San Francisco's change-agent police chief
Friday, August 28, 2009
from the San Francisco Chronicle
Friday, August 28, 2009
Brace yourself, San Francisco. A new police chief, hired to overhaul an old-boy department, is about to cut loose. The changes spelled out by George Gascón will mean the city's nearly 2,000 officers will see their shifts changed, work routines disrupted and desks moved miles across town. Gascón, a management guru, plans a top-to-bottom makeover from the fifth-floor command center on Bryant Street down to the 10 district stations.
Yet he's after more than the bureaucracy. He's promising a major street sweep in the Tenderloin aimed at netting repeat law-breakers who will be earmarked for serious jail time. In a civil liberties-loving city, he wants to go against the grain in the name of efficiency by cutting through an 18-month backlog of civilian misconduct complaints to focus a few persistent cases while skipping over the rest.
He's also feeling the political breeze in his face. Three weeks on the job, he's gotten nowhere with a wish to bring in two outsider aides and has settled on just one, petty as that sounds. Also, he's jumped into a modest fight over releasing the costs of Mayor Gavin Newsom's security detail by recommending against full disclosure.
In a high-pressure post, Gascón speaks softly, wears a business suit most days, hands out business cards, and talks about "enhancing technological abilities and mentoring."
In a session with The Chronicle's editorial board, he was frank about his expectations. He plans public meetings to go over crime statistics collected by a new tracking system. The public will be invited to quiz police leaders, town hall style. It might be rough, but it's a step in building trust, he thinks.
He also thinks it's time to upend the 9-to-5 work habits of the department to better handle crime at night and on weekends. When he carried out a similar plan in his last job as police chief in Mesa, Ariz., "the wives were yelling and screaming at me that I was disrupting family life." He expects the same here.
But can a change-agent chief remake a hidebound department? Gascón's answer is a mix of management-speak and choir music. He's using a string of committees to extract the buy-in he'll need to change the culture. For now, he's giving himself two to three years to see results and is leery of asking for a bigger budget in tough times.
His house-cleaning could lead to a wave of retirements, which would sink morale and experience levels. He wants doubters to give his plans a chance to work and think about the ideals that led them to put on the badge.
"They might say, 'This job is fun again,' " said the new chief. Gascón's optimism is refreshing, and his goals are ambitious and well conceived, but his challenge is daunting. He won't be able to do it alone. He will need both cooperation within the department and strong backing from the elected officials at City Hall.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/28/ED3N19E3O5.DTL
|
