By David Chanen, The Minneapolis’ Star-Tribune
Come January, Minneapolis will have its first new police chief in nine years.
The field of candidates, which includes two women and three blacks, was whittled down to six this week. The finalist will walk into a department that is dealing with several high-profile police brutality allegations, that recently signed a federal mediation agreement to improve community relations and that faces looming cuts to its $100 million budget.
Whatever name Mayor R.T. Rybak submits to the City Council for approval, the appointment could be the defining point of his term. The police chief is always a lightning rod for criticism, deserved or not.
When departing chief Robert Olson became chief in 1995, he couldn’t have predicted that the city was going to end the year with a record 97 homicides. He would later be credited with guiding the department after it reduced crime to its lowest level in 30 years.
Not only does the city want a chief who will continue to keep crime in check, it also wants an effective manager with extraordinary leadership abilities who can inspire and support the rank and file and effectively communicate with Minneapolis’ diverse population in good and bad times, said City Council President Paul Ostrow. While Ostrow admits it’s a pretty demanding list of characteristics, he is confident that Rybak and his advisers have developed a high-quality group of candidates. At least on paper.
Here is a quick look at the six finalists. Rybak had named another one, Deputy Chief Charles Tubbs of Beloit, Wis., but Tubbs withdrew for personal reasons. Rybak is scheduled to hold a news conference today at which he may announce that the field has been whittled further.
HERMAN CURRY JR.
The words “well-respected” and “hands-on” are most often used to describe the nearly 30-year Detroit policing career of Herman Curry Jr. He had developed a military leadership style through his parallel officer duties in the Air Force Reserve, said Assistant Police Chief Harold Cureton.
In fact, it was his Reserve activity that factored into his retirement last year. Detroit’s new mayor decided to require testing for the deputy chief positions, but Curry was on active duty and failed because he couldn’t properly prepare, Cureton said. He said he has no doubt that Curry would have been able to pass it.
Curry, 54, took a job as security manager for the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. He was a finalist for the Seattle police chief position last year.
Part of his police command positions included the department’s tactical units. Even as a young sergeant in the gang unit, he was a go-getter who would never go to a superior with a problem unless he thought he had a solution, Cureton said. Lt. Eugene Good, an officer of one of Detroit’s police unions, said there were no major personnel issues when Curry was deputy chief.
“He’s not a timid soul,” Cureton said. “And he’s not a guy who leads from behind a desk. The troops will know him.”
This would bode well in the eyes of Mayor R.T. Rybak, who criticized Olson for not spending enough time with officers.
Curry had the confidence of the city’s large black and Arab-American populations and was called upon to resolve racial flare-ups, Cureton said. While he was deputy chief, the department was in the midst of a wide-ranging investigation by the U.S. Justice Department into treatment of prisoners in city lockups and the handling of fatal shootings by officers.
The year before he retired, Curry was part of an 11-member reorganization team headed by Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick that studied successful police departments to see how Detroit’s department could create greater officer accountability, better use of technology to focus on crime-fighting efforts and more neighborhood policing. Curry was also in the media spotlight when officers fatally shot a man who came after them with a rake.
LUCY GEROLD
Although she has worked for the Minneapolis Police Department since 1977, Lucy Gerold is sometimes criticized for her lack of street experience. On the flip side, others ask whether you want a good chief or somebody who has made a lot of arrests.
She was a civilian employee when she started to implement the department’s SAFE unit, a crime prevention strategy dealing with neighborhood livability issues that was considered community policing before the concept was widely known to officers. It pairs a crime prevention specialist with an officer. They are assigned to an area of the city to work with neighborhood watch groups on personal safety issues and problem properties, and to address crime trends.
The unit is an excellent way for residents to understand the workings of the Police Department because of the direct contact residents have with officers in solving problems, said Jim Long, a former crime prevention specialist supervisor. Gerold has lived in Minneapolis her entire life and has always had a clear understanding of what’s good for the residents, Long said.
“Lucy is incredibly competent,” he said. “Even officers who might have been against the SAFE concept early on admired her.”
Gerold, 51, eventually became director of the department’s community services bureau, a position that had a dual rank of deputy chief. She earned her peace officer’s license in 1997 and later was a precinct inspector before her appointment to deputy chief last year.
Many officers say Gerold has a very confident demeanor and researches all sides of an issue before making a decision. Rybak said he has been in tough situations with Gerold and Deputy Chief Sharon Lubinski, the other internal chief candidate. He has seen them at hospitals when people are dying, at crime scenes, at extremely complex budget meetings and in rooms where they were praised and lambasted.
“What the city needs is somebody who knows the cops and the community and can hit the ground running,” said Sgt. John Delmonico, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis. He hasn’t endorsed either candidate.
SHARON LUBINSKI
Activist Spike Moss said he wishes that the community could have more input in picking the final candidates but didn’t hesitate to say that a woman might make a good chief.
He did have an issue with Lubinski, saying he didn’t feel she spoke out enough on community issues involving the police until she was recently involved in federal mediation. But Lubinski, 51, said, “the heart of what I do is working with the community, particularly with the Somali, Latino and Southeast Asian immigrants that have come to the city.” She also has focused her community-oriented policing efforts on the underserved populations, such as the homeless.
“Community policing is more than just a program,” she said. “It’s getting a philosophy carried out by every cop on the street.”
Omar Jamal, executive director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center, said that Lubinski has a very good relationship with the minority communities and that she is his contact if he needs to resolve any conflicts between Somalis and the police. He recently asked for help when a Somali cab driver was killed.
“She’s very down-to-earth and responsive to our concerns,” he said.
In the mid-1990s, Lubinski was the department’s coordinator of Minnesota HEALS, a public-private business collaboration that helped reduce the city’s homicide total after a record number of killings in 1995.
“In Sharon, every colleague I’ve talked to about her has had good things to say about her,” said City Council Member Barb Johnson. “I’ve been impressed with her crisp and professional manner. She is every inch a cop.”
Former Chief John Laux said that Lubinski’s and Gerold’s leadership styles are different but that he doesn’t know if their styles are “better or worse than the other.” Being an inside candidate has its strengths because the officers know your track record, but they also know your weaknesses, he said.
Johnson said it “is just wonderful” that two of the finalists are women, because “they succeeded in a place I’m sure wasn’t very welcoming many times.
“I want a chief that is the best qualified, but it’s going to be hard for the mayor to look beyond Sharon and Lucy,” Johnson said.
WILLIAM McMANUS
Jim Dinneen, city manager of Dayton, Ohio, sounded almost resigned to the fact that other cities were going to be coming after Police Chief William McManus. McManus was billed as a “top-notch guy” when he left his job as assistant chief of Washington, D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department two years ago.
He was a key official in a department with nearly 3,800 officers, compared with 500 officers in Dayton. He developed a task force that eliminated entrenched prostitution markets in the district and directed operations during three days of civil disobedience and mass demonstrations against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in 2000.
So when he arrived in Dayton, Dinneen said, McManus wasn’t afraid to make significant changes. But he was going to have to deal with a city going through some political turmoil and budget problems, he said.
McManus, 51, developed a community policing model for the city, which he credited with reducing violent crime by 12 percent. He is credited with raising residents’ level of confidence in police and reducing complaints against officers by installing video cameras in squad cars.
Minneapolis NAACP president Brett Buckner said he was impressed with the way McManus worked in Washington, where 70 percent of the officers are members of minorities. Dinneen agreed that he has good relationships with the communities of color in Dayton, which helped calm a potentially volatile situation when a black man died after he was taken into custody by white officers.
“He talked to the NAACP. They trust him. Everything was calm,” Dinneen said. “You have to remember Cincinnati is only 60 miles from us. And you know what has happened there.”
McManus was criticized by officers for several policy changes, including those restricting police chases and determining when officers can shoot at moving vehicles. He received a no-confidence vote from the city’s police union, with one of its officials saying relations between McManus and the union had eroded to the point where there is no communication at all.
CHARLES MOOSE
If Minneapolis is looking for a media-created personality, “you got it,” said Walter Bader, president of the officers’ union in the Police Department of Montgomery County, Md., , where Charles Moose served as chief until he retired in June.
Moose became a household name when his face was splashed over television and newspapers as the East Coast dealt with last year’s sniper killing spree. Some of his own officers complained that he was too emotional during media briefings and that he withheld information about the sniper suspects from investigators and patrol officers, thereby jeopardizing their safety.
“I liked him the first minute I met him,” Bader said. “When he decided all the sniper shooting deaths were his opportunity to make money, that didn’t sit too well with officers.”
Moose, 50, signed a book deal earlier this year, but the Montgomery County Ethics Commission later forbade him to write the book. Moose challenged the decision but ended up resigning after being chief for four years. Before the shootings, Bader said, the union had a good relationship with him, and county officials were impressed with his openness to progressive policing and strategies.
In Montgomery County, he started a crisis intervention team to defuse situations involving people with mental illness and developed a new internal affairs process. During the sniper investigation, the union tried to negotiate a policy requiring police leadership to disclose suspect or vehicle information if officers could get hurt, but Moose balked at it because he believed it would imply he did something wrong, Bader said.
“I would think it would be hard for any rank and file to have respect for him,” he said.
County and police officials declined to comment on Moose’s candidacy, only to say they appreciated the job he did in Maryland.
Moose has made the news over a couple of legal actions not involving criminals. In August he received an undisclosed amount of money after threatening to sue over an alleged incident of racial discrimination at a Marriott hotel in Hawaii last year. When he was chief in Portland, Ore., an openly gay high-ranking officer sued the city, blaming his demotion on discrimination.
JOSEPH SAMUELS JR.
The citizens of Richmond, Calif., and new Police Chief Joseph Samuels Jr. apparently weren’t on the same timeline to put a new community policing strategy into place.
“The residents wanted it yesterday,” said City Manager Isiah Turner. “When it didn’t happen, that caused some consternation in the community and at City Hall. But he didn’t do anything so draconian that he shouldn’t be hired as a police chief.”
Samuels had a five-year plan, but the department didn’t embrace it. He didn’t do enough to improve relations with neighborhood councils and patch up strained relationships with minority groups, said the Rev. Charles Belcher, a City Council member. Also at issue were the handling of investigations and discipline involving a melee at a Cinco de Mayo celebration, and an allegation that an officer extorted money after a traffic stop.
Belcher said that Samuels had a good community policing concept, but that things became so politicized that he didn’t have a chance to make it work. Samuels also found himself in the shadow of a popular former chief, Belcher said.
“He had great intentions when he came to Richmond, but the people against him became so entrenched I don’t think Santa Claus could have pulled off his plan,” Belcher said.
Oakland Police Chief Richard Word still uses many of the community policing efforts that Samuels started when he was chief there from 1993 to 1999. Samuels was the city’s first black chief.
Word didn’t see the problems in Oakland that Samuels had to deal with in Richmond. But in both cities, Samuels was forced out before his term expired. Several Minneapolis council members expressed concern that Samuels has been a chief in three cities in the past 12 years.
Minneapolis Urban League president Clarence Hightower said that he’s impressed with the three candidates of color, but that he won’t necessarily be disappointed if one of them doesn’t become the next chief.
“I was hearing two weeks ago that people were declaring that this person is great or that person is great,” he said. “Hopefully folks are willing to fairly interview all the candidates.”