City’s Assistant Chief Is Among Finalists For Dallas’ Top Position
By Bruce Nichols, The Dallas Morning News
PHOENIX, Ariz. – Frank Fairbanks, city manager of this ambitious metropolis sprawled across the Sonoran desert, shows unmistakable pride in the number of police executives that Phoenix has provided to other cities.
Harold Hurtt, a former Phoenix chief, just took the chief’s job in Houston. Ben Click led the Dallas department in the 1990s. Others have gone to Detroit; Salt Lake City; Richmond, Va., and Pasadena, Calif., Assistant Chief Kevin Robinson is a finalist for Dallas’ top job, which officials are in the final stages of filling.
“I think Texas has recruited away more of our best people than any other state,” said Mr. Fairbanks, city manager since 1990 and a Phoenix employee for 32 years. “We really do have some very good people.”
Experts across the country agree. “Phoenix has a national reputation as a very good department,” said Chuck Wexler, director of the Washington-based Police Executive Research Forum.
Phoenix has similarities to Dallas, Houston and other new big cities – rapid growth, budget challenges, a burgeoning Hispanic population – but its reputation for developing police executives is the main attraction for out-of-town headhunters.
“The Phoenix department has had a very strong emphasis on professionalization ... in terms of education and training,” said Larry Hoover, director of the Police Research Center at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. “Add to that the orientation in progressive public administration they get from the city and you have a very attractive combination.”
Standards are high. “That’s what drew me to the department,” said Officer Troy Clark, a spit-and-polish former Marine, as he steered a patrol car through a beat on Phoenix’s west side. “I have a need for a certain level of professionalism.”
Phoenix’s reputation has blossomed even as the former agricultural and mining town grew rapidly into an electronics manufacturing hub and America’s sixth-largest city, with 1.4 million people – 3.2 million in the metropolitan area.
“This has been a moving target for a long time,” said Rob Melnick, director of the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University in suburban Tempe.
The Phoenix department has grown in stature despite co-existing with the better-known – some would say notorious – town jailer, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
He’s been widely criticized and often sued over the unorthodox way he does his job: putting women on chain gangs, housing inmates in tents in the unforgiving Arizona heat and giving them pink underwear and cut-rate food. But he has repeatedly won easy re-election. Phoenix voters clearly like both their unorthodox county sheriff and their buttoned-down city police.
They’re the two different departments, but they “work together well,” George Weisz a senior assistant to the mayor. Phoenix wasn’t always a paragon. Until the late 1940s, the city built on copper, cotton, citrus and cotton was a mess. Prostitution, gambling and crime were rampant, and City Hall was corrupt.
Then, a good-government movement led by businessman Barry Goldwater, later a U.S. senator and presidential candidate, cleaned Phoenix up and put the city on a path to high-quality municipal management based on a non-partisan, council-manager system.
Since then, Phoenix has won international awards as a well-managed city, and the commitment to quality operations imbues all departments, including police, Dr. Hoover said.
“Our police department has been innovative and adaptive as opposed to resistant,” Mayor Phil Gordon said.
Officer Clark, assigned to the city’s Maryvale Precinct where gang-plagued working class neighborhoods mix with sparkling-new subdivisions of $200,000 homes, put the commitment in action last week.
He was both firm and apologetic while guarding witnesses at a homicide scene on a street where modest homes mingled with warehouses and a horse was tied to a tree behind a rusting 1970s Impala with a flat tire.
Not a Spanish-speaker, Officer Clark used what words he knew to politely tell Hispanics in the group no habla – don’t talk – to keep their recollections pure for detectives.
Later, after arresting a man caught stealing bags of cement at one of the many subdivisions emerging among the cactus, he repeatedly asked if the man’s handcuffed hands were comfortable as he drove him to the precinct station.
“When they’re handcuffed in the back of your car, they’re your responsibility,” he said.
Phoenix was among the first big cities to implement community policing, which focuses on building neighborhood relationships to fight crime. Phoenix now is studying use of enhanced computing power to better identify crime trends and target police efforts.
Phoenix was an early leader in issuing officers non-lethal weapons to control suspects and minimize police shootings. (Taser International Inc., maker of a popular electrical stun device, is based in suburban Scottsdale.)
The city has been creative in trying to control police chases and the dangers they pose. The resulting policy – setting out in detail when and how to pursue – has been copied elsewhere.
The city has a good working relationship with its police union, which is less divided along racial lines than some, said Jake Jacobsen, president of the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, the officers’ labor organization.
The department relies heavily on citizen advisory panels. “We are very aggressive in confronting problems and working together with people to come up with solutions,” said interim Chief Jack Harris, one of the candidates to succeed Chief Hurtt.
Despite progressive measures, there’s always crime – Phoenix’s recent statistics are better than Dallas’ but about the same as Houston’s – and police everywhere make mistakes. “I didn’t tell you we never have problems,” Mr. Fairbanks said.
Phoenix experienced a spate in the ‘90s, when police killed three suspects, two in shootings and a third, a legless amputee, in a police chokehold. All three stirred community outrage and forced the city to address problems.
Last week, Hispanic leaders were up in arms about immigration agents showing up at some police traffic stops. Phoenix has a policy against police enforcing immigration law.
“We’re still sorting out what happened,” Mr. Fairbanks said.
Rather than avoiding comment while the matter was investigated, Phoenix officials started talking immediately. Mayor Gordon, City Manager Fairbanks and Chief Harris met about a dozen Hispanic leaders to discuss the issue and promise responsive action.
“If there’s an issue, we try to go out to the community and resolve it,” said Dave Siebert, chair of the City Council’s public safety committee.
Some say Phoenix has been a bit easier to manage because of its growth economy and its relative racial peace.
Phoenix is still majority white and its black population is small for a big American city: 5.1 percent. The city, which boomed mainly in the last 20 years, never attracted the influx of blacks experienced by older industrial cities, experts say.
Hispanics now represent 34 percent of the population, but few can vote and Hispanics have been elected to the City Council only intermittently. Currently, there’s a black council member but no Hispanic. A woman appointed to fill a vacancy lost the last election to a candidate backed by gays.
Neither blacks nor Hispanics are fully satisfied and, with a new stream of middle-class blacks arriving to work and retire in Phoenix alongside the many Hispanic immigrants, jockeying and tensions likely will rise in the future, analysts say.
That doesn’t inevitably mean trouble, said John Hall, a public affairs professor at Arizona State who has helped train Phoenix police executives.
“These are people who understand that politics and administration are connected,” he said. “They’ll look to have the numbers, the programs, the activities in place.”
Candidates for Phoenix police chief run a gauntlet of interviews with committees of citizens from all walks of life, Mr. Fairbanks said.
“I don’t think it’s unfair,” he said. “Police chiefs will get in a situation where there’ll be a lot of heat ... You’ve got to respond right now.”
The city manager said he can’t recall the last time Phoenix hired a police chief who’d never worked in the city, but he’s hedging his bets time. He’s conducting a national search to replace Harold Hurtt.
“It’s clearly the most important hire a city manager makes,” Mr. Fairbanks said.