highlands were too frightened to do anything about that corner until it was clear. But once it had been reclaimed, my team organized residents and equipped them with the tools they needed to keep it that way—by, for example, alerting neighborhood officers of any suspicious activity or calling 911. I was so hell-bent on keeping that corner clear that I offered residents my personal cellphone number. “If we don’t do what we’ve promised to do at this intersection,” I told them at a community gathering, “I want you to call me directly, any time of the day or night”—and boy, did they call. The progress we made was sustainable only because we’d gotten the community involved and invested.
The residents’ response to our small win was off the charts. Chief Kunkle also took notice. Operation Kitchen Sink was the most successful tactic I’d ever implemented, and for me, it became a pivot point at which, five years into my efforts in community policing, the strategy clicked. It all made sense. And it could be done only hand in hand with those who have the most invested in a neighborhood—its residents.