NATIONAL COPS EVALUATION
ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE CASE STUDY:
Riverside, California

David Thacher
Research Associate
Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University

Case Study Prepared for the Urban Institute

Introduction

Riverside, California is a rapidly-growing city of close to 250,000 residents at the heart of California’s Inland Empire, an agricultural powerhouse that lies to the east of Los Angeles. Since the city’s first orange groves were planted some one hundred years ago, Riverside has been the source of nearly all of this country’s navel oranges, and to this day the citrus industry occupies a central place in the local culture. But as Riverside has matured and its agricultural industry has lost the power to carry the local economy entirely, the city has shown some characteristic signs of age and growth, such as a declining downtown and rising crime rates.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Riverside began undergoing important changes in its local government, including the appointment of a new, reform-minded City Manager, and growing activism on the part of its City Council. One of the most dramatic and contentious examples of how these changes have played out is in the local police department. With 323 officers and another 151 civilians, the Riverside Police Department was among the largest police departments in the region, and many RPD veterans point to a distinguished history in which the department enjoyed a reputation as one of the premier law enforcement agencies in the state. But by the early 1990s the department faced some significant challenges, including a lukewarm reputation in the city’s minority communities, a series of lawsuits brought by Riverside citizens, and internal divisions over its current leadership and how to handle the agency’s growth, which had made traditionally informal management practices increasingly problematic.

Ken Fortier, the Chief of Police appointed to meet these challenges in early 1993, has left a complicated legacy in Riverside. On the one hand, Fortier was able to revamp the RPD’s administration, helping to install modern systems for everything from budgeting to the serving of search warrants; and he was able to lay the foundations for community policing in the city by spearheading a system of area commands charged with solving community problems. On the other hand, Fortier’s leadership provoked great resistance in Riverside, the effects of which still linger today, and many of his reforms were embroiled in turmoil until his departure in the summer of 1997.

The following sections review this history in three parts: Section one begins by describing how the Riverside Police Department operated in the years leading up to Ken Fortier’s arrival, examining its relationship to the rest of city government and the community, its operational and administrative systems, and its management. Section two then chronicles the reforms that took place under Fortier, and section three revisits the RPD today through the same lens that section one applied to its past.

I. THE RIVERSIDE PD IN THE 1980s

As it entered the early 1990s, the Riverside Police Department (RPD) was starting to suffer some growing pains. “When a department usually reaches three hundred [officers],” one RPD veteran explains, referring to the sworn strength Riverside reached at this time, “it changes. The face changes from a family organization to more of a business.” The difficulty was that no change comes without some strife, and many in the department apparently did not particularly want to give up their atmosphere of informality and collegiality for the impersonal style of a business. More to the point, RPD management had long taken a hands-off approach to their job, to the point that policies and procedures were not strongly emphasized, and many who had gotten used to that system saw no need to do anything different.

But at the same time, a substantial number of newer officers and managers worried that their department was becoming too loose and lacked direction, and city officials had also begun to feel this concern. Indeed, because the eventual push to reform the RPD would come from city hall and the community, it is perhaps best to begin by looking at the department from the outside.

1. Relationship with the Environment

Not long before an annual negotiation with the Riverside Police Officer’s Association in the mid-1980s, the office of the City Manager in Riverside received a puzzling wish list from the police union—puzzling not because of the demands it made, but because of one it didn’t make. As explained by Assistant City Manager Larry Paulsen, who has dealt with labor relations issues for Riverside for many years, these annual lists had become quite predictable: “I could go look at one now and it would look like it did in 1975. I mean, it’s got the same things on there that they want and we’ve never given them.” But this particular list contained a notable absence:

There was little the City Manager’s office could do at that point. As Paulsen puts it, “After he has done it, you weren’t going to put that horse back in the barn. It was just gone.” Paulsen admits that the city probably would have conceded to the union on the 4-10 plan at some point, but he says that it would have insisted on some negotiation: “At the negotiating table we would have put some sort of value on that, and hopefully received something in return for giving that very huge, or perceived huge benefit.”

The episode reflected an uncomfortable lack of communication between city government and the RPD. To be sure, Paulsen and other government officials maintain that their relationship with the police was not necessarily adversarial: When they did get together, police managers and city officials were able to work together amicably. But the two groups often didn’t get together on many issues in the first place, and city hall apparently became increasingly uncomfortable with the way police were making decisions on their own. The basic problem seems to have been that Riverside police—like many of their counterparts in other cities at the time—simply did not want to talk much about departmental strategies and operations, choosing to keep such decisions within the family, as it were: Paulsen and others report that past administrations were not very forthcoming about departmental problems, even though some of them impacted city government directly (for example, the RPD reportedly generated an average of $600,000 annually in claims and lawsuit payments); and elected officials maintain that they had almost no communication with anyone in the police department except the Chief and a single overburdened “liaison” who had been designated to handle their inquiries. Police did, of course, usually confer with city government on decisions about things like budgeting and labor contracts, but the 4-10 episode—and there were reportedly others like it—suggested that even that link was a little bit weak.

The RPD’s relationship to the community was similar, in the sense that the department had a relatively good public image with most of the community, but little direct dialogue outside of individual calls for service and newspaper reports on specific crimes (the department did operate a neighborhood watch program during this period, but it was reportedly not very active). On the positive side, many department members felt that they had “a pretty good relationship with the community” (in the words of one RPD veteran), and a 1992 community survey seemed to bear that impression out, as it found that 66% of its sample rated the department’s overall job performance as “excellent” or “good.”

On the other hand, some groups of Riverside residents apparently had serious concerns about their police department: Most notably, while only 25% of whites rated the RPD’s performance as “only fair” or “poor” in the 1992 survey, 54% of blacks did. Moreover, although the same statistics suggested that the city’s Latino community was only slightly less supportive of the RPD than whites (with 31% rating the department’s performance as “only fair” or “poor”), there was clearly tension between police at least a significant minority of Latinos. This was particularly true in the vocal Casa Blanca neighborhood, where resident groups maintained that the department ignored crime and even emergency calls and accused police of heavy-handed tactics when they did take action. For their part, many police felt threatened by increasingly violent gangs in Casa Blanca, and they denied the charges of both harassment and under-enforcement. Many of these disagreements crystallized in a series of high-profile confrontations between police and Latino community members.1 This sort of high-profile tension with the community was apparently the exception rather than the rule, but even RPD supporters admit that the department tended to weaken its relationships with the community by closing itself off from outside opinion (though they rightly point out that many of their counterparts in the law enforcement world were doing the same thing): “Like many police departments,” one RPD veteran explains, “our attitude pretty much was like ‘We’re the police, and we go to school for this and train, and we’re the experts in this area.’”

In part, this sense of professional autonomy was limited to questions about who would have input into police decisions, for officers did sometimes collaborate with outside agencies—such as code enforcement, schools, and nearby police forces—in responding to community problems. But police apparently had some reservations about this type of collaboration: For example, the School Resource Officer program, while extremely popular with local schools, faced some criticism within the RPD, where some felt that the officers were being diverted into work assignments that police should not properly be involved in (a criticism that actually intensified as the RPD moved into community policing). Moreover, even those officers who insist that they would call on agencies like code enforcement to “manage their beats” admit that they would only do so in extremis, and that outside agencies themselves often resisted their overtures—to the point that many officers became discouraged with collaboration altogether.

2. Operations

Though many in the department admit that they were “a little weak on listening to the community,” most insist that the department was strong on front-line operations. Detectives prided themselves on resourceful tactics and a high clearance rate (for example, the economic crimes section—one of four subdivisions within General Investigations—cleared 89% of its assigned cases), and patrol officers were considered to be well-qualified and hard-working individuals who took pride in “handling their beats.” There were apparently concerns that Special Investigations was too removed from the rest of the department: Geographically, it was housed in its own separate facility away from the rest of the RPD; and managerially, a series of wrong-door search warrants by drug investigators raised a red flag in city hall in the early 1990s. Nevertheless, department members maintain that all of their operational units were skilled, inventive, and aggressive.

The concerns that did exist about operational divisions were administrative and managerial. For example, some in the city worried that the department was overspecialized, as it distributed its basic operational units to four separate divisions (Special Investigations, General Investigations, Patrol Services, and Special Services, which housed the Traffic Bureau and some special support functions, such as the aviation unit). To be sure, the generalist Patrol Services Division housed the bulk of the RPD’s personnel and spent the bulk of its money. But specialized units abounded, and they claimed a substantial share of departmental resources, as the following table suggests:

 

Division

Number of Sworn Positions
1992

Total Expenditures
FY 1992

 

Patrol Services

147

$14.2 million

 

Special Investigations

30

$3.2 million

 

General Investigations

49

$5.1 million

 

Special Services

46

$4.3 million

(plus $1.7M for aviation unit)

Other concerns about front-line operations were less live issues at the time than they are retrospective judgments. Most notably, many managers today express dismay over the RPD’s lack of neighborhood focus in the past, when the most important organizing principle for the patrol force was time rather than geography. Officers were organized first and foremost into three “watches” overseen by one or two lieutenants, who remember their main duty as “handling the shift” (in the sense that each sought to get as much staffing as possible to cover beats and handle emergencies during the hours they were on duty). During two of the department’s three watches, the RPD did divide the city into two bureaus named “north” and “south,” and it assigned one lieutenant to each of them. But those lieutenants were reportedly not particularly encouraged to think about their areas’ long-term problems (and in fact their assignment to one area or the other was not necessarily permanent [?]). Officers themselves had relatively stable assignments to one or the other geographic divisions, but not necessarily to the smaller beats within those areas. Interestingly, some sections of the General Investigations division had at least as much geographic focus as the patrol force, as detectives in the youth services section and the property crimes section were assigned by areas.

Another retrospective concern involves problem-solving, as many department members express discomfort with what they remember as a reactive patrol force in which officers had only the traditional duties of 911 response and random patrol. This concern, however, is far from universal in the RPD: Although it is true that the department did not have any formal structure for problem-solving work in the 1980s, some officers insist that they did so informally under the rubric of “handling your beat.” “If you have a problem that you keep going back to over and over,” one explains, “you have got to handle it,” going on to insist that he and others did so long before “problem solving” became a buzzword in Riverside.

3. Administrative Systems

In any case, many of these internal disagreements about whether or not operational units were doing a good job were not really live issues at the time—and indeed, they seem to reflect changing norms about police work rather than universally-accepted standards (for example, many RPD officers simply did not see a need to increase the patrol force’s geographic focus, as they felt that the beat system gave officers enough incentive to take care of neighborhood problems). On the other hand, even the department’s most ardent supporters concede that the RPD faced some serious administrative weaknesses in this era.

The basic problem seems to have been that the RPD was a medium-sized police agency that tried to run in the informal manner of a much smaller department, seeing rules, agreements, and policies as an affront to its atmosphere of collegiality and trust. The few available copies of the department’s policies and procedures manual had not been revised since the 1970s, and many department members felt that they lacked guidance about their work (indeed, the 1992 employee survey reported that almost half of the department disagreed that “written rules and procedures are readily available”). For example, when asked in 1993 about the growing number of wrong-door searches they had made, special investigations personnel could not point to any policy at all that governed their execution of search warrants. Even basic issues like labor agreements were surprisingly informal: In lieu of revising the contracts themselves each year, the department simply kept a file of the annual letters that served to summarize that year’s negotiations, with the unfortunate result that each side sometimes had a different understanding about important issues like when officers earned overtime or what the disciplinary process actually consisted of.

Moreover, basic mechanisms for control and direction-setting were underdeveloped in the RPD—at least that was the conclusion of a 1992 management audit commissioned by Riverside’s new City Manager. The audit, performed by a Sacramento-based consulting firm named Ralph Andersen and Associates, painted a picture of an organization strong on basic operations and with a good public image, but with weak administrative systems. Information systems, for example, were too inaccurate to provide meaningful input into planning and evaluation, so even though the department did formally develop annual objectives as part of the city’s budgeting process, it had no systematic way of following up on these plans. Moreover, quality control was essentially absent, so that department management had no way of knowing whether or not front-line units were doing a good job; and internal affairs lacked an effective system for investigating all but the most serious complaints, as well as for keeping accurate records about those citizens tried to bring. Finally, in the area of training, the normally tactful audit concluded that “although the recruit training in the department meets state standards, in-service training programs are poor and overall training administration appears not to accomplish internal and external training needs.”2 Indeed, at the time the consultants visited Riverside, the police department’s training system was in disarray: Over one-third of the force was in almost unavoidable danger of being out of compliance with state training requirements; a single officer with no training expertise of his own was responsible for coordinating the department’s training efforts; and it was allegedly common practice for Sergeants to misrepresent their officers’ participation in training updates.

Such criticisms were not simply those of an outside consulting firm, as many RPD members today admit to serious administrative problems, and at the time some groups within the department were reportedly restless about the department’s lack of policies and direction. In any case, when the Ralph Andersen report came out, the RPD responded earnestly to many of the problems it identified, and it had already taken steps to address some of them (notably in the area of information systems, where it had purchased a new CAD system that was intended to improve information processing capabilities, although implementation difficulties derailed some of these hopes). Nevertheless, administrative systems were a major outstanding weakness in the RPD in the early 1990s.

4. Management

Many of these administrative deficiencies may have been related to the department’s long-established philosophy of management, which many people inside and outside the department refer to as one of “high trust, low control.” The basic idea—supported by many RPD members both then and now—was apparently that police should be treated as independent professionals who did not need much direct supervision and structure in their work, whether directly from managers or indirectly from the administrative systems they created and monitored. It was not, of course, that basic organizational checks were not in place: For example, Sergeants and Lieutenants were expected to make sure that patrol officers followed established procedures, like those that governed pursuits. But in critical areas—notably discipline and the search warrant process— many RPD veterans report that management took a hands-off approach, preferring to leave matters to officers and detectives themselves with an appeal to their sense of professional integrity.

In this sense, RPD management was radically decentralized in the years before community policing. But some department members and outsiders also suggest the opposite pattern. For example, the Ralph Andersen report maintained that departmental goals and objectives were determined solely by the Chief and his command staff, and it went on to cite an employee survey to suggest that this decisionmaking style left the rank-and-file feeling that they had no control over the department’s direction (68% of survey respondents disagreed with the statement that “I have input into the development of department goals and objectives”). One RPD veteran echoes this sentiment: “[We were] very much a traditional police agency, in the military kind of style, [with] Captains, Lieutenants, and Sergeants. I say this and you do that . . . Although we all got along, I think the expectation was, ‘Hey, you have got a bigger bar than me and you are the boss.’”

II. CHANGE

1. Developing an Agenda for Change

1992 was a pivotal year for the Riverside Police Department, as its administration found itself under attack or at least admonishment from several directions. Internally, the police union passed a vote of no confidence not just in the Police Chief but also in his Deputy Chief; and although the immediate source of tension concerned negotiations over pay and benefits, some in the RPD were reportedly becoming restless with their agency’s lack of direction. Outside complaints were even more numerous, to the point that Riverside’s police were beginning to face something of an image problem within the city.

First of all, there was reason to be concerned about the department’s reputation in the community: Accusations of brutality or harassment had repeatedly made front-page news, and relations with the Casa Blanca community had deteriorated to the point that a well-known neighborhood group in the area had pulled out of talks designed to improve relations between the two sides. Equally important, city hall was starting to pay closer attention to potential problems in its police department. One crucial juncture came in August of 1992, when Ralph Andersen and Associates delivered its management audit to the City Council: Although the document was not entirely critical of the RPD, it pinpointed significant deficiencies in training, policies and procedures, and the department’s ability to set a direction. But even before the report was released, the City Manager’s office was becoming concerned that the RPD was “becoming a loosely-controlled organization,” as city Manager John Holmes puts it. Holmes, who had been appointed to his position in the fall of 1990, recalls how this sense gradually dawned on him:

Holmes also remembers being concerned about the low number of citizen complaints the department was reporting. “We are a city of 250,000 people,” he explains. “I started wondering why we were having so few [complaints]”—a concern that the Ralph Andersen report seemed to confirm, as it identified substantial problems with the department’s system for handling citizen complaints.3 City Council was reportedly not aware of these particular problems at the time, but it had begun taking more of an interest in the police department in its own way, notably by advocating for the increasingly-popular idea of community policing: Individual council members proposed related reforms like bicycle patrols, and the body as a whole had discussed the idea and passed a resolution setting a deadline for a progress report.

Sonny Richardson, who was Riverside’s police chief at the time, initially responded constructively to many of these demands. With respect to the audit, for example, Holmes maintains that “Chief Richardson thought it was fine, and if he stayed he probably would have worked on it.” On the community policing front, Richardson was reportedly quite receptive in principle, seeing the approach as a way to soften the department’s image and perhaps alleviate some of its public criticism. In response, the Chief assembled a committee to study the idea, sent several department members to seminars on the topic, and approved site visits to police agencies around the country that were considered to be leading examples.

But in the end, none of the calls for reform would come to fruition under Richardson, who announced his retirement from the Riverside Police Department in the fall of 1992. Holmes, who would have had the power to replace the Chief if he had wanted to, insists that Richardson made the decision on his own. “He left of his own volition. He had a number of strengths as a chief of police, and I was not at the point where I would have made a change in leadership,” he explains. But when Richardson did retire, Holmes took the opportunity to lay out a basic agenda for police reform.

Choosing an Agent for Change

As Holmes saw it, the basic challenge for the RPD was to develop into a “modern, professional police department”—one that had “modern technology and crime analysis” as well as “excellent standards of conduct, professionalism, a community-based policing approach, and [a system for] taking citizen complaints seriously.” The city charter gave him full authority to hire and fire the police chief, so he was able to make these ideas the centerpiece of the hiring process, and he had them written in to the position announcement itself.

But at least as important as these substantive guidelines for the job was Holmes’s decision to open up the position to outside applicants. “My policy was to conduct a national search for a department head-level position. Then if you select an in-house candidate, that individual earned the position against national competition.” At the time, the decision was not particularly controversial even within the RPD—a sentiment that the City Manager had already checked out for himself. “I interviewed a number of the officers, including some of the [Riverside Police Officers’ Association] members,” Holmes remembers, “and they all told me that they felt we needed to be more professional and bring in an outsider.” Indeed, many Riverside political figures felt that the Association had broadcast its opinion about inside candidates in its recent no-confidence vote against the Richardson administration; as one city official puts it: “They had a no-confidence vote both in Sonny Richardson and [Deputy Chief] Mike Figueroa. Very strange to give [him a vote too]. I understand a no confidence vote for the chief, but Mike Figueroa was the heir apparent. In effect they said, ‘Don’t go for him either.’” In the event, Figueroa did apply for the job, but he had to compete against other highly-qualified outsiders.

The city hired the same company that had recently completed the RPD’s management audit to oversee the national search, and a number of candidates applied. The field was whittled down in two phases: First, Holmes enlisted the help of two panels made up of community members and professionals (including the RPOA president) to select three “finalists,” and there was reportedly broad agreement among the group that any one of these three candidates would make an acceptable choice for the job. Second, Holmes made the final decision among these three candidates based on his own reading of how well they would be able to deal with the strategic issues that he and others had identified for the department.

The man Holmes ultimately chose for the job was an 51-year-old Assistant Chief from the San Diego Police Department (SDPD) named Ken Fortier. Fortier had a reputation for being the strong manager in the SDPD, and in Holmes’s mind, that was precisely what Riverside needed. “We had a number of excellent police officers, but at the time the organization did not appear to have developed managers capable of making the changes we needed,” He explains. “Based on our hiring criteria and our desire for improvement, I selected a professional with an outstanding managerial background in a large urban police department. In short, based on the interviews and a thorough background check, I hired a very strong manager.”

Fortier had worked for the SDPD from the beginning of his career, just over thirty years before he took the chief’s job in Riverside. Starting out as a patrolman and then a detective, he had moved up the ranks quickly. “I happened to hit the department at a real growth spurt,” Fortier explains, “and so there were about four of us that really went through the ranks fast.” Indeed, by the time he was 30, Fortier had made captain, and he took a commander’s position at 34. Over the next sixteen years, he held a variety of command positions in the department including both patrol and investigations, but administrative matters were his forte. As he explains his duties:

At the time, San Diego itself was gearing up to look for a new police chief, and Fortier was considered to be one of the two leading candidates for the position. But he himself was not sanguine about his prospects: “As I read it, I was not going to get the top job [in San Diego],” Fortier remembers. “As things will happen, you go through an organization, you make friends, you make enemies. And looking over at City Hall, it was not going to happen.” In any case, Fortier was not sure he wanted the job, which in his view had become “extremely political” in recent years, so he resolved to take advantage of a generous early retirement package that the recession-strapped city was offering.

Brought to his attention by a recruiter, the Riverside job appealed to Fortier on many levels. Personally, the move would be to familiar territory: He and his family owned a second home in Riverside County, and in any case the city was only a short drive away from San Diego. “I have family in San Diego, so it’s close to home, just an hour-and-a-half away, and it seemed like a very easy move to make. I could keep my San Diego ties—friends, family, that sort of thing— and still do the police chief’s job.” Riverside also seemed to be a good choice professionally: Fortier had heard that the police department was facing some problems, but he sensed a commitment to change together with an ability to carry it out. “At the time they were not experiencing the severe financial problems that a lot of cities were in California,” Fortier remembers, “so there were still upsides—some potential to do some things.” More important, City Manager John Holmes seemed have the independence and seriousness of purpose that would be needed for the job:

Fortier took it as a particularly good sign that Holmes had been able to offer him the job unilaterally, with input only from the two panels he had assembled for the purpose. As he remembers it: “The City Manager was able to go through this process [and] hire me, and then he asked me if I would come up one night to be introduced to the Council. That was his first announcement that he had appointed me Chief.” To Fortier, this was precisely the sort of professional government that was slipping away from San Diego: “[Holmes] kept it tight, and it was obvious to me that the Council had not had a hand in the decision, which impressed me very much. That’s the way it’s supposed to be: That’s the way council-manager governments are supposed to work.” In any case, although Fortier was also in the running for the Police Chief position in another city, Holmes and his staff moved quickly to make him an offer, and he ultimately accepted it, beginning work in January of 1993.

Chief Fortier

As Fortier remembers his first days in office, he took over the RPD with a broad mandate for change that focused on implementing community policing and carrying out the main recommendations from the Ralph Andersen audit. The audit was particularly influential in shaping his sense of the RPD’s strategic issues. “I asked for a copy of the report before I was hired and looked it over,” he remembers, “and it was clear to me that there were some managerial problems that needed to be dealt with. It wasn’t really a blueprint necessarily, but it was pretty clear.” In particular, deficiencies like the lack of an effective internal affairs unit and the lack of an organized training effort were red flags to Fortier that some basic managerial issues needed to be addressed.

Some early experiences helped confirm this diagnosis in Fortier’s mind. The first was the RPD’s response to his request for a copy of the union contract:

Similarly, when Fortier requested information about citizen complaints and discipline, he was told that no accurate records were available and that the nominal head of internal affairs simply did not know the answers, since the Chief had handled discipline himself. To Fortier, all of these experiences suggested an overly informal department that was out-of-touch with modern ideas about how to run a police department. “They weren’t set up managerially to run this department in a contemporary manner,” he maintains.

The new Chief received what he took as impartial confirmation of this growing sense from a promotions panel made up of outside police managers, which had been assembled to help him appoint his first round of sergeants. At the end of their week in Riverside, the board collectively expressed serious concerns to him about the fifty-plus officers they had interviewed.

This opinion too seemed to be confirmed by the Ralph Andersen audit, which had found that much of the department simply had not received required in-service training from outside agencies—training whose central purpose was to keep officers up-to-date with current trends in law enforcement.

Community Policing

Fortier’s conclusion from these experiences was that the RPD faced some basic problems with its organizational infrastructure, and that these problems needed to be addressed right away. The news was not exactly welcome for the new chief. “I didn’t really intend to do that,” Fortier remembers, referring to the litany of infrastructure efforts that wound up on his agenda for change.

Despite his initial intentions, Fortier felt that it would be impossible to make progress on community policing without dealing with the infrastructure issues as well, arguing that the RPD simply would not be able to inspire trust in its community partners. “As far as I was concerned,” he explains, “the underpinnings of the department that instill confidence and trust that there is a competency level in the department just weren’t there. And that had to be dealt with either first or along with trying to get them in a position to work in partnership with the community.”

Basic competency issues aside, some of the department’s problems seemed directly related to community policing. Mike Blakely, another SDPD veteran who came to Riverside to serve as Fortier’s Deputy Chief, singles out the department’s process for handling citizen complaints as especially damaging to community partnerships: “Community policing requires that there be a willingness to work together and have trust in each other,” Blakely explains, “and one of the most critical facets of that is to have a legitimate, valid complaint process.” He and Fortier felt that the RPD was simply not up to that standard. As Fortier puts it: “The way to resolve a conflict with the public [was] for a member of the public to . . . sue us and to try to get a Federal court judgment.” As a result, the two men felt that implementing a new complaint process was a prerequisite to community policing.

More generally, Fortier felt that the existing RPD culture was unfortunately not always respectful of all facets of the community. “The relationship with the minority community was miserable, especially the Hispanic community,” he recalls, explaining that he got that impression from his own early meetings with community members. Those encounters had not painted a uniformly negative picture of community sentiment: For example, Fortier recalls that the local Chamber of Commerce positively “loved the cops,” believing that they were “fighting crime and . . . doing what needs to be done.” In fact, the very week he took office as Chief, an RPD officer received an award from the Chamber for his efforts to deal with graffiti. But it was precisely this schism in community opinion that concerned Fortier. “If you were on the right side of town and you were the right sort of person—especially business people—[you] were treated extremely well by Riverside police officers,” he maintains. “If you were not, there was a question about whether you would be dealt with that way.” For the new Chief, that situation seemed fatal to community policing:

An Agenda for Reform

In these ways, Fortier’s initial resolve to bring community policing to Riverside became complicated by a set of unanticipated issues, and his plan for change evolved along two somewhat separate branches. The first, which dealt with infrastructure development, consisted of a list of administrative systems that were in sore need of reform—including things like the department’s outdated policies and procedures manual, its unacceptable manner of taking citizen complaints, and even economic issues like the haphazard way it sent officers to court on overtime. The second was community policing itself, which would be further developed through a visioning process within the department.

Several problems would soon emerge with this two-pronged strategy, and it is worth prefiguring some of them here. First of all, the infrastructure effort turned out to be deeply problematic for many officers in Riverside, which had an established history of doing things informally and did not necessarily see a need to change. For example, one of Fortier’s first initiatives as Chief was an attempt to deal with the informality of the RPD’s labor agreements by putting together a group that was charged with writing up a formal contract. Fortier hoped that the effort would be a quick, easy win, but it turned out to be very difficult. In the end, the RPOA, which had been involved in the negotiating process, balked on signing off on the document, forcing the administration to compromise on its scope by giving the union the right to appeal to the “old” version in case of a conflict. Moreover, when the department released booklet copies of the new agreement to all employees, it had an effect opposite to what Fortier intended. “We thought this would be popular,” he remembers. “‘Hey, there’s the rules.’ [But] I think it scared everybody: ‘My gosh, why do you need to do this? We’re all one big family, why do we need to have these things written down?’” This experience, in particular, convinced Fortier that there was a severe division between management and the rank-and-file: “There’d just been years and years of miscommunication and distrust and ineffective management—there’s no other way to put it. It was really an us and them.”

The second problem was the somewhat ad hoc nature of the infrastructure effort, emerging as it did by pieces, with the result that some RPD members could not perceive any clear vision guiding the changes that were going on. Jerry Carroll, who took over the Chief’s job after Fortier resigned in 1997, maintains:

More pointedly, Carroll suggests that Fortier’s role as a change agent made it positively inadvisable for him to articulate what he was doing. “I asked the Deputy Chief one time, ‘I want to see the vision,’” Carroll remembers. “He said, ‘He’s not going to show you the vision’—because the vision was an agenda and the agenda was to come in and change the culture here in this police department.” In any case, the result was that there was little buy-in to the reforms Fortier had in mind. “I don’t think anybody knew what the vision was,” Carroll maintains. “It was not articulated.”

Community Policing in the RPD

Fortier was apparently more explicit about the community policing side of his reforms, as he describes a constant effort to stress what he felt community policing meant: “The message I kept giving over and over again was, ‘We’re not here to just make people like us—that’s passé. We’re here to do something about crime.’” For example, Fortier recalls one meeting with a newly-promoted lieutenant who was to be assigned one of the department’s new community policing areas:

Fortier understood the tendency to fall back on “PR” activities, but he insisted that dealing with crime should be the main focus of Riverside’s community policing efforts.

A Plan for Community Policing

Riverside had begun thinking about community policing under Sonny Richardson, who had responded to City Council’s inquiries about the topic by appointing a task group charged with studying it. Apprised that this groundwork had been laid, Fortier called the Captain in charge of the group into his office, but he was disappointed with what he found. “I had him in the first few days I was there, and I said, ‘Great, you’ve had this committee, you’ve been working for a year, let’s talk about what you’ve done.’ [But] after spending twenty minutes with him, he hadn’t done a damn thing except wait for retirement. . . . He traveled a little bit, and he’d looked at some other cities, and he hadn’t written a paragraph about it.” Other department members believe that Fortier overlooked other potential starting points—notably the RPD’s emerging partnership with police at the University of California at Riverside, which they felt laid the foundations for team-based community policing in the city. But Fortier was convinced that the department needed to start from scratch, and he asked his command staff to see that a tentative implementation plan was developed quickly.

The job ultimately fell to a young Lieutenant named Mike Smith, and although he had no particular background in community policing, his Captain apparently felt he could get the job done. Smith remembers the task as a fast-paced one:

Fortier sat down with Smith personally to lay out his own framework for the task, directing the young Lieutenant’s attention to the ideas of neighborhood focus, the role of detectives, and the roles of patrol officers and their supervisors.

Smith worked furiously over the course of the week, drawing heavily on the materials that had been brought back by Richardson’s community policing group, and by the end of it all he had produced the conceptual outline of community policing for Riverside that Fortier wanted. The document helped establish some basic building-blocks for the efforts to come, including the commitment to a system of area commands, the idea of devolving responsibility to patrol officers, and the intent to develop priorities in dialogue with the community.

At this point, Smith began working with a committee of other Lieutenants in the department to fine tune the ideas further. Perhaps the most significant choice this group made concerned the geography of the area command system. Smith himself reports that he had never thought of Riverside in that way before:

As it turned out, city hall more-or-less officially identified 18 neighborhoods in Riverside, and these existing demarcations were one factor the team considered in dividing the city up into policing areas. But the group simply could not make each neighborhood into its own policing area: The RPD had already decided that each of its five Lieutenants would be put in charge separate areas, so that the question became how to turn 18 “neighborhoods” into five areas. Several factors became important in this decision, including demographics, physical boundaries, and the seven council wards. The latter consideration was mildly controversial: On the one hand, some in the group reportedly wanted to have some degree of match between areas and wards so that the area commanders could be responsive to constituent complaints.4 On the other hand, the group agreed that too close a match risked trouble, since political influence might get in the way of professional management by the Lieutenants. In any case, the committee settled on five areas that they felt constituted a meaningful division of the city, and Fortier approved the scheme.

With elements like this one in place, the department fleshed out its community policing plans over the course of the next six months. The first and most important milestone in this effort was a three-day retreat at Lake Arrowhead known as “the meeting on the mountain,” which focused on formulating a mission statement, fine-tuning some central ideas of the community policing effort, and laying out Fortier’s expectations for the department. In addition to the Chief himself, the retreat was attended by the department’s Lieutenants, Captains, and Deputy Chief, under the assumption that these command-level people would formulate the basic ideas and articulate them to their first-line supervisors. It was followed up with a number of work groups intended to put the finishing touches on Riverside’s plans for community policing, laying out key elements like a strategy for securing necessary funding, the Problem-Oriented Policing teams, and the intention to make problem-solving a department-wide philosophy. The entire plan was presented to the RPOA and the public in early April of 1993, not quite four months after Fortier had taken office.

The story of what happened to these plans—including both how they went awry and what lasting effect they did have—is best told in terms of three audiences that they spoke to: The troops themselves, the Riverside community, and city hall. Fortier’s reforms unleashed intense feelings both inside and outside of the RPD, and by the time he left Riverside in 1997, intractable opposition had arisen on many fronts. To understand community policing in Riverside, it is essential to understand these dynamics; and while it is of course impossible to know exactly why resistance became as severe as it did, it is at least possible to lay out which groups turned against reform and when, and what they have to say about their reasons behind their reactions.

2. Reform and the Riverside Police

When Fortier began work as Chief in January of 1993, he had broad support in the city. Even within the police department, which might have been expected to be wary of an outside leader, many viewed the new Chief as something of a savior. One RPD veteran explains:

There were some who felt right from the start that the new chief was an outsider who knew little about Riverside, and that his early rise in the SDPD had meant that he had been away from the street for too long. But most RPD members remember an initial period of good-will between the department and its new chief of police.

Fortier did not take this good will for granted, and he recognized that he would need to work to generate support for the sometimes difficult reforms he had proposed. He started doing so quickly with a few popular decisions that undid some of Richardson’s final reforms, such as his elimination of the department’s 21-man traffic unit (Fortier reassigned 10 of these officers back into traffic, using the remainder to help start up community policing units). But most of his strategies for building support were intimately tied to each of the reforms he proposed. Consider the two strands of those reforms—community policing and the infrastructure effort—in turn.

The Transformation of the Patrol Force

Fortier’s community policing reforms centered on the decentralization of the patrol force into the five new policing areas that Smith and his fellow lieutenants had agreed upon, with the goal of creating new units of accountability based on geography that would replace the old ones based on time. Lieutenants would stand at the helm of each of these five miniature police departments, and their role would be transformed completely. As then-Deputy Chief Mike Blakely explains it:

Ranks beneath Lieutenant would undergo changes as well: The watch commander duties that Lieutenants previously had—the nuts and bolts of things like staffing, equipment, and notifications—would be devolved to the Sergeant level, adding to that rank’s existing supervisory duties. Finally, at the bottom of the hierarchy, officers would be encouraged to look behind incidents to identify the problems that underlay them, and they would be empowered to use whatever legal and ethical means were necessary to deal with those problems. The end result of all this restructuring would be the creation of coherent teams of officers and managers who felt responsible for Riverside’s neighborhoods.

To put these ideas into practice, Fortier focused his attention on management, an emphasis that he describes as a matter of personal philosophy:

“Working through management” meant at least two different things: Seeking to assemble a new management team that was enthusiastic about reform, and trying to articulate what the new roles meant in practice. Consider each of these tasks in turn.

Building a New Management Team

Over the course of his four years in Riverside, Fortier sought to put together a management team that was committed not just to community policing in particular, but to organizational reform in general. To that end, he sought to quickly promote people to management positions who were capable and committed to reform, and to speed up the retirement of those who were not. “If we’re going to move the department into community policing,” Fortier explained to the City Council, “we’ve got to change the culture and it’s got to start with these managers, who have such an influence over the rest of the organization.” In particular, Fortier felt that “some people . . . would have held us back on community policing [because] they were just from a different era.” In response, he and City Manager John Holmes worked together to create a “retirement incentive program.”

Recognizing that the offer might be perceived as a threat, Fortier insists that he made clear it was not, telling the group: “This is not mandatory. If you don’t want to be interviewed all you have to do is say so and that’s the end of it. There will be no retribution.” In any case, most of the group agreed to be interviewed, and about a half-dozen Captains and Lieutenants were eventually offered incentives to retire that they accepted.

As those less inclined towards reform retired, Fortier and Deputy Chief Mike Blakely (who came to Riverside in early 1994) sought to promote people who exhibited the proper skills and attitude. As Blakely puts it:

The two RPD chiefs did not, of course, expect that anyone in the department would be completely versed in community policing itself, since the agency simply had not provided them the necessary opportunities. But Fortier and Blakely sought to create those opportunities and monitor how people responded. Fortier explains:

Fortier and Blakely also looked outside the department altogether for people who had some of the qualifications that its own officers lacked. From the start, Fortier actually tried to bring in lateral hires at the management level, opening up all management jobs to outside applicants. Fortier remembers this strategy as a radical one that “threw down the gauntlet” to RPD managers: When he announced the new policy to the assembled command staff, he told the group, “if you want these jobs, you’re going to have to change,” laying particular stress on their need to embrace accountability. Fortier quickly made good on the promise by making two lateral hires—a Lieutenant from the San Bernadino Sheriff’s Office, and Blakely himself, who was hired from the SDPD as a Captain and immediately promoted to Deputy Chief.

The backlash against this effort was severe—at best department members resented the loss of a rare promotion opportunity, and at worst they took the move as a statement that in Fortier’s eyes, “in-house people weren’t good enough”— and many RPD managers believe that the Chief backed off on it. But Fortier insists that he did not, and that he was willing to consider outside applicants for all fourteen of the management positions he eventually filled during his four years in Riverside.

In any case, at the officer level, many people still entered the RPD laterally, and some RPD veterans believe that Fortier sought to promote these people in order to further cultural change. While neither Blakely nor Fortier describes a conscious strategy for doing this, Blakely does report that he consciously drew on outsiders for some assignments. For example, he reports that RPD officers’ strong feelings about the history of tensions with the Casa Blanca neighborhood made it difficult for them to view the situation objectively, so he tried to “reach [out] to people that were laterals, that had other outside law enforcement experience.”

In any case, many around the department recall a general sense that promotions sped up during this period, particularly from the officer level to Sergeant. One RPD veteran recalls: “Fortier came here and then he made fifty-two promotions in like three years, which is incredible because we were averaging like one promotion every three or four months before.” Another elaborates:

More important, as the sheer pace of promotions sped up, the criteria used to decide who got them changed dramatically. Fortier embarked on a complete overhaul of the promotions process, assigning a laterally-hired lieutenant to review “best practices” in the field, help develop new written tests, and assemble three panels that would have input into each promotion decision. Finally, officer evaluations began to incorporate problem-solving as a central component, and these evaluations in turn fed into promotion decisions.

Fortier insists that these efforts to build up a committed and able management team paid off. “The difference of what I left in place from when I started is like night and day. I mean, there really are some awfully good management people there.” In particular, of the RPD’s five patrol lieutenants who ran the city’s watches in 1993, only one is among today’s five area commanders, and Fortier expresses immense confidence in this group:

In this sense, the Chief felt that he accomplished his job of building a core of support in the management ranks who could in turn carry the message of reform to the rest of the department.

Nevertheless, the efforts also alienated many RPD members and thereby backfired with respect to the goal of building support for reform. Most simply, while Fortier could fill management positions using new criteria, he could not ensure that the new managers would have the necessary influence over their rank-and-file. Indeed, as the criteria for promotion changed, the entire process apparently lost some legitimacy in the eyes of the troops,5 so that many officers became cynical about how their new superiors had made their ranks. Particularly controversial was the fact that Fortier bypassed the traditional route from patrol officer to Sergeant: In the past, almost no one in Riverside had made that jump without passing through the detective rank. But under Fortier, a number of energetic officers were promoted directly to Sergeant without ever working as investigators. Many RPD veterans considered this route irresponsible: One explains, “We have supervisors who have been here just a short period of time that have no idea where that criminal report goes or what happens to it when they’re done with it.” Another elaborates:

Some officers specifically resented the promotion of outsiders, who they felt did not understand the “Riverside way of doing things.” More generally, many of the recent promotions got labelled as “Ken dolls” (after Fortier’s first name), the implication being that they had pandered to what the Chief wanted and now simply operated as his tools. So although Fortier was successful in changing the face of management and even supervision, the new face did not necessarily have the authority to bring the rest of the department along.

The opposite problem was perhaps even more severe: Despite their moniker, many of the department’s new promotions were not particularly loyal to the new administration and the reforms it valued, to the point that some of them actively stonewalled against them. “[Fortier] thought that all these folks that he was going to promote were going to buy into and go off down this road,” one RPD veteran explains. “[But] they didn’t. And it was almost like he would promote people—particularly guys who wanted to be Sergeant really bad—he’d promote them and then they’d kind of turn on him.”

A New Role for Middle Management

The basic problem was that promotions themselves did not necessarily breed loyalty in a situation where reform stirred up many other sources of resistance. It was not simply that the face of management was changing: Its mandate was changing as well, and in ways that exacerbated growing tensions within the RPD.

As described above, the Lieutenant role underwent perhaps the most dramatic changes in the new, community-oriented RPD, with middle managers shifting their duties from those of a watch commander to those of an area commander. Fortier tried to convey the content of the new role personally, sitting down with each area commander to explain what would be expected of him or her, and to discuss the Lieutenant’s plans for his or her area. As one of the first area commanders remembers it, the basic message in these talks was that “this area was [my] responsibility 24 hours.”

Lieutenants got substantial flexibility to accomplish these jobs. Managerially, they received many of the same powers as a police chief over their respective areas, allowing them to deploy personnel, reassign schedules, nominate projects, and do whatever else seemed necessary. Organizationally, they were moved out of the uniformed services branch and became salaried employees rather than hourly workers: Given their new 24-hour responsibilities, they needed to have flexible working hours, so it no longer made sense to employ them under the old shift system.

Some Lieutenants reportedly filled their new duties admirably, putting in long hours to meet with various community groups and respond to their concerns. But many department members report growing pains for some of the Lieutenants. As Fortier himself concedes:

Indeed, Fortier felt that Riverside’s longstanding ethos of “high trust, low control” had eviscerated management, making the sort of reform he proposed for lieutenants—which traded in the supervisory duties of a shift commander for the management duties of an area commander—particularly difficult.

Fortier’s call for management to press officers to buy into reform ran headlong into this norm. “They didn’t really want to face these troops,” he recalls. “I watched Captains stand in front of roll calls trying to explain some policy . . . and just wither away. They just could not bring themselves to tell these people something they didn’t want to hear. And so they would try to couch the terms, and maneuver.” Fortier recalls that some managers performed admirably, standing up to say “This is the right thing to do, and here’s why we’re doing it;” and he sent managers to assertiveness training to help deal with the problem. But for the most part, Fortier felt that the existing management culture frustrated his efforts in this area.

In the short run, the seemingly small detail of making Lieutenants salaried employees turned out to be even more damaging to reform, as it led to a sequence of problems that began to tear the Riverside Police Department apart. The trouble began as a matter of pay: When their new role made Lieutenants into salaried employees, they suddenly became exempt from certain provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. In particular, the group no longer got paid for overtime and holidays the way they had as watch commanders, with the result that their total compensation dropped some $300 per month (mostly out of retirement benefits). One former Lieutenant remembers:

The Lieutenants recognized the potential problems (though perhaps not their magnitude) from the start, but they went along with the reform anyhow. One remembers: “The lieutenants signed off on it, I think, just because they were going to be part of the team. They got on board the train and just wanted to be part of the movement towards C.O.P.P.S., and they felt this was something they had to do.” But over time the issue became the source of increasing concern, and in October of 1995, the city raised the Lieutenants’ pay by 5% in order to undo the damage that had been done.

From Supervisors to Watch Commanders

The move helped shore up support among Lieutenants, but it did so at a tremendous cost to relations with the Sergeants. That group had felt somewhat left out of community policing from the start: Sergeants had not been invited to participate in the “meeting on the mountain,” and their introduction to the new ideas came off as perfunctory. Mike Smith, the Lieutenant who spearheaded the area command effort, explains:

The Sergeants’ official “introduction” to their new jobs came in what is widely remembered as a 45-minute meeting that presented the changes as non-negotiable—most notably, that Sergeants would take over the Lieutenants’ old watch commander duties. “The salesmanship [to] Sergeants in that process never really occurred, it really did not,” Smith maintains. “It was just kind of like ‘This is what we are going to do.’”

Against this background, the Lieutenants’ pay raise turned into an explosive issue. When the new roles were first announced, neither group was compensated for what each perceived as an increased workload, and the two ranks began strategizing as to how they could jointly ask for a raise in salary (both Sergeants and Lieutenants belonged to the same bargaining group at the time, which was essentially the “management branch” of the Riverside Police Officers Association). But Smith explains that the Lieutenants’ raise shattered this emerging coalition:

Ironically, Smith and others maintain that the Lieutenants did not want to take the 5% raise when it was offered—despite Sergeants’ perceptions that the Lieutenants had “settled and laughed and left,” as one put it. But Fortier reportedly made the change unilaterally: “He called the Lieutenants into his office [and said], ‘This is what I am going to give you,’” Smith remembers hearing (by this time he had been promoted to Captain). “And they said, ‘No we are not going to take it,’ but he gave it to them anyway, just to get it resolved.” When he did, the Sergeants immediately looked into filing suit for breach of contract, and some of the simmering concerns about increased workload—which up until that point had not fundamentally damaged the reform efforts—reached a critical mass.

As Smith suggests, Sergeants were partly infuriated at the move because they felt the Chief had bypassed the existing collective bargaining arrangement by awarding a raise to one group within a single bargaining unit. Indeed, the pay issue ultimately led the Lieutenants to break off with the Captains into their own bargaining unit, institutionalizing the growing wedge between Sergeants and upper management. To be sure, Smith explains that break had other sources as well:

More concretely, as reform brought issues of compliance and discipline more and more to the fore, the Association focused more and more attention on defending members accused of wrongdoing and filing grievances about unwanted changes. As a result, Smith explains, Lieutenants and Captains found themselves in an increasingly awkward position in the old bargaining group:

Nevertheless, even if the flare-up over the pay raise was not the only reason behind the bargaining group’s split, it apparently served as the catalyst.

In any case, beyond the technical issue of whether or not the Chief had the authority to grant a raise to a single element of a bargaining unit, the Sergeants simply felt that they deserved a raise as much as the Lieutenants did: Their jobs, too, had become more demanding. As Lieutenant Pete Curzon, who as a Sergeant had served as the representative of his rank to the administration, explains:

The Lieutenants, of course, insisted that they were not really getting a raise at all but simply being compensated for their loss of holiday benefits—“to right a wrong, so to speak,” one explains. But that distinction was lost on the Sergeants, who saw their responsibilities increasing without any compensation.

In any case, Curzon raised some of these issues with Fortier, but he felt rebuffed by the Chief. “[He said], ‘Well, basically, that’s the way it’s going to be,’” Curzon remembers. “He was not responsive to any of the concerns that the Sergeants really had.” Curzon attributes the problem to Fortier’s management style—particularly his background in a large agency, which made him unfamiliar dealing with Sergeants at all. “He wasn’t used to speaking to Sergeants,” Curzon maintains. “They were just people: If you come from a big agency, the Sergeants are nothing at all.” Whether or not that was true, the perception that Fortier was unconcerned with their plight led Sergeants to withdraw. “We would go to these quarterly management meetings, and you would hardly ever hear a Sergeant ask a question,” Curzon remembers.

Fortier himself had expected the Lieutenants and the Captains to keep encouraging their Sergeants to carry out their new duties, but that apparently wasn’t happening. RPD members offer several explanations for this failure. Some felt that the new area commander role simply took Lieutenants too far away from the department. “Lieutenants became area commanders and they embarked on more of a mission of getting out into the community, going to chamber of commerce meetings, going to neighborhood advisory committee meetings,” one Lieutenant from the period explains. “[But they were] not spending a whole lot of time mentoring Sergeants, giving Sergeants expectations, and those kinds of things. And so the Sergeants just kind of continued being supervisors.” Others explain the problem in terms of a mismatch between the two ranks’ areas of responsibility: Each Lieutenant was formally assigned four Sergeants to supervise, but because of insufficient manpower, Sergeants did not always get permanent assignments to their Lieutenant’s area—with the result that any given lieutenant might supervise sergeants in different areas of the city. Moreover, the system of one Lieutenant per area virtually ensured that a Lieutenant would not physically see two shifts of the sergeants who reported to him or her. Together, these two problems undermined the Lieutenants’ ability to manage their Sergeants closely. One current Lieutenant explains:

Finally, some Lieutenants argue that they simply did not have enough authority to make recalcitrant Sergeants take their new roles seriously, because performance evaluations did not cover many of the relevant responsibilities. “Sometimes they will call people back to work or hold people over on shifts when it is convenient to them,” one Lieutenant maintains, “because the budgetary responsibility falls usually on management and administration. They’re never held accountable: There is nothing in the evaluation that holds them accountable for budgetary decisions. And yet as a watch commander sergeant, they have the ability to call people back.”

Whatever the causes of upper management’s failure to mentor Sergeants effectively and secure their cooperation, the consequences were clear: With some exceptions, Sergeants were not taking over the Lieutenants’ old watch commander duties, and basic operations were falling apart. Curzon maintains that “this watch commander and Sergeant responsibility . . . still is a burning issue in field operations,” and one Lieutenant argues that while “some of the Sergeants are excellent,” many never accepted their new duties:

Again, some of these issues reportedly worked fairly well at the start of the area command system, but as resistance grew because of problems like the pay raise, the system broke down. Lieutenant Pete Esquivel makes the point clearly:

Fortier concedes that he was never able to get the Sergeants to buy-in to reform: “We really found, toward the last year that I was there, that the Sergeants were really adrift,” Fortier explains. “They were all doing things differently, and they weren’t buying it. Community policing tended to stop at five o’clock, when the Lieutenants went home.” In retrospect, he believes that he should have worked more directly with his front-line supervisors: “I tended to rely very heavily on the management side, and we probably could have done it a little bit differently—spent more time with the Sergeants.”

Compared with these problems in management and supervisory levels, community policing was both more and less successful in the patrol force. It was more successful in that the department created several innovative special units focused on community problem solving, and these units began to create a home-grown capacity for community policing that may serve as a springboard for future evolution. But it was also less successful, because it was in the patrol force that resistance became so severe that it began to become a public issue and take a toll on Fortier’s political support.

The POP Teams

At the center of the brewing storm about Riverside’s reforms, the problem-oriented policing (POP) team was relatively sheltered from turmoil. Together with the area commands themselves, the team was the early locus for Riverside’s community policing efforts—one that Fortier describes as “a way of jump-starting community policing.” In his estimation, the POP team became an unequivocal success: “They did an excellent job. The people that were assigned to [the POP team] and their supervision really took it seriously . . . They really began to attack neighborhood problems.”

The POP team was born in July of 1993, when eight officers and one Sergeant were removed from the patrol force, assigned to a special unit with no required 911 responsibilities, and charged with identifying and solving neighborhood problems. The first assignment to oversee the unit went to sergeant Alex Tortes, who set about soliciting interest for eight diverse, proactive officers who would make Riverside’s first formal forays into neighborhood problem-solving.

The POP team’s basic duties were to identify and respond to neighborhood problems—particularly those nominated through the new area command system, but also those raised in the community meetings POP officers themselves attended, as well as problems that they or the patrol force identified on their own. But Tortes sought to expand the unit’s duties beyond this core: Recognizing the potential for special units to detach from the mainstream of operations, he insisted that his officers participate in patrol work when time permitted by attending regular roll calls, taking calls for service, and serving as back-up to other patrol units. In any case, the eight officers were split into four teams of two, each assigned to one area (with the exception of areas three and four, which split a team between them; later on the unit would add two more officers so that every area would have its own POP team).

Tortes sought to school his unit in creative problem-solving techniques that went beyond the traditional tactics of arrest and patrol (though those tactics were not ruled out). His previous experience offered some starting points: During a recent stint as Sergeant for the RPD’s gang unit, Tortes had learned how the city’s civil abatement laws and its code compliance department could help deal with chronic neighborhood problems, and the POP team adopted these tactics for its own use. For example, when one local hotel was identified as a hotbed of drug dealing and prostitution, POP officers were able to persuade the hotel’s management that the problems were serious by explaining how civil abatement laws could be used to levy fines against them. With management’s attention piqued, the officers could then suggest more immediate solutions to the problem, like requiring both a driver’s license and a credit card to rent a room—identification that many dealers and prostitutes did not have.

Developments in Riverside’s Office of the City Attorney gave the POP team a boost in using these tactics. Long a relatively low-profile operation, the City Attorney’s office got a new breath of life in the summer of 1992, when City Council appointed Stanley Yamamoto as its new head and gave him a clear mandate for reform. Yamamoto quickly sought to refocus the office’s flagging attention with a fervor that matched Fortier’s own efforts in the RPD. For police, his efforts to use civil laws to fight crime in the downtown area stood out as especially important. For example, in the Spring of 1995, Council approved a plan Yamamoto had drawn up that would allow the city to sue gang members in civil court, arguing that they had created a “climate of fear” that constituted a public nuisance; using a similar logic, the plan also empowered the city to sue landlords who rented to drug dealers. Later that same year, Council approved another plan from the City Attorney’s office that would help manage growing difficulties with the homeless, making it illegal to panhandle aggressively and to lie down on city sidewalks. Many of these efforts were controversial: For example, an ACLU attorney called the anti-gang ordinance “a cheap shortcut around constitutional protections,” and a federal judge struck down the anti-begging ordinance as an unconstitutional violation of free speech.6 But Yamamoto’s efforts brought many old and new anti-crime tools into use, and the POP team in particular added them to its repertoire.

Other city agencies were not always so forthcoming, at least in the POP unit’s early days. Code compliance, for example, turned out to be an extremely useful partner for the POP team, but it initially resisted officers’ overtures about problem properties. It was not that code enforcement officers absolutely rejected problems nominated by police: It was simply that they did not get to them in what police considered to be a timely fashion, and when pressed, some would argue that their agency had its own backlog of work that needed attention first. “It was a real problem,” one officer recalls, “because the citizens were starting to lose faith in the officers. They were saying, ‘We tell you about these problems, but nothing gets done.’” It was sometimes possible to persuade code enforcement that the projects police were nominating were community concerns rather than pet projects of the police. But the POP team eventually had to raise the issue with Fortier and Holmes, who directed the agency to give POP projects a high priority—reinforcing a general mandate he had given to all city agencies at the outset of community policing.

With these interventions from above, the code enforcement relationship improved over time, and many other agencies began contributing to the POP team’s growing toolbox. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), for example, was reportedly very enthusiastic about cooperating with POP officers—indeed, the local HUD office was relieved that it finally had someone in the RPD to work with as it tried to bring its own problem properties under control. Parole and probation have also become close partners with the POP team, and they have been instrumental to the RPD’s efforts to deal with problem people around the downtown bus stop. Finally, the POP team has also involved social service agencies like the county mental health department in its efforts to deal with the homeless.

Many of these interagency efforts shared a common focus on property owners, and the POP team brought that emphasis to its logical conclusion by organizing a special program for Riverside’s landlords. The initiative, called the “Crime-Free Multihousing Program,” was essentially a training program for landlords that advised them about strategies they could use to deal with crime. A number of programs of this sort were becoming popular in policing circles at the time, but Riverside imported the idea from Mesa, Arizona. Sergeant Lisa Williams, who oversees the POP team and Crime-Free Multihousing today, explains that Riverside had more affinity for Mesa’s program because of its “aggressive” posture:

Sympathetic to this approach, the RPD sent a detective to Mesa to be trained in the program, and it received support from city government to move forward. The first eight-hour class, run by two officers from the POP team, was held in the fall of 1995.

The program works in a number of phases, the first of which is the training itself. As Williams describes it, the training center on one basic message: “You can set the tone. You’re the owner, and if you want to set very high standards for your property, then by all means, do so.” Screening techniques are one strategy, and landlords are taught that so long as they apply legitimate categories consistently (such as prior criminal record), they can keep certain types of people out of their property. But the sessions also describe things like how to evict problem tenants who slip through that process, how to implement effective crime prevention techniques, and how and when to contact police. The trainings are mostly designed and run by POP officers (today the RPD gives full-time responsibility for the program to two officers within the POP unit), but others participate as well. For example, Yamamoto lectures the class on how managers can protect themselves from civil liability suits, and his office prepared the curriculum for evictions. Landlords are not required to use specific techniques; instead, the training seeks to describe the menu of options available to them so that they can make informed choices about how to manage their properties.

RPD officers follow up the training after a set period of time by visiting each participant’s property and checking it for compliance with program principles (for example, to be considered “compliant,” certain standards of physical security and upkeep must be met, and a landlord must have some process for screening applicants—though the department does not prescribe what screening criteria should be used). Compliant properties then host an open tenant meeting attended by POP officers, who explain to residents what their landlord is doing and ask for help in monitoring the property’s compliance. Properties that satisfy all of these requirements are issued signs that announce their participation in Crime-Free Multihousing, and which serve as something of an advertisement to potential tenants that the landlord is serious about safety. The signs can be revoked if a property fails to meet program guidelines, and new owners or managers must attend the class to keep their property in compliance.

Crime-Free Multihousing became a central tool in the POP team’s repertoire. Property owners learn about the program in many ways: The RPD sends out periodic invitations to many landlords (everyone who owns more than two apartments must have a business license on file with the city), and it sometimes tries to target these mailings to areas with growing crime problems. Patrol officers who take a call in an apartment complex may also leave information about the program, and they sometimes alert the POP team to a property’s troubles. Finally, POP officers themselves often use Crime-Free Multihousing as part of their plans to tackle neighborhood problems, using it to elicit cooperation from landlords. In most cases, landlords sign up willingly for the classes, seeing them as a way to help bring crime under control. “[A lot of] people,” Williams explains, “come to class and take it real seriously, with the attitude, ‘I have to live here, and my kids have to live here.’” But some landlords are not so cooperative, and in those cases the team may move on to what one POP officer calls the “hammer” approach: The use of civil laws to put pressure on landlords, as in the hotel example above. Occasionally, local courts have even ordered landlords into the program as part of a civil judgment.

Civil abatement laws, interagency collaboration, and the Crime-Free Multihousing class have developed into a broad array of weapons that the POP team can use to deal with neighborhood problems—particularly those centered on problem properties, such as apartment complexes or hotels. In essence, these strategies attack recalcitrant problems by identifying a new set of pressure points, so that it is fair to describe Riverside’s POP efforts as oriented towards sanctions (though environmental and social service interventions are not absent in the city). As one officer puts it, “POP is the most aggressive form of policing in the world. Some of these landlords, we’d come after them with the gang enforcement, we’d come after them with codes, we’d come after them with HUD . . . [They would] come up to me and say, ‘What the hell is going on here?’”

The POP teams quickly became viewed as a success in the city: City council members who raised neighborhood problems with area Lieutenants found that the POP unit dealt with many of them successfully, and residents too developed a relationship with some of the POP officers who were responding to their concerns at last. Finally, although some city agencies resented the work that the teams were sending their way, others were thankful that they finally had steady contacts in the RPD to work with.

There were, of course, some concerns about the POP unit. Some community residents felt that although many of the two-officer teams were excellent, others were less productive. Within the RPD, some felt that particularly at the outset, POP “solutions”—like moving phone booths out of street drug markets—could be superficial; and others worried that the team was monopolizing problem-solving experience (many area Lieutenants bypassed the patrol force altogether, assigning most of their POP projects directly to the teams). Moreover, the POP unit itself had disagreements about its focus—notably whether it should act like an autonomous “target team” or, as Tortes believed, it should be more integrated with the patrol force. Finally, the teams did not entirely escape wider departmental tensions, which could influence an officer’s motivation to bid for community policing assignments such as the POP unit, the department’s bicycle teams, and its University Neighborhood Enforcement Team. Indeed, in March of 1997, as Fortier’s tenure wound down, almost all officers in community policing assignments requested transfers out of them to show their displeasure with the Chief. Earlier on, revisions to the citizen’s complaint process reportedly made some officers wary of all proactive assignments, which by virtue of their visibility were seen as lightning-rods for complaints. One community policing officer explains:

But despite these concerns, the POP teams in their own right were on balance a clear success. The real difficulty came in trying to diffuse that success to the rest of the RPD.

Spreading The POP Teams

From the start the POP team was intended to jump-start rather than carry community policing in Riverside, and upper management took several steps to spread its methods to patrol. First of all, just as the meeting on the mountain had led to a redefinition of management and supervisory roles, so it also led to a redefined role for officers. A new emphasis was placed on looking behind incidents for the problems that were generating them, and officers received a mandate to draw on whatever resources they needed to solve those problems. As Deputy Chief Mike Blakely puts it, the new charge was to “go fix that problem—find out what it is and go fix it.” The new mandate was supported by new authority: “I don’t care where you get the resources from,” Blakely remembers explaining to the troops. “Go get them, but go fix the problem. [So] officers were getting greater freedom not to be restrained by working days, by working hours, by who they could talk to, and the chain of command.”

Indeed, this radical decentralization was the only way to make community problem-solving work in an agency with growing resistance at the Sergeant and Lieutenant levels: It became critical to protect officers doing community policing from recalcitrant supervisors by giving them direct authority to act and by offering them support. Blakely explains the situation from the officer’s viewpoint:

Expanding on the last point, Blakely explains that Fortier’s reforms to the promotions process ensured that problem-solving, and not loyalty to the existing system, would be rewarded. “It was not uncommon for . . . middle managers to come up and recommend this person for promotion, [but] the Chief would come out and say, ‘I’m not [promoting] this person because this person isn’t fulfilling the vision that I have for the organization.” Blakely admits that this strategy had the effect of further alienating middle managers, but he felt that was a necessary cost to pay.

More positively, the department sought to encourage community problem-solving through an initial training on the topic that came soon after the meeting on the mountain. Unfortunately, this training turned out to be a disaster on many levels. First of all, many RPD officers resented the fact that the training came from San Diego: The sessions were run by two young7 SDPD Sergeants, and as many RPD veterans remember it, the basic message that came across was that “everything you have been doing here in Riverside is wrong, and we are going to tell you how to do it like we do it in San Diego.” Beyond such allegedly direct challenges, the simple fact that the officers came from San Diego and referred to SDPD programs exacerbated existing tensions over Fortier’s frequent references to his old department. “Everything was San Diego, San Diego, San Diego,” one RPD veteran explains; and another elaborates on departmental sentiment about this issue:

Indeed, at one point Holmes counseled Fortier to stop referring to his old department, for while he himself knew that the Chief had great respect for RPD personnel, the City Manager recognized that repeated references to other cities “irritate the staff.” Nevertheless, though Fortier understood the downside of using San Diego trainers, he felt that it was the only option. “If I’d been able to do it another way I would have, because I knew there there’d be some certain resentment over San Diego cops coming and training Riverside cops. But these are the best available, and they were paid for by the state [which reimburses police agencies only for training it has certified]. It was a very good way to do it.”

Either way, there were several other objections to the training. Some officers apparently disliked what they perceived to be the sessions’ basic message—that “problem oriented policing was about moving some phones, shaking hands and talking to folks,” and that “it was this warm and fuzzy thing,” as one puts it. Others simply did not find the training very encouraging, as they heard the teachers describing programs that they themselves admitted had not completely succeeded. Even dispatchers took personal offense at the criticisms of 911, for both the trainers and RPD officers portrayed that system as a burden that stifled creative work. In the end, some of the sessions deteriorated into arguments between the trainers and their students.

The training was not a complete wash: Some of the techniques it introduced—like the much-maligned moving of phone booths—quickly showed up in POP logs as the response to a number of neighborhood problems. Moreover, some Sergeants and Lieutenants would occasionally supplement it with informal instruction in community problem solving for their own officers. But this first training, at least, clearly did not meet the need for a department-wide indoctrination into C.O.P.P.S.

The administration’s final strategy for bringing community policing to the patrol force was through assignments—specifically, putting a two-year limit on assignments to the POP team. The idea behind this limitation was that POP officers would gradually spread throughout the department and bring their knowledge and experience in problem-solving with them. One RPD Captain maintains that it paid off: “Now we have thirty or forty people out there that have been POP officers, [and] they know how to problem-solve.” Indeed, POP logs show that outside POP officers themselves, former POP officers are among the most frequent problem-solvers in the RPD.

But despite these strategies for decentralization, training, and POP assignments, it does not appear that problem-solving has truly taken off in the patrol force at large. One former POP Sergeant, for example, recalls that his team was immensely productive, “but in essence we were the only people doing it.” Even today, one Captain who strongly supports community policing admits that “right now, I think the POP team is probably the focal point,” though he maintains that the department is “moving towards [involvement by the patrol force]—we really are.” Statistics bear these impressions out: In 1994, the POP team worked on nearly 6 POP projects for every one i