We’re used to cerebral soldiers. Every American generation has given us a sprinkling. Contemporary generals are expected to be tough and irrepressible. They are also expected to be thoughtful and, increasingly, humane. Not so our cops—or at least not until very recently. If an American police chief has had a philosophy, it has been the stuff of no nonsense, one with which he has presided over an armed workforce that keeps order in a Manichaean world.
Last week I attended a memorial service for a man—a cop—who was a glorious exception, a philosopher-policeman. He was Joseph D. McNamara, a man who had been chief of the San Jose Police Department from 1976 to 1991. He retired from the force just days after calling for the resignation of Daryl Gates, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, four of whose officers had savagely beaten an unarmed black man named Rodney King —an act of violence, caught on tape, that came to be seen as the nadir of American policing.
McNamara had been one of a very few senior American police officials who had condemned Gates in public. In an op-ed on these pages, written in April 1991 while he was still running the San Jose Police Department, McNamara said that “the videotape of the LAPD brutality affects the credibility of all police officers. It has cast a cloud over policing that won’t be lifted until police chiefs drop their own code of silence and speak out against one of their own’s peculiar philosophy of policing.”
McNamara died on Sept. 19, of pancreatic cancer. He had, in the time since his retirement in 1991, been a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford (where I was his colleague for the past seven years). He wrote prolifically—op-eds for newspapers, this paper in particular, and crime novels of a lively (and sometimes best-selling) flavor. His obituary in the New York Times recognized him as the “father of community policing” in this country, which he was indisputably; but he was also much more.
In an email to me, Ray Kelly , until recently the chief of the New York Police Department, described McNamara as “a visionary leader in law enforcement at a time when they were in short supply. Starting as a beat cop in Harlem in the 1950s, he became a scholar and an advocate for progressive policing throughout the country. Never afraid to speak his mind, he was the most influential police officer-academic of his time.”