IPD Officer Lance By Anne Scheck
It was a dark and stormy night. Well, not that stormy. It was just a typical Oregon rain. But it was really, really dark. And it was very late.
I was at the Independence Post Office. I’d just moved up from Los Angeles and I’d grown accustomed in LA to making what I call “a mail run” any time of day. So, I parked by the drop box at the Independence PO. I was frantically searching for the stamps I knew I had in my car -- the interior of which always looks like a landfill – when I heard a soft knock on the window. I was surprised to see a police officer staring down at me.
“What is it that you are doing?” he asked. I thought it was obvious. I told him I was mailing letters. “Okay,” he said. He observed that it was nearly midnight. We chatted for a few moments about why I would find this particular time a good opportunity for a trip to the post office. Then he wished me well and departed. I found the stamps, popped the letters in the box, and drove off.
I joked about this little event incessantly with my California friends. “I live in a town where the police track you down for mailing a letter after they roll up the sidewalks,” I’d say. It was only later, after a series of such encounters with local law enforcement, that I stopped poking fun and began singing praise. It became clear that I hadn’t seen an over-protective police effort, but rather, an example of an approach I’d learned had the potential for the most crime-fighting success: Community policing. And if you want to see it action, there is no place like Independence, at least in my view.
It did take me a while to reach that conclusion. There was the time I made a wide swing around a bicyclist on Gun Club Road. The officer who stopped me told me he saw my car crossing the center of the street; I told him I’d known someone who died in a bicycle accident, so it made me doubly cautious. “Yes,” he said. “That was Hank Bersani and I knew him, too.” We both paused for a long moment. It struck me that this would never happen in a larger community.
Then there was the time I’d rented a car for a trip down the I-5 to Northern California, and, on my way back home from Salem, I couldn’t figure out how to activate either the turn-signal or the headlights. In the dusky twilight, along Stryker Road, an Independence police officer pulled me over to point out that my headlights were off. When I explained that I was flummoxed by the modern dashboard, he leaned in and pointed out what he’d instantly determined was the right button to push. “You could have made that look harder,” I said with a laugh, knowing full well I probably seemed like a lunatic. I expected to get a ticket -- but I didn’t.
It began to dawn on me that I was experiencing from the Independence Police Department (IDP) the very thing I had written about, fairly early in my journalism career, which was taken from a document produced by a panel known as “The Christopher Commission.” It was released in response to the Rodney King case. Mr. King, an African American man, had been violently beaten during an arrest – an incident captured on video that went viral before such a word ever was termed. He was never charged with a crime.
Though I am not what anyone would expect as media coverage for law enforcement – I have two biology degrees along with a BA in journalism -- I started my career as a police reporter in a tiny, dingy office in Parker Center, the legendary glass-and-concrete building that once served as headquarters for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). With my educational background, I seemed destined to be the worst hire for the police beat that my employer, City News Service, ever could have made. But I was saved by the occasional, kindly help of a heart-of-gold veteran journalist, Nieson Himmel of the LA Times, who often corrected me before I had a chance to commit career hara-kiri.
Years later, when I was working for a different publication, I was asked to write an article about the Christopher Commission Report, and, ever the science nerd, I wanted to do so from a scientific perspective. Though I’d been steeped in the police beat by that time, I was still filled with a form of scientific wonder about why human beings behave the way they do.
Back in college, I’d driven my psych-major friends absolutely bonkers with my complaints about some classic studies in the social sciences, and one in particular – known as the Milgram experiment – was particularly frustrating to me. This was the study in the 1960s in which fake shocks were administered by volunteers who were unaware that the volts they were administering and the recipients they were electrocuting were actually entirely phony. Two-thirds of the people who agreed to send electricity into other humans did so at high levels – and the conclusion from this outcome seemed to be that we hurt each other when ordered to do so by an authority figure.
This didn’t square with the experimental designs I’d seen in biology, which usually asked why something didn’t work as well as why it did. A third of those participants in the Milgram test refused to partake in such an injury-causing set-up – and it bothered me that they never were investigated, or if they were, that message seems to have escaped even a footnote in textbooks.
The headlines about the Christopher Commission Report reflected the bad cops and the brutality, an unarguable finding. I’d seen it myself – people at traffic stops being treated by police like pieces of moving furniture. And if there is one result that came in loud and clear to me from covering the Christopher Commission Report, it was this: not only is such behavior outrageous, it is completely counter-productive.
The only time in LA I’d seen a true form of community policing up-close-and-personal was when an African American police officer intentionally stopped me on my way to cover a protest in South Central, to tell me I shouldn’t go there, that I could be putting myself in harm’s way. I pointed out that I was on an assignment, but it made no difference to him. He was clearly worried.
I don’t know why he issued such an ominous warning because though I am white and though the crowd of protesters clearly was not, I made my way in and interviewed several of them “without incident” – the phrase I once used in police briefs. I seemed to be the only person of my particular skin tone in the entire area, but nobody used any of the pejorative terms applied to my race that I’d seen on TV dramas featuring minority characters. This neutral, even welcoming response, would prove predictive of all my trips back then into what is still called “the black community.”
So, when I wrote about the Christopher Commission Report, it was with the aim of finding out what was working well in the LAPD, and why it did, not just the abject failure. Right there, in words incredibly easy to understand, the commissioners found that women police officers had demonstrated the road to success -- they used “excessive force” far less than many of their male counterparts, and their arrest records and other standard measures of job performance were the same. This was true of men on the force who employed the same non-confrontational tactics, of course -- but they weren’t given support for it by many of their peers. Women, it seemed to me at the time, hadn’t really learned the art of swagger that can be an expectation for men. As sexist as that sounds, it was the conclusion of a much-younger version of myself and, even now, I see no reason to revise it.
I had some help interpreting the report, thanks to one of the most remarkable interviews I recall ever having; It was with the dean of an LA medical school, a physician who served on the Christopher Commission. He was an unforgettable man, both in terms of intelligence and demeanor. Dr. Robert Tranquada was genteel but candid during our interview, and I remember thinking that I’d never meet anybody quite that memorable for a long time. And, for a long time, I didn’t. Some people are such outliers, just so infrequent.
But one day, at a meeting called the Oregon Peace Officers Association in Grand Ronde, I met someone who put me in mind of Dr. Tranquada. He was a lawyer who had served as a police officer, and he seemed happy to answer questions. I told him I was working on a story for The Independent about community policing. I thought I’d seen this approach widely used in my adopted hometown of Independence, I explained. I was looking for some well-informed background.
This is how I met John Kilcullen, who couldn’t have been nicer or more informative and who, after speaking with me at some length, finally informed me that he’d lost a son, police officer Chris Kilcullen, in the line of duty. He told me this without transmitting a trace of bitterness or rancor. I promised Mr. Kilcullen I would send a copy of the story I was preparing.
The article finally ran. It led off with IDP Officer Grant Hedrick learning de-escalation techniques at a regional law enforcement workshop held at the Independence Event Center. Officer Hedrick had gone to high school with my daughter, and he was a star quarterback there and in college, and I remember thinking I was never so impressed with him as I was that day in the basement of our city hall.
The article, which appeared in what has to be the smallest newspaper in Oregon if not the entire world, became the most-requested issue of The Independent ever printed. Former IDP Chief Vernon Wells, who is widely credited with initiating community policing here in town, wrote an editorial; IDP Chief Robert Mason, who provided details on how it’s carried out, kicked off a Q-and-A about emerging mental health issues with other respondents: Sheriff Mark Garton, Fire Chief Ben Stange and Deputy Fire Chief Neal Olson.
So, when the protest marches about George Floyd began, I finally sat down to write the essay about policing that I’ve wanted to chronicle for so long. And, in this time of COVID-19 pandemic, I know our police department isn’t perfect – citizens here have emailed me when they believe they’ve seen an attitude wholly inconsistent with community orientation. I’ve pledged that I’ll take an unvarnished view of the IPD and write about it in a critical-eyed way, when the occasion calls for it.
Months ago, when I first thought about my essay on this issue, I got the photo for it exactly the way you might expect: from a traffic stop by a friendly officer, in this case the one who travels by motorcycle, IPD Officer Lance. He’d stopped me because I was driving erratically on a curve, I think. Did I look impaired? I was late for an appointment. I explained this is a terrible thing to do to people waiting for you. Then I asked to take his picture. He said OK. When I handed him my business card after that, he seemed stunned our town has a media enterprise like mine, a perfectly understandable reaction and sadly for me, even a somewhat common one, after four years of its operation.
And I am now reminded there’s a promise I need to keep. It is to Mr. Kilcullen. I’d forgotten that I’d assured him I would mail the article that ran in The Independent. I’m ashamed to say it had slipped my mind, until recently. I was driving down the highway near Eugene. I saw a road sign posted in memory of his son -- a police officer who left behind a wife and two children. He died while attempting to stop a car, from a shot fired through the window of the vehicle. I was all the way to Grants Pass before I stopped thinking about passing that sign and meeting Mr. Kilcullen and interviewing Dr. Tranquada and so many of the other things. And I was reminded of an often-used phrase, that it takes a whole village to raise a child. It takes the same thing to have a healthy, supportive, rule-abiding community.
It was a dark and stormy night. Well, not that stormy. It was just a typical Oregon rain. But it was really, really dark. And it was very late.
I was at the Independence Post Office. I’d just moved up from Los Angeles and I’d grown accustomed in LA to making what I call “a mail run” any time of day. So, I parked by the drop box at the Independence PO. I was frantically searching for the stamps I knew I had in my car -- the interior of which always looks like a landfill – when I heard a soft knock on the window. I was surprised to see a police officer staring down at me.
“What is it that you are doing?” he asked. I thought it was obvious. I told him I was mailing letters. “Okay,” he said. He observed that it was nearly midnight. We chatted for a few moments about why I would find this particular time a good opportunity for a trip to the post office. Then he wished me well and departed. I found the stamps, popped the letters in the box, and drove off.
I joked about this little event incessantly with my California friends. “I live in a town where the police track you down for mailing a letter after they roll up the sidewalks,” I’d say. It was only later, after a series of such encounters with local law enforcement, that I stopped poking fun and began singing praise. It became clear that I hadn’t seen an over-protective police effort, but rather, an example of an approach I’d learned had the potential for the most crime-fighting success: Community policing. And if you want to see it action, there is no place like Independence, at least in my view.
It did take me a while to reach that conclusion. There was the time I made a wide swing around a bicyclist on Gun Club Road. The officer who stopped me told me he saw my car crossing the center of the street; I told him I’d known someone who died in a bicycle accident, so it made me doubly cautious. “Yes,” he said. “That was Hank Bersani and I knew him, too.” We both paused for a long moment. It struck me that this would never happen in a larger community.
Then there was the time I’d rented a car for a trip down the I-5 to Northern California, and, on my way back home from Salem, I couldn’t figure out how to activate either the turn-signal or the headlights. In the dusky twilight, along Stryker Road, an Independence police officer pulled me over to point out that my headlights were off. When I explained that I was flummoxed by the modern dashboard, he leaned in and pointed out what he’d instantly determined was the right button to push. “You could have made that look harder,” I said with a laugh, knowing full well I probably seemed like a lunatic. I expected to get a ticket -- but I didn’t.
It began to dawn on me that I was experiencing from the Independence Police Department (IDP) the very thing I had written about, fairly early in my journalism career, which was taken from a document produced by a panel known as “The Christopher Commission.” It was released in response to the Rodney King case. Mr. King, an African American man, had been violently beaten during an arrest – an incident captured on video that went viral before such a word ever was termed. He was never charged with a crime.
Though I am not what anyone would expect as media coverage for law enforcement – I have two biology degrees along with a BA in journalism -- I started my career as a police reporter in a tiny, dingy office in Parker Center, the legendary glass-and-concrete building that once served as headquarters for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). With my educational background, I seemed destined to be the worst hire for the police beat that my employer, City News Service, ever could have made. But I was saved by the occasional, kindly help of a heart-of-gold veteran journalist, Nieson Himmel of the LA Times, who often corrected me before I had a chance to commit career hara-kiri.
Years later, when I was working for a different publication, I was asked to write an article about the Christopher Commission Report, and, ever the science nerd, I wanted to do so from a scientific perspective. Though I’d been steeped in the police beat by that time, I was still filled with a form of scientific wonder about why human beings behave the way they do.
Back in college, I’d driven my psych-major friends absolutely bonkers with my complaints about some classic studies in the social sciences, and one in particular – known as the Milgram experiment – was particularly frustrating to me. This was the study in the 1960s in which fake shocks were administered by volunteers who were unaware that the volts they were administering and the recipients they were electrocuting were actually entirely phony. Two-thirds of the people who agreed to send electricity into other humans did so at high levels – and the conclusion from this outcome seemed to be that we hurt each other when ordered to do so by an authority figure.
This didn’t square with the experimental designs I’d seen in biology, which usually asked why something didn’t work as well as why it did. A third of those participants in the Milgram test refused to partake in such an injury-causing set-up – and it bothered me that they never were investigated, or if they were, that message seems to have escaped even a footnote in textbooks.
The headlines about the Christopher Commission Report reflected the bad cops and the brutality, an unarguable finding. I’d seen it myself – people at traffic stops being treated by police like pieces of moving furniture. And if there is one result that came in loud and clear to me from covering the Christopher Commission Report, it was this: not only is such behavior outrageous, it is completely counter-productive.
The only time in LA I’d seen a true form of community policing up-close-and-personal was when an African American police officer intentionally stopped me on my way to cover a protest in South Central, to tell me I shouldn’t go there, that I could be putting myself in harm’s way. I pointed out that I was on an assignment, but it made no difference to him. He was clearly worried.
I don’t know why he issued such an ominous warning because though I am white and though the crowd of protesters clearly was not, I made my way in and interviewed several of them “without incident” – the phrase I once used in police briefs. I seemed to be the only person of my particular skin tone in the entire area, but nobody used any of the pejorative terms applied to my race that I’d seen on TV dramas featuring minority characters. This neutral, even welcoming response, would prove predictive of all my trips back then into what is still called “the black community.”
So, when I wrote about the Christopher Commission Report, it was with the aim of finding out what was working well in the LAPD, and why it did, not just the abject failure. Right there, in words incredibly easy to understand, the commissioners found that women police officers had demonstrated the road to success -- they used “excessive force” far less than many of their male counterparts, and their arrest records and other standard measures of job performance were the same. This was true of men on the force who employed the same non-confrontational tactics, of course -- but they weren’t given support for it by many of their peers. Women, it seemed to me at the time, hadn’t really learned the art of swagger that can be an expectation for men. As sexist as that sounds, it was the conclusion of a much-younger version of myself and, even now, I see no reason to revise it.
I had some help interpreting the report, thanks to one of the most remarkable interviews I recall ever having; It was with the dean of an LA medical school, a physician who served on the Christopher Commission. He was an unforgettable man, both in terms of intelligence and demeanor. Dr. Robert Tranquada was genteel but candid during our interview, and I remember thinking that I’d never meet anybody quite that memorable for a long time. And, for a long time, I didn’t. Some people are such outliers, just so infrequent.
But one day, at a meeting called the Oregon Peace Officers Association in Grand Ronde, I met someone who put me in mind of Dr. Tranquada. He was a lawyer who had served as a police officer, and he seemed happy to answer questions. I told him I was working on a story for The Independent about community policing. I thought I’d seen this approach widely used in my adopted hometown of Independence, I explained. I was looking for some well-informed background.
This is how I met John Kilcullen, who couldn’t have been nicer or more informative and who, after speaking with me at some length, finally informed me that he’d lost a son, police officer Chris Kilcullen, in the line of duty. He told me this without transmitting a trace of bitterness or rancor. I promised Mr. Kilcullen I would send a copy of the story I was preparing.
The article finally ran. It led off with IDP Officer Grant Hedrick learning de-escalation techniques at a regional law enforcement workshop held at the Independence Event Center. Officer Hedrick had gone to high school with my daughter, and he was a star quarterback there and in college, and I remember thinking I was never so impressed with him as I was that day in the basement of our city hall.
The article, which appeared in what has to be the smallest newspaper in Oregon if not the entire world, became the most-requested issue of The Independent ever printed. Former IDP Chief Vernon Wells, who is widely credited with initiating community policing here in town, wrote an editorial; IDP Chief Robert Mason, who provided details on how it’s carried out, kicked off a Q-and-A about emerging mental health issues with other respondents: Sheriff Mark Garton, Fire Chief Ben Stange and Deputy Fire Chief Neal Olson.
So, when the protest marches about George Floyd began, I finally sat down to write the essay about policing that I’ve wanted to chronicle for so long. And, in this time of COVID-19 pandemic, I know our police department isn’t perfect – citizens here have emailed me when they believe they’ve seen an attitude wholly inconsistent with community orientation. I’ve pledged that I’ll take an unvarnished view of the IPD and write about it in a critical-eyed way, when the occasion calls for it.
Months ago, when I first thought about my essay on this issue, I got the photo for it exactly the way you might expect: from a traffic stop by a friendly officer, in this case the one who travels by motorcycle, IPD Officer Lance. He’d stopped me because I was driving erratically on a curve, I think. Did I look impaired? I was late for an appointment. I explained this is a terrible thing to do to people waiting for you. Then I asked to take his picture. He said OK. When I handed him my business card after that, he seemed stunned our town has a media enterprise like mine, a perfectly understandable reaction and sadly for me, even a somewhat common one, after four years of its operation.
And I am now reminded there’s a promise I need to keep. It is to Mr. Kilcullen. I’d forgotten that I’d assured him I would mail the article that ran in The Independent. I’m ashamed to say it had slipped my mind, until recently. I was driving down the highway near Eugene. I saw a road sign posted in memory of his son -- a police officer who left behind a wife and two children. He died while attempting to stop a car, from a shot fired through the window of the vehicle. I was all the way to Grants Pass before I stopped thinking about passing that sign and meeting Mr. Kilcullen and interviewing Dr. Tranquada and so many of the other things. And I was reminded of an often-used phrase, that it takes a whole village to raise a child. It takes the same thing to have a healthy, supportive, rule-abiding community.