NATIONAL COPS EVALUATION
ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE CASE STUDY:
Fremont, California

David Thacher
Harvard University
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management

Case Study Prepared for the Urban Institute

I. THE FREMONT PD BEFORE C.O.P.P.S.

Fremont, California is a relatively wealthy1 Silicon Valley community of nearly 200,000 residents. Its population is growing increasingly diverse; once predominantly white, in the last ten to twenty years the city has attracted many new residents from almost every Asian nationality—from Afghan, to Indian, to Chinese—, as well as a growing number of Latinos. Census data, which classify immigrants from places like Iran as “Caucasian,” underestimate this diversity, but a recent school district survey found that nearly half of Fremont’s residents are linguistic minorities. Crime has always been relatively low in Fremont, and the city has consistently ranked among the safest U.S. cities larger than 100,000 population.

The Fremont Police Department (FPD) has at least since the early 1970s been a highly competent and innovative organization. For one, it has experimented with a number of organizational innovations that helped pave the way for community policing (which in Fremont goes by the name of Community Oriented Police Problem Solving, or C.O.P.P.S.). But perhaps most important, it has maintained a culture of service and professionalism that would seem to be a prerequisite to a policing philosophy like C.O.P.P.S. Rana Sampson, a consultant to innumerable police departments around the country, recalls her impression of Fremont officers when she came to the city on the eve of its transformation: “It’s a very professional department. It’s not . . . riddled with personnel problems, lawsuits, anger, or bitterness. It’s not a department that cuts illegal corners to provide your services.” Moreover, organizational consultant Tom Anderson, who has worked with police departments throughout California, remarks that Fremont has “always been a very creative, innovative, progressive department,” describing that orientation as the department’s “tradition.”

This tradition has meant that the FPD has been quick to adopt cutting-edge innovations as they have emerged in the policing community: In the 1970s, the department adopted a team policing program that assigned officers by geography and encouraged them to interact with the community. But early in the 1980s, Fremont police began to emphasize technology and tactics to protect the public’s safety. It was not until around 1993 that the pendulum begin to swing back towards community participation in Fremont, this time under the rubric of “community policing,” which arrived by way of the new chief of police, Craig Steckler.
In any case, on the cusp of that transformation, the FPD’s innovation and professionalism were apparent throughout the department: Police enjoyed a mostly open relationship with the community and city hall (even if in the past, their collaboration with other agencies was somewhat weak—as was interagency collaboration in general around Fremont); they maintained state-of-the art, proactive operational and administrative systems; and their management was well-schooled in contemporary ideas. Consider each of these four areas in turn.

1. Relationship to the Environment

Authorizing Environment
During the 1980s, the Fremont PD primarily looked to the police community for guidance about the choices it made. The department was well-connected to California policing circles: Its Chief, Robert Wasserman, was widely known in the state as an innovative police leader, and many FPD managers attended California’s Police Officer Standards and Training (P.O.S.T.) system of police command colleges. Partly as a result, the FPD participated in many of the tactical and technological innovations that were emerging in the field.

Locally, the FPD had a good relationship with city government and the community. On the community side, the FPD did not face the accusations of bias and incompetence that plagued many police departments operating under the traditional model: Civil suits against officers were rare, as were internal affairs investigations in general. On the government side, the FPD enjoyed a strong reputation: Public safety always took a high priority in budget deliberations, and in 1992 the council formally voted to adopt that goal as the top priority for Fremont’s government.

But although the police-city relationship was positive, it was not necessarily strong in day-to-day decisionmaking. City hall had some influence over police decision-making, particularly through the annual budgeting process. But many police and city officials report that the city manager had somewhat less direct input into police issues than is the case today. For example, though the manager has always met regularly with all department heads, these meeting are more frequent today, and they are more likely to focus on long-term planning in the departments and in the city rather than the current council agenda. Nevertheless, during the 1980s and early 1990s the manager’s office did help push a number of changes important to the FPD, like bringing in new communications equipment and decriminalizing several municipal code violations (like parking and traffic violations, public disturbances, and animal control ordinances).

The Elusive Community
Community members—and sometimes community groups—also played a role in setting the FPD’s day-to-day priorities. For example, the traffic unit always made it a practice to check out community complaints (such as complaints about speeding on a particular street), whether phoned in by individual citizens, raised by groups at neighborhood meetings, or even brought to a city councilor’s attention. More generally, many officers describe the premium past administrations put on community relations.2

Nevertheless, the FPD has always faced some practical challenges to building relationships with Fremont’s “community,” which rarely organizes around neighborhood quality-of-life issues. To be sure, the FPD has for some time organized Neighborhood Watch groups, and that program has grown rapidly in recent years—Fremont now lists over 800 of these groups, though some meet only once a year. But most residents seem to direct their civic energy towards other types of organizations, like PTAs, merchant’s associations, cultural groups, and homeowners’ associations. Homeowner groups, in particular, took off in the 1980s, as new tract housing developments and gated communities sprang up throughout the city.

In the 1970s, the FPD organized its patrol force with an eye towards building links to these diverse associations, which rarely approached police on their own. During this period, the city was divided into four sectors to which every patrol officer was assigned, and each sector designated a particular officer as its “Adam car” (a position that brought a slight pay increase). Part of Fremont’s team policing program, Adam cars counted the role of community liaison among their additional responsibilities. For example, Adam cars were supposed to keep tabs on all of the area’s community activity and attend any relevant meetings—which reportedly included not just neighborhood watch meetings, but also those for groups like PTAs and business associations. The Adam car officer was expected to follow up on problems raised in these forums, coordinating the activities of the other sector cars where necessary.

But by the early 1980s, the FPD had done away with the Adam car. The change was actually intended to strengthen community ties, for the “designated officer” system had seemed unintentionally to absolve other officers from responsibility for community problem solving. But in practice the change did not have its intended effect, since it roughly coincided with a broad philosophical shift that FPD veterans describe—a shift away from the community orientation associated with “team policing” and towards a more technology-driven philosophy. In the words of Steve Blair, a twenty-year veteran of the FPD who is currently president of the Police Officer’s Association: “[In the] late seventies or start of the eighties we moved away, at least in my view, from a person- and victim-oriented philosophy or approach to [an approach where] everything was stat-driven.” So although community input was hardly shut out, and programs like Neighborhood Watch still existed, other forms of police-community problem-solving took a back seat as the FPD turned its attention towards the improvement of internal systems.

The Task Environment
Nevertheless, during much of this period the FPD clearly valued customer service, and it has even turned to the community and elected officials to help set its priorities. So on these scores, some of the groundwork for C.O.P.P.S. had already been laid. But where its task environment is concerned—the organizations and groups that the FPD has looked to for help in getting its job done—, the department had not yet formed the necessary links.

It is not, of course, that Fremont agencies and community institutions never worked together to coordinate their routine business or to tackle specific community projects. For example, Fremont police have long received domestic violence training from a local nonprofit named SAVE, which provides services for domestic violence victims (who in turn are often referred by the FPD). In city hall, the FPD has served on interdepartmental committees and otherwise worked with city agencies for some time. For example, FPD officers have referred neighborhood problems to the city’s code enforcement officers for years, even if they did so less frequently than they do today. And Fire Chief Dan Lydon maintains that despite improved collaboration between his agency and the FPD on some fronts today, front-line officers in the two departments enjoyed a close relationship in years past, since the relatively decentralized Fire Department offered police many homes away from home in its neighborhood fire stations.

Nevertheless, most agency employees remember some difficulties in their collaborations with city police. The overriding problem seems to have been what some call a “silo” approach to service delivery, in which each city agency cultivated a distinct area of competence that others were not expected to question, and which often undermined joint decision-making. For example, the FPD has for years participated in Fremont’s City Technical Coordinating Committee (CTCC), which meets weekly to talk about all new projects coming into the planning department for approval. Roger Shanks, senior planner in charge of current planning for Fremont’s Development and Environmental Services department (DES, aka “planning”), explains the committee as “a chance for projects to get up there and get thrown in front of a group,” so that different agencies can comment on the projects. “By having everybody in the same room,” he explains, “we get feedback back and forth between different divisions.” But in the past Fremont agencies typically focused narrowly on their own concerns in these deliberations, and the FPD was no exception:

Shanks sums up the problem by saying that many police suffered from “tunnel vision.”

Other city departments felt the same difficulties with the FPD and with each other, with the result that each agency tended to keep to itself. For example, Maintenance and Recreation Director Jack Rogers explains that police sometimes shot down events his office proposed on the grounds that they might potentially create safety problems (for example, by bringing together rival youth from opposite ends of town). “There were times when I may even have hesitated calling the police department, telling them I was putting together a big activity, because I knew they were going put the kibosh on it. So you look around and you say, ‘My job is to run some of these things and their job is to avoid all risk.’”

More broadly, tunnel vision in the FPD translated into a definite sense that the police were separate from city government. Department members apparently conveyed that sense regularly, as most Fremont city employees remember it well; Economic Development Director Ann Draper is one example:

This perception—the belief that police saw themselves as different from the rest of city government—was apparently quite widespread in Fremont, as it is reported by a number of agency heads as well as council members like Mayor Gus Morrison, who has held elective offices in Fremont for the better part of two decades.

The Criminal Justice System
By contrast, the FPD did work actively to build relationships with some outside agencies in the criminal justice world. Most notably, it worked closely with some area police departments by participating in task forces and maintaining a strong presence in the Alameda County Chief’s Association. To be sure, jurisdictional lines were more firmly entrenched in the past than they are today: For example, a number of officers report that the FPD tended to neglect problems at the local commuter rail station on the grounds that they were the responsibility of the transit police. But for the most part, relationships with other police agencies were strong.

On the other hand, the FPD found frustration on the court and corrections side of the criminal justice system. The arrests Fremont sent through the system were typically for less serious offenses than the ones emanating from its neighbors to the North: For example, Fremont is in the same county (and hence court system) as Oakland, but that city has around six times Fremont’s rate of index crimes. The result, according to many, was that the county criminal justice agencies did not treat the FPD’s cases as seriously as the local community would have liked—a tension that would drive some of the department’s C.O.P.P.S.-related innovations.

2. Operations
In the years leading up to C.O.P.P.S., the FPD assigned its operations to two divisions: Operations (which included patrol and investigations) and Support Services (which housed dispatch and staffed the jail, in addition to a few administrative functions). The department grew steadily throughout the 1980s, with the exception of a recessionary period beginning in 1985, and by 1991 it employed 303 personnel, about two-thirds of them sworn officers. When recession hit again in that year, the department had to lay off five non-sworn personnel and essentially stop hiring; by the time it reached its low point in 1993, staffing was down to 269, of which 180 were sworn officers.

Patrol
Patrol was the largest division throughout this period (for example, in 1994, 119 officers were assigned to patrol, while 20 were assigned to investigations and the special units reporting to it). 14 patrol officers were assigned to a specialized traffic unit that was essentially separate from the rest of the division, but most officers worked for the patrol force proper. The structure of that force changed somewhat over the years, but on the eve of C.O.P.P.S., the FPD divided the city’s 92 square miles into 6 different geographic zones, each patrolled by 2-3 officers at a time. Each officer usually kept the same zone for three years, but the FPD did not otherwise privilege geography in its patrol force: Officers reported to sergeants on the basis of days off rather than zone, so that each sergeant formally supervised officers scattered throughout the city.

In any case, patrol officers had many duties in Fremont, including 911 response and random patrol, but also including proactive problem-solving and investigations (as described below). 911 response put a premium on customer service, and officers were specially trained in victim assistance.

Beyond these basic duties, Fremont has also expected its officers to engage in problem-solving for some time—at least since the 1970s, when Chief John Fabbri brought team policing and many other reforms to the department. After a hiatus of a few years in the early 1980s, team policing was succeeded by a new problem-solving technology called Crime Coordinating Action Teams (CCAT), which officers still use today.

CCATs generally focused on geographically-concentrated problems identified by officers themselves or through crime analysis. The typical response to these problems, according to many FPD members from the period, was a focused, zero-tolerance saturation patrol. CCATs could become fairly large, involving several officers and even investigators across different shifts. For example, one officer remembers:

Fremont’s efforts were clearly more analytic than many other police departments’ “problem-solving” or directed patrol activities, as crime data played an integral part in plotting the response to neighborhood problems.

CCAT had a few limitations, however. One was that responses were fairly stock, limited to focused patrol and investigations; CCATs rarely involved outside agencies or collaboration with the community. Another was that the structure of the patrol force made it difficult to find time for problem-solving: Since each zone had only 2-3 officers, there was little slack available to cover for an officer’s absence, making it risky to go out-of-service to spend time at a problem location. Still, the FPD was apparently fairly generous in using overtime to support problem-solving work, so officers could often find needed time in that way.

Investigations
Unlike most police departments of its size, the Fremont Police Department expects patrol officers to undertake most investigations themselves. One FPD detective explains that while in most larger police departments, officers play the role of report-taker, Fremont officers have always taken the alternative role of generalist. Even for relatively serious crimes like robberies, the responding officer typically investigates the incident until her leads have run out.

The detective unit itself was and is relatively small, assigning 15 officers and 2 sergeants in a department of close to 200 sworn positions. In the eyes of detectives and officers alike, the role of investigations is to support patrol work. In part this role means literally helping patrol officers as they investigate crimes themselves—for example, showing them how to use the computer search system or guiding them through idiosyncratic cases. But sometimes support means taking over cases that promise to burn up too much time (like serious robberies or homicides) or that demand special expertise (like high-technology crimes). But as a general rule, patrol officers will handle cases as far as they can; the FPD has always had a strong norm against unwelcome infringement on a patrol officer’s caseload.

Throughout the 1980s (and continuing on through today), the investigations unit mostly employed generalist detectives, though some had special assignments like high-technology crimes or crimes against persons. In addition to the sworn detectives, investigations also employed a few non-sworn uniformed officers: Nonsworn Crime Scene Investigators collected and analyzed physical evidence, and one Community Service Officer investigated less serious cases like missing persons and bad checks and acted as liaison to the coroner. Investigations also maintained a specialized drug unit for part of the 1980s, as well as a small problem-solving unit known as the MUPPETs. (Two of this unit’s officers were always on short-term assignment from the patrol force, where they had identified a neighborhood problem that demanded more time than they could muster on patrol.) Finally, the FPD’s Community Relations unit (later renamed to Community Partnerships) reported to the Investigative Services division, overseeing activities like Neighborhood Watch, DARE, and the small volunteer program.

3. Administrative Systems
The FPD’s experimental temperament led it to develop and refine many organizational systems during the 1980s. In particular, it began to rely increasingly on technology to help organize and support patrol work, and more generally to rationalize the department’s administration.

The technological developments in Fremont were dramatic. Mike Lanam, a twenty-year veteran of the FPD who oversaw the transition to C.O.P.P.S., remembers that starting in the early 1980s the department began introducing new technologies at a breakneck pace: “All this technology exploded . . . Computer-aided dispatch, records management systems, laptop computers, M.D.T.s, fancier police cars that could tell you where the officer was in the city by satellite.” One driving force behind these developments was the region’s flush economy, which offered up plenty of funding for the new technological systems. Another was the influence of the state’s law enforcement community; according to Lanam, “It was just the next phase, and I think all police departments were going through that, especially in California.” Indeed, police consultant Rana Sampson maintains that the police profession in California has developed a decided penchant for technology, and more generally for developing analytic capacity:

Fremont was clearly influenced by these statewide trends—it sent many of its managers to the command college Sampson refers to, and it participated actively in state and regional professional associations—, but in many cases it outpaced them. For example, Fremont was among the first cities in the state to equip patrol cars with laptop computers for report-writing and data retrieval.

Crime analysis was particularly advanced, and it fed into the problem-solving systems described above. The department’s record management system facilitated many types of searches, including geographic searches for particular types of crime, as well as modus operandi searches for crimes committed in a particular way. In the early 1990s the crime analysis unit lost some of its ability to support patrol work in this way, as it shut down temporarily, switched systems, and increasingly took on the job of report review. But these developments only revealed how important analysis had become in the department, as officers expressed their frustration when they couldn’t get the information they had once relied on.

Nevertheless, this analytic sophistication had some limits that had to do not with technical capability, but with strategy. Lanam maintains: “We could do anything with a computer, and we can give you all the analysis in the world, but then what will you do with that information? We can tell you where the crimes were and maybe the profile of who was doing it, but we are still playing cops and robbers, we are still trying to catch the crook versus trying to prevent it from happening in the first place.” Indeed, that underlying assumption—that police work meant identifying and arresting individual offenders—drove the design and use of many administrative systems. Crime analysis, for example, was used principally for CCATs and investigations, both of which sought to enforce the law against individual offenders.

Moreover, personnel systems for evaluating officers also encouraged the “cops and robbers” game, and many felt that they had become overly systematized and narrowly-focused. Association president Blair, for example, recalls:

The system earned widespread derision among officers: Even those who did not question the underlying philosophy of police as law enforcers resisted being pegged as numbers; and they became somewhat cynical about how easy it was to manipulate the system.

These limitations aside, the FPD’s administrative systems underwent much development and innovation throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The department worked with outside consultants and systems analysts extensively, and these relationships helped it become particularly adept at strategic planning and evaluation. For example, management consultant Tom Anderson met repeatedly with FPD command staff to work through sessions on goal-setting, management by objectives, and improving performance standards. Ultimately, these capacities and the relationships that fed them would play an important role in the transition to C.O.P.P.S.

4. Management
It is inherently difficult to reconstruct something as subtle and subjective as managerial practice, but two things stand out about FPD management in the period before C.O.P.P.S. First of all, most in the department—particularly officers—have a general sense that they were afforded significant discretion in their work. One officer maintains, “The difference with our department is they give us so much more freedom at the patrol level, that's why a lot of these projects, they come right from us out on the street. . . . That's just how we were trained here from day one. . . It was part of our training originally and it's just always been expected of us.” Some managers report that past administrations kept a tighter rein on things like the use of overtime, and that dissent was less welcome in departmental decisionmaking. Nevertheless, most agree that discretion was accepted and even encouraged.

On the other hand, some aspects of that discretion were more centralized than they are today. For example, one long-time department member explains the difference between CCATs and C.O.P.P.S. projects in terms of who initiates individual projects:

Another FPD manager, echoing the sentiments of others, maintains that past managers were more likely to play a supervisory role than a support role: “The people when I hired on are retired now, so for the people that are in there now it is a learning process. Because their mentors did not ask us what we should be doing. They told us what we should do . . . So a lot of it is a different management style.” Thus the main flow of departmental initiative tended to run from top to bottom rather than the reverse—a circumstance that C.O.P.P.S.-related reforms would try to alter.

II. THE C.O.P.P.S. REFORMS

1. The Development of A Vision
In many cities community policing takes hold by force, as scandal or strong-willed politicians drive local police to “open up to the community” and try new ways of tackling growing problems. By contrast, Fremont moved towards C.O.P.P.S. by choice, without explicit pressure or crisis. To be sure, citywide changes in the philosophy of government did feed into community policing in important ways, but those changes did not emerge until after the FPD had taken its first steps towards C.O.P.P.S. And although a recession-driven resource crisis and growing frustration with the criminal justice system did help spur the department on in new directions, neither pressure was severe enough to force the FPD to change. Instead, to understand why the department turned to community policing, one needs to understand the Chief who made the initial decision to do so, and the route he took to Fremont.

Chief Steckler
Craig Steckler came to the FPD as a deputy chief in 1986, serving under Chief Robert Wasserman and beside Deputy Chief Jim Noonan. Steckler had been brought on as a potential replacement for Wasserman, who intended to retire in a few years; according to Fremont Mayor Gus Morrison (then a city councilor), the city manager “knew Wasserman was going to retire soon, and he didn’t want to have a situation where there was only one logical replacement.” So Fremont created a second Deputy Chief position, and Steckler wound up with the job offer.

At the time Steckler was Chief of police in nearby Piedmont, a much smaller city of about 10,000 residents. Steckler had wanted to find a Chief’s job in a larger police department, and he saw the deputy chief’s job in Fremont as a stepping-stone—before that his only command experience had been in the smaller California cities of Piedmont and San Clemente. In any case, he got the position and held it until 1992, when Wasserman announced his intention to retire and run for city council in early 1992. At that time, city manager Roger Anderman started a national search for a permanent replacement, naming Steckler the city’s Acting Chief in the interim.

When he took that job in March of 1992, Steckler found himself in the middle of budgetary turmoil, as California’s recession had forced Fremont to make substantial cuts, and Anderman immediately asked him to cut positions. Most of the cuts were made through attrition, but Steckler had to lay off a handful of CSOs, and in doing so he incited the ire of some of his force. As he explains:

But the budgetary problems had another effect as well, as they seemed to put some FPD members in a reflective mood: The department’s past strategies, based on technology and sheer manpower, were not sustainable in the new fiscal environment. Lanam recalls: “We could not throw staffing and police officers and equipment at all the problems. We had to figure out a better way of doing business.”

Steckler himself felt that community policing was the better way. He brought that conviction with him from his previous work in Piedmont and San Clemente, where a close relationship with the community had been a way of life. “My background was basically smaller departments,” he explains. “San Clemente was about 40 people, and Piedmont was 27. And just by the nature of a small . . . beach community, [they] had a more casual, laid-back way of dealing with the issues of the community. And by virtue of being small, [they were] closer to the community.” Steckler did not want to push these sorts of changes as Acting Chief: Aside from the incomplete mandate his title implied, he did not want to mix up community policing with the tumultuous budget fight that was going on. But as he interviewed for the Chief’s position with Anderman and the various search panels, he made no secret of his intention to bring community policing to Fremont.

Nevertheless, that intention apparently had little to do with Anderman’s ultimate decision to give Steckler the job. The city manager reportedly did not have any specific vision for the FPD—indeed, many in Fremont remember Anderman less as a visionary than as an analyst—, and the only charge he gave the new Chief was to “keep cutting the budget.” He apparently appointed Steckler only because his experience clearly surpassed the competition, and perhaps (according to Steckler himself) because he had been able to pull off the budget cuts the city needed. Steckler admits that he and Anderman did not see eye-to-eye on many issues, and one knowledgeable observer reports that Anderman “was [not] too keen on Craig,” but that “when he got all done seeing what was available, Craig got the job.” Steckler took over the Chief’s job as a probationary appointment in June of 1992, receiving a permanent appointment one year later, on July 1, 1993.

First Steps
Steckler held off on community policing for some time after becoming Chief on the grounds that other business demanded his immediate attention: The budget was still in crisis, and more dramatically, an officer had sued the department for discrimination when Steckler denied his promotion. “That was kind of tearing the organization apart,” Steckler remembers. “So I hired a consultant to come in and said, ‘We have got to do some major problem-solving and get over these issues that are right in front of us so that we can look at the future.’” The process put community policing on hold for five more months, but Steckler felt that the time was not right for a new initiative.

As these immediate crises wore down, the department began exploring the idea of community policing. The early discussions and research took place mostly among Steckler and the FPD’s captains (the department no longer had deputy chief positions), and that group tried to learn everything it could about community policing by reading up on the concept and attending seminars about it. Steckler also discussed the idea with Tom Anderson, a management consultant who had a longstanding relationship with the FPD and who had earned a strong reputation in the police world by helping several California police departments make the transition to community policing.

In their discussions, Anderson worked with Steckler to help develop the Chief’s ideas about C.O.P.P.S. and organizational change. In particular, Anderson posed what he describes as “tough questions” for Steckler about why he wanted to move towards community policing: Was it simply that the idea was coming into vogue, or was it that the Chief had, in Anderson’s words, “a personal and professional belief that there seemed to be a solid base to it, and a rationale that it made sense.”3 Steckler felt the latter, and although he admits that he did not properly articulate his reasoning to his troops at the outset, his position was based on a thorough consideration of the trends Fremont faced:

Thus Steckler’s essential intuition was that although Fremont had been successful in the past, it would face new challenges in the future as the city grew and matured. Moreover, the current budget crisis suggested that the past response to trouble—hiring more bodies and spending more on technology—might not be feasible if crime did become a more significant problem.

Envisioning C.O.P.P.S.
Steckler recognized that Fremont needed to do more work on refining precisely what alternative would meet the challenges he expected: Since his city was different from many of the places that had tried community policing, he did not want simply to import the current fashions. “I told the organization, ‘I don’t want to pick a model’,” he remembers. “I don’t want Portland’s model or Hayward’s model or Santa Ana’s model and overlay it on Fremont. I mean, we are very different, and we will have our own model.’”

As a first step towards doing this, in March of 1995 he hired Anderson to lead a three-day team-building workshop in which the department would flesh out the program Steckler wanted to follow. At the same time, Steckler and others hoped to begin building support for the ideas by starting a participatory process of deciding what the reforms would consist of. To that end, he invited not only his command staff (lieutenants, captains, civilian managers, and himself), but also representatives from the sergeant rank, as well as the president, vice president, and secretary of the Police Officer’s Association (POA). Thinking specifically of the POA, Steckler explains: “We wanted them to be in on the initial steps and have the buy-in.”

In any case, Anderson remembers these sessions as fluid and open: “We had a general direction, [but] we weren’t certain where we were going to end up. We just knew that we wanted to put together the operational building blocks for community policing.” Significantly, Steckler apparently took an open attitude towards the planning process—an attitude that many feel contributed to the sessions’ productivity. Anderson, for example, maintains: “Chief Steckler was extremely open and receptive to a somewhat non-structured workshop session. [He] made it clear that anyone at the session could speak out on whatever they felt and believed to be important as it related to the implementation of C.O.P.P.S.”

The workshop had two objectives: To define C.O.P.P.S. and its various components, and to develop a basic outline of how to get there. In creating a definition of community policing, Anderson pushed the group to be concrete and thorough:

In particular, the group—picking up on Steckler’s commitment to transform the whole organization—spent considerable time focusing on how FPD units outside patrol would be affected, a topic that many felt had not been adequately addressed in the literature and in other departments. As a result, moving into new territory meant engaging in a dialogue about untried ideas.

The substance of the emerging vision had two main cornerstones: Problem-solving based on a richer analysis of causes than officers had traditionally used, and collaboration with the community and its institutions. The problem-solving element was somewhat difficult to distinguish from what FPD officers had been doing for the past twenty years, since systems like CCAT and team policing had an established history in the department. Mike Lanam, who would go on to spearhead the community policing effort, explains that he himself initially saw community policing as a way to return to past strategies: “I [was] looking back and saying, ‘Well this is basically what we did in the 70s,’” he remembers. “But then the more and more I looked at it, it was not.”

At the same time, Lanam and others did not want to overemphasize the break with the past, lest they would undermine support for the new ideas within the ranks: “[We were] telling the officers just take the next step,” he remembers. “Not that what you are doing is wrong, but just take it to the next step.”

The second cornerstone of Fremont’s emerging vision was looking beyond traditional law enforcement resources. As Lanam explains it, the guiding ideal was to create a community capable of self-regulation, as in this example he gives:

In focusing on these twin ideals, the team self-consciously tried to synthesize community policing and problem-oriented policing. Lanam remembers: “We were not just going to take the community-based approach or the problem-solving approach because you had—God knows for what reason—a battle of philosophies or tactics going out there: ‘This is C.O.P. and this is P.O.P.’ They are the same thing. You need the same tools to accomplish it, you need community involvement and problem solving.”

Mike Lanam and The Community Policing Office
Beyond the substantive vision of community policing, the team-building sessions moved on to consider implementation issues as well, taking a first stab at listing the essential tasks the department would have to perform. As Anderson remembers it, that meant answering questions like “Where would we start? How would we start? Who would have to do what? How much advertising do we have to do internally and externally?” The major conclusion to come out of this part of the discussion was the decision to appoint a single captain in charge of implementation4—in Anderson’s words, “somebody [with] the responsibility to handle the implementation, to be there every day to answer all the questions, all the concerns. When people are pissed and are confused, this person has to jump into the midst of it all and say, ‘Hey we can work our way out of it.’ So they had to be the director, the morale advisor, and all those kinds of things.”

Lanam got the job without much warning. As Steckler remembers it, he essentially made the assignment in the middle of the team-building sessions during a hallway discussion with Tom Anderson, at which time Anderson reiterated what the POA and the sergeants had pressed: “Tom Anderson and I were talking and he says, ‘You know you really have to have this one command person’ . . . And we were standing outside and Mike came walking up, and I said, ‘Mike, I have a job for you when we get back into the session.’ We got back in and boom. I laid it on him.” Still, the choice was not entirely arbitrary, as Steckler had high respect for Lanam’s abilities and felt that he would be eminently capable of carrying out the job.

Steckler outlined the job clearly and decisively: His participatory style up to this point had been so thorough that some were mumbling that their Chief was too laissez-faire—that he did everything by committee. “So I looked at everything that was up there and I said, ‘OK, now I am flying by the seat of my pants.’ But I said, ‘OK, see what you put up there? Well here is how it is going to be. Boom, boom, boom. And I started laying out what the reporting lines were going to be during the implementation phase. . . . Office of community policing, put Mike in charge, an administrative analyst to help.” Formally, Lanam’s job was to head up a new Office of Community Policing that would report directly to the Chief. He was charged with leading the FPD into community policing by continuing the research that had already begun, developing a detailed plan of action, and coordinating the organizational and policy changes that would be necessary to carry it out. Three units would report directly to him—the Personnel and Training division, the Community Relations Unit (renamed to Community Police Partnerships), and the 5-person M.U.P.P.E.T.S. unit—, but he did not have chain-of-command authority over the rest of the organization. Lanam explains:

In other words, the Chief promised his support for any defensible ideas that emerged out of the participatory process Lanam planned to embark on—something Lanam felt was necessary if that process was to have credibility.

The Site Visits
Before he got on with the implementation itself, Lanam felt he needed to do two things: Undertake a more systematic program of research, and develop a formal plan for C.O.P.P.S. The department had already done significant book research and sent top managers to several seminars, but Lanam did not think that was enough. “I don’t believe everything that is written,” he explains. “I think there is a lot of creative report writing going on out there right now, and we knew from our own experience from other agencies that some chiefs were touting that they had the greatest police organization going, and their officers were not saying the same thing.” There was clearly something to learn from the pioneers that had had the courage to try community policing in the 1980s, but the only way to find it out would be through direct observation: “If the organizational change had been truly made,” Lanam explains, “we wanted to see first hand from the officers and from the staff why the change had been made and what they thought the strong points and weak points were.”5

The plan Lanam developed involved visits to nine sites identified by community policing experts as leading-edge departments. He proposed to send about 40 members of the department from diverse ranks and specialties on the trips, charging each team with collecting some standardized information about the department it visited. The initiative would obviously be expensive, but he and others reasoned that the expense was justified: “We figured an extremely important component was laying the foundation down right and doing the research,” Lanam explains. In the event, the department was able to seize on the budgeting flexibility city hall gave it, reshuffling training and equipment funds to pay for the effort. (Over the years, the FPD also negotiated with the city for more and different types of training in its annual budget.)

Lanam chose the teams by soliciting volunteers and then—since he got 80 applicants for 40 slots—submitting them to a peer evaluation, which would allow everyone a say in choosing who would represent the department. “We just gave them a list,” Lanam explains. “They were to rank people that had volunteered, in order of who they thought would serve their research best as far as being conscientious in their involvement, not just going because it was a free trip or whatever.” The element of self-selection in the choice of teams was apparently somewhat of a problem: Some veteran officers who were skeptical of community policing resisted participating on principle, and some groups outside of patrol did not think they would learn much by participating; for example, one dispatcher reports: “Dispatchers did not want to participate. We had this person that went to San Diego, but . . . no one had [much] to show us anyway as far as the dispatch went. So it would have been a waste probably, because no one had anything for us to pick up on.” Nevertheless, Lanam tried to encourage various groups to participate, and in the end the teams represented a fairly broad cross-section of the department (even if some specialties did not visit all nine departments).
The research was clearly a defining moment in the department, remembered well by those who participated as well as many who did not. The teams visited police agencies all over the country (including places as geographically dispersed as Newport News, Virginia; Madison, Wisconsin; Longmount, Colorado; and Portland, Oregon) and even one outside of it (Edmonton, Alberta). Each team took on one department—Lanam was the only person to visit more than one site—, trying as best as it could to learn about all aspects of community policing there, and how all of the agency’s various divisions contributed to it. The teams then prepared detailed reports describing the results of their observations, including standardized six-page questionnaires, as well as a more open-ended summaries of the main lessons they took away from the sites. Finally, Lanam synthesized these findings into an overall report that focused on 9 different aspects of community policing, reporting on things like the varieties of community policing, philosophies, styles of management and supervision, and the role of the community.

Fremont took a number of very specific lessons away from the visits. In part, Lanam reports, the department simply learned mistakes to avoid: “They said [one department] is a great department, but they forgot all about the dispatchers. So we did not make that mistake. [Another department], they forgot all about the sergeants. So we did not make that mistake. [A third department], they forgot all about the F.T.O.s, but we did not make that mistake.”

More positively, Fremont explicitly stole many of the good ideas it found: For example, the FPD took its Reporting Area (RA) program (described below) directly from Longmount, Colorado; it modeled its joint police-community training sessions, as well as some of its strategic planning process, on those in Portland, Oregon; and it modeled its volunteer program on those it observed in Santa Ana and San Diego.

But as important as the specific lessons Fremont learned was the excitement the visits generated. Sampson, for example, could still feel it in the training sessions she ran a year later: “A lot of the people felt invested in this. They felt like, ‘Hey, we got to participate right from the beginning.’” Lanam feels that the experience even helped convert some of the skeptical officers:

Thus quite apart from the specific lessons Fremont took away from the sites—and it directly implemented many of them—, the site visits helped prime the department for change by creating a sizable group that was committed to the new ideas.

The Strategic Plan
Fresh from the site visits, Lanam embarked on the final phase of the visioning process: The development of a strategic plan that would guide the FPD into C.O.P.P.S. To develop the plan, Lanam had the assistance of Administrative Analyst Phil Hawthorne, a specialist in strategic planning who had a long career of systems analysis in government, academia, and the private sector.

The two-man team began by developing their own outline for the plan, starting with an assessment of current conditions. They insisted on leaving no stone unturned, using an entire wall to map out the department. Lanam remembers: “There was not an empty space on that wall. . . We looked at the community, we looked at the training, we looked at the educational model as far as how we were going to get more information . . . you name it and we had it on that wall. We just threw a tremendous amount of information up and tried to make sure that we were not going to miss too much.” He and Hawthorne continually checked their analysis with managers from the appropriate units, and though some found it overwhelming, many were able to provide feedback on the emerging plan. One FPD manager recalls, “I saw that originally and I thought ‘Oh, my God.’ But it turned out to be a good thing because it kept us on track.” In any case, over time the schematic evolved into a baseline for the plan that would develop.

From there, Lanam and Hawthorne outlined how each element of the organization needed to change, drawing particularly on what had been learned from the site visits. “What we did was bring back from what we had found in the other jurisdictions that we had studied the kinds of things that they found were necessary for transition,” Hawthorne explains. For example, all the sites visited had found that crime analysis was important in identifying and analyzing problems, so Hawthorne felt that Fremont would need to revive that unit and review its capabilities. He and Lanam then fed these new tasks into the massive departmental model they had developed, using the interdependencies outlined there to help sequence the necessary changes. “It became a pretty significant communication device for the two of us,” Hawthorne remembers of the wall diagram. “We could go up and get our hierarchies of activity so we knew what level we were dealing with. And we could relate where those outputs were going to go, and how soon we were going to be able to feed them to the people that were going to be the recipients.” In the end, the two men converted their conclusions into a milestone chart that outlined dozens of discrete tasks the organization needed to accomplish.

With this skeleton of a plan in place, Hawthorne and Lanam created eight committees charged with fleshing out several of the most important tasks. Here Hawthorne set some basic parameters, and he solicited relevant FPD divisions for volunteers. (Many participants in the site visits reportedly volunteered at this stage, having learned some specific program they wanted to bring to Fremont). But he left most of the decisionmaking for the committees, which were charged with diverse tasks like redefining roles, reducing workload, and improving training (later sections will describe the committee recommendations in more detail). When they had completed their reports and made their recommendations, it fell to Lanam to make sure the department carried them out. As he explains it, “The rule was that if they came up with a good idea that was well-thought-out and developed, it was our job to give it birth, so to speak, and to say ‘OK, it is a good idea, it is a calculated risk, let’s do it.’”

2. Marketing C.O.P.P.S. Inside the FPD
The task committees represented the final stage in a long process of visioning that sought to develop the idea of community policing in Fremont. Throughout that process, the department took a careful, studied approach; no outside force was insistently pushing for change, so the FPD could proceed at whatever pace it wanted.

Many credit the gradual pace of change, together with the caution and attention to justification that went with changes, with helping to build support for C.O.P.P.S. in Fremont. “They really did a good transition in that they took it slow,” one FPD manager maintains. “They started out with education, and they didn’t rush anybody.” Another department member remembers the early days of the transition in almost identical terms, emphasizing the careful way the administration dealt with nascent resistance:

For Lanam, going slowly and carefully was intimately tied to a need to explain every step of the way, a point he illustrates with an analogy:

In keeping with this philosophy, the administration did not rush community policing. In fact, it did not push for operational results (though it certainly welcomed any that emerged) until well into 1996, over two years after the “visioning” process had begun. Instead, it used that “start-up” time primarily for education and other prep-work.

Indeed, the FPD spent considerable time and money (cobbled together from other pieces of the budget, as allowed by the city’s bottom-line budgeting system) on education. “We almost gave up what it cost for a police officer for a period of time to make our training happen,” Lanam explains. “And it was well worth the investment, because what we got out of that, I think, was a lot more [from the] officers as a whole.” That education included philosophical introductions to community policing and problem-solving from well-known people in the field like Rana Sampson, Chris Braiden, and Professor Herman Goldstein. The department later brought Tom Anderson back on to help FPD staff operationalize the philosophy. For Anderson, that mandate meant acting as a mentor and a sounding-board: He met regularly with individual FPD staff (particularly sergeants, who Anderson sees as the backbone of community policing), helping them to think through particular problems they were working on, listening to their gripes about C.O.P.P.S., and conveying their concerns to FPD management.

In addition to taking the time for education and adjustment, Fremont also exercised caution in another way: By basing new initiatives on extensive research, and by making most of them experimental. With respect to the former, some in the FPD argue that the department’s painstaking research allowed it to forestall potential problems. For example, Steckler decided against the “specialized units” model of community policing because he had seen it lead to insurrection in other departments, where the “regular” patrol officers often resented the new “elite” community policing units. The latter tool, experimentation, was perhaps even more powerful in heading off resistance: The FPD adopted nearly every new initiative as a pilot program that could be discontinued after a year or so (often based on the result of a formal evaluation).

An example of that strategy at work comes from the department’s proposal to reorganize officers’ shifts—a proposal that called for the creation two teams of officers that worked four 11-hour days in sequence. Sergeant Mike Eads, who developed the idea and marketed it to the Police Officer’s Association, remembers that there was “A lot of uncertainty on the officers’ part . . . because it was such a significant change in their lifestyles.” Officers particularly worried about the length of the new shifts: “[It was] a much longer day,” Eads explains. “We went from a nine hour day to an eleven hour day. There were a lot of concerns about fatigue.” But when the idea came up for a vote in 1995, it narrowly passed. Eads argues that an important consideration in favor of the system was that it was experimental: “It was presented as a pilot project for the first year—a program that we could back away from if we needed to. There was a safety net built into it that if we did not like it, we could at least go back to the old traditional scheduling system.” In the event, the officers loved the new system, and the vote to make it permanent registered 98% in favor. In that way, the story echoes in many other FPD initiatives: The administration help assuage initial skepticism by promising that the programs could be discontinued if they did not work; but in almost every case, it was not actually necessary to do so.

C.O.P.P.S. as Social Work
Despite its studied attitude towards change, Fremont did face significant tension in the early days of C.O.P.P.S. Many department members seem to interpret this tension as a consequence of terminology. One explains: “To be honest with you, I felt that in this department, for many years, we had already been doing a lot of the C.O.P.P.S. kinds of things, we just weren't calling it C.O.P.P.S. In fact, I feel that calling it C.O.P.P.S. kind of created a stumbling block . . . All of a sudden there was a lot of confusion as to what it was that we were supposed to be doing, when all along, I think, we’d been doing a lot of these things.”6 Steckler himself regrets his choice of terms: “[Something] I did that was wrong that I can’t change now is I stuck with the term C.O.P.P.S.: Community Orienting Policing and Problem Solving. I probably should have come up with our own acronym. It would have made people feel better, but we didn’t.”

One major problem was that the term C.O.P.P.S. quickly became associated with “soft” policing. Some department members believe that the early marketing of the idea was to blame. “Initially, there were some statements from the chief and from a captain that said, ‘Police work’s going to change, and we’re not going to be arresting people any more,” one FPD member recalls. “And we’re going to be trying to fight crime in a different way, and it’s going to be more—a bunch of warm, fuzzy hugs with the community, and all that. And that grated on a lot of people.” Steckler and Lanam both maintain that they always tried to emphasize C.O.P.P.S.’s continuity with the past, but that message apparently did not transmit evenly throughout the department.

One early problem-solving project—and one of the most significant ones still running today—unintentionally contributed to C.O.P.P.S.’s reputation as “social work.” The project focused on domestic violence, trying to address that problem by requiring officers to follow up three times at every address that generated a domestic violence call; in the follow-up, the officers were expected to try to check with victims and offenders to offer services and to ask how things had been going.7 Begun as a pilot project in one of the city’s three zones, the effort produced a dramatic reduction in repeat domestic violence calls and none of the expected complaints from citizens that their privacy was being invaded. Even so, many officers felt that the project took too much of their time and that it bordered on social work, and they began referring to it as the “Adopt-a-Family” program. One FPD member recalls: “The Adopt-a-Family thing . . . took on a real social worker connotation . . . And that just put a label on the C.O.P.P.S. philosophy [as] this social welfare program.”

Mike Eads, who invented and oversaw the pilot program, made some modifications early on in order to meet the complaints his officers were making; for example, he lengthened the time-period officers had to make the first of their three re-visitations to the complaint address. But the real problem came when the department chose to bring the program to the entire the patrol force (a decision it made after closely monitoring the impact it had generated as a pilot program). As Eads remembers it: “When this was initially proposed patrol-wide, there was a great deal of resistance.”

The administration’s strategy for dealing with this resistance was twofold. First, it tried to modify the program to mitigate some of the main concerns officers were raising. Most notably, Lanam proposed excluding the least serious domestic dispute calls from the list of calls that required follow-up. Eads recalls of the idea, “I wasn’t quite sure how that would work, but it was a lot better than having 100 angry officers not wanting to try the program at all. And it turns out that it was probably a better idea,” primarily because it did not overload the patrol force. The second way the administration dealt with officer resistance was simply by staying the course, emphasizing that the program was a pilot, and explaining the possible benefits (namely, that by reducing repeat domestic violence calls, the program would ultimately reduce officers’ workload, even if it increased it in the short run). As Lanam explains, he saw his role in this dispute, as in many others, as “offering support”:

The program still has its detractors, but many in the patrol force seem to have accepted the new requirements, and Eads reports that he is more than satisfied with how the project has gone.

C.O.P.P.S. and the Police Officers’ Association
Other complaints greeted C.O.P.P.S. as well. Many officers complained that they simply did not have time to take on C.O.P.P.S.-related activities. One argues: “I come up with a C.O.P.P.S. project, how am I supposed to work on it? Because I’m also supposed to be on the street, I’m supposed to be taking calls. We’re too busy for me to spend an hour or two hours, three hours, meeting with some of these folks.” Others saw the new philosophy as too much of a break from their previous training. One explains: “For years, it seems like they’ve been teaching you [that] you need to let the pressures of the job go when you get home at night, so you don’t vapor lock over a period of years. And now they want you to take more personal responsibility for it.”

Many of these complaints found their way to Steve Blair, president of the Police Officers’ Association (POA). For example, the workload issue became particularly salient when the administration proposed its new Reporting Area (RA) program, which would assign each officer permanently to an area (not necessarily one he or she patrolled) and give him or her responsibility for attending area meetings and otherwise acting as the FPD’s community liaison. A few officers asked Blair to oppose the RA program; he recalls: “Essentially they were saying, ‘We don’t have time for it.’ They wanted the association to essentially complain, try and get it stopped.” But Blair and others on the association’s board did not find the arguments convincing. “Frankly, there wasn’t that much involved . . . that I thought should be causing any kind of real barrier to getting it done,” he explains. As a result, the association did not formally oppose the project with the administration.

Blair does think that the workload issue has some validity in general. “That can become a valid point,” he explains, focusing particularly on the argument that C.O.P.P.S. activity sometimes puts added burden on the rest of the officers in a zone when they have to pick up the 911 slack. Blair’s conclusion is that not everyone needs to work on problem-solving projects in order to play an important role in C.O.P.P.S.: “If you're going to want to critique or criticize or discipline an officer who is not getting involved by doing his own personal C.O.P.P.S. project, you have to give some credit . . . [if] he is the person staying on the street . . . . I don't necessarily see where he is not quote ‘in the C.O.P.P.S. philosophy.’” But for the most part, Blair—like the great majority of FPD officers—does not object to C.O.P.P.S. reforms, since the department has made the appropriate adjustments (including throwing out the old arrest-based evaluations, and developing new ways to free up officer time for problem-solving). In his eyes, the few complaints that still arise are not particularly strong ones, and in any case they are not constructive criticisms: “Occasionally there doesn’t seem to be any way to placate an individual who has a complaint with a proposed C.O.P.P.S. program. When we present alternatives or solutions, the response is ‘No, that can’t work either.’” In any case, Blair goes on to emphasize that “generally, this is a very small percentage of the group as a whole” who raise such complaints in the first place.

3. Marketing C.O.P.P.S. Outside the FPD

Building Support in City Hall
Given Fremont’s idea of community policing, which put a high value collaboration with community institutions, the department obviously needed to build support not just inside the FPD, but among its outside partners as well. Moreover, the internal changes the Department intended to make required buy-off from city government (particularly since community policing was internally-driven in Fremont—unlike in some cities, Fremont’s city hall did not ask its police to implement the new idea). For example, the need for governmental approval is particularly clear in budgeting, since Fremont’s city manager requires all city agencies to build their budget requests around goals and objectives. As a result, the Department needed to redefine officially what those goals and objectives were, so that the individual expenditures associated with community policing would make sense. As Steckler explains it: “I am trying to tie the expenditures of the budget [and] the discretionary funds that I have back to community policing. [For example], the north end substation, what we are going to be doing there. Because that was a brand new program we started—purchases of certain pieces of equipment, staffing levels, and that kind of stuff.” In this way, the Chief and others in the FPD fully appreciated the need to get city government on board with community policing.

Nevertheless, the FPD apparently began its transition without much council involvement. “It was almost a stealth transition,” Fremont Mayor Gus Morrison recalls.8

Even so, the issue did not turn out to be terribly problematic, since the general idea of community policing was a familiar one by the time the FPD embarked on it: “The literature and the talking about it was all very positive,” Morrison explains. “So there wasn’t any concern about it. You’d seen it in the various government publications. And so the idea, the concept, was nothing new to us. But just the fact that we were going in that direction was kind of a surprise.” Morrison recalls that he “raised the issue a couple of times,” asking the department, “When are you going to tell us what you’re doing?”

In 1994, Steckler made a formal presentation to the city council that did exactly that. The presentation covered the police department’s accomplishments to date, laying out the work the 8 task committees had done, progress on training, initial problem-solving projects, and the various partnerships the FPD had developed (particularly those with other city agencies). Steckler also laid out the department’s future community policing plans, highlighting planned problem-solving activities, community meetings, and work with other Fremont agencies. Although he does not remember the presentation as a response to Morrison’s queries, it served that purpose adequately, as Morrison felt that the direction Steckler described made sense. As Steckler remembers it: “It is like apple pie and motherhood. ‘We are going to involve the community . . . ’ There was no opposition whatsoever.” At the same time, Steckler did need to avoid one obvious pitfall, namely, offending ex-Chief Robert Wasserman, who had successfully run for council upon retiring from the FPD. “I had to walk a fine line here because my predecessor was on the Council,” Steckler remembers. “He was chief for 17 years. And so you know, I am saying that the department had already set the ground work for it, and this was just a natural evolution and progression. . . . I had to walk a fine line. Although I get along great with [Wasserman].”

Reinventing Government
One reason the council and the rest of city hall were so accepting of community policing was that it fit nicely into a larger reinvention of city government that Fremont had launched shortly after C.O.P.P.S. got underway. In large part, that citywide reform was driven by the leadership of city manager Jan Perkins, who Fremont appointed to the position in 1994 (she had already served one year as interim city manager, and another as assistant city manager). With reinvention, Perkins tried to bring a new style of government to Fremont, one that focused on “breaking down the boundaries” between city departments in order to serve customer needs more effectively. As she explains:

In Perkins’s eyes, the “focus on the community” provides an alternative way to organize government work: For her, the traditional concentration on functional areas (police, transportation, recreation, etc.) gives way to a concentration on community problems, working in concert with members of the community. For example, the city manager’s office and the agencies themselves have repeatedly formed cross-departmental teams to deal with emerging community problems. One example is the Centerville Action Team described below, which assembled a multiagency group to deal with issues that had arisen in one area of the city. Other examples include an interagency task force convened to work on youth issues and a recession-era team Perkins assembled to develop strategies for dealing with a shrinking budget.

Perkins’s “one organization” philosophy also applies outside the confines of these ad hoc committees, as she also expects agencies to collaborate on their day-to-day business. (City council has taken a similar approach, encouraging interagency collaborations through projects like their annual Elected Officials’ Summit for all elected officeholders in a three-city area.) The concept, as Perkins explains it, is that city employees—regardless of the department they are assigned to—are first and foremost “city” employees with community-wide focus. An example of this type of thinking in practice comes from Economic Development Director Ann Draper, who maintains that “everyone [in city government] indirectly works for Economic Development. [So] I have seven hundred people on my team. And that is really a very important distinction, because many Economic Development people [feel] that they only have to participate with people who directly report to them.”

In any case, Perkins has arranged for extensive training on reinvention, bringing in luminaries like Ted Gaebler and Gary Heil to discuss the principles behind it, sending agency staff to conferences, and sending them to other cities to see how the ideas work in practice. All of this is reinforced in her own regular discussions with managers.

This philosophy of interagency collaboration obviously fit well with C.O.P.P.S., which sought to open up the FPD to more collaboration with outside agencies, the community, and the private sector. As Perkins remembers it, the two initiatives “meshed beautifully.” Steckler maintains: “She is very supportive of it [community policing]. It fits very nicely in what she is trying to do in streamlining City government, customer focus, and customer satisfaction.” Thus it was not difficult to get Perkins’s support for C.O.P.P.S.; and its principles did not even need much explanation, since they seemed to be a special case of the broader ideas associated with reinvention.

Beyond the conceptual affinity of C.O.P.P.S. and reinvention, Perkins simply had a better familiarity with community policing than many city managers, largely because of her past experience. In particular, she was Assistant City Manager for Santa Ana, which under Chief Raymond Davis had become one of the first California cities to implement community policing. As Steckler explains: “My City Manager has a total grasp on community policing. She was the assistant City Manager in Santa Ana and had a good understanding of public safety. . . And so I didn’t have to educate [her] on community policing.”

Whatever the reasons, Perkins quickly became a staunch ally for the FPD as it entered new territory. In particular, she was able to put the authority of her position behind police initiatives that called for collaboration from other Fremont Departments. Lieutenant Jan Gove remembers one example from the Irvington district of Fremont where interagency collaboration was key:

Gove and the rest of her team sought cooperation from other city agencies, and while those agencies did not exactly resist participating, they did not initially start out wholeheartedly. “Not so much because they didn’t want to do the work, but because it definitely does increase their work load,” Gove remembers. Indeed, given that the project was something of a break from the past, it is not surprising that city departments needed a signal from above to authorize their commitment of time and resources. It is in this connection, Gove remembers, that Perkins’s support was crucial:

Thus with the city manager on board with C.O.P.P.S., many other pieces fell in place.

Moreover, the broader effort of reinvention sometimes drew police into interagency efforts that they might not have thought up alone. For example, Fremont’s Department of Human Services has undertaken several initiatives that have involved the FPD, and Maintenance and Recreation has invited police to participate in a number of activities for youth. As another example, Economic Development director Ann Draper has tried to make officers more cognizant of the way they respond to calls from businesses:

Draper has followed up on this message by relaying anything businesses tell her about police responses to the department:

Throughout, Draper tries to make clear “the link between their professional behavior” and the decisions firms make about investing in Fremont. In any case, because of her perspective on the role police play in Economic Development—which itself seems tied to the interagency perspective reinvention champions—, police management gets an additional source of feedback on officer behavior, and the department gets an additional push to maintain its strong community relations.

Other Efforts with City Government
In sum, the happy coincidence of reinvention helped the FPD’s own transformation along by priming other city agencies to be good partners. But the FPD did not rest on its good fortune; it took on a number of additional efforts intended to bring other city agencies on board with C.O.P.P.S. For example, the FPD pursued several formal interdepartmental initiatives to improve coordination, like arranging for a Truant Officer from the Schools Department and a counselor from the Department of Human Services to work on site at the Police Department.9 The FPD has also used cost-sharing to solidify interagency partnerships, notably through grants that help pay for staff in partner agencies—including a code enforcement officer and four domestic violence outreach workers, who work for a nonprofit domestic violence agency called Shelter Against Violent Environments (SAVE). Finally, the FPD has tried to reorganize itself in order to be more user-friendly: Creating positions like a Business Liaison who can work with area businesses as well as the Department of Economic Development; beginning a School Resource Officer (SRO) program that acts as liaison to area schools; and charging its Street Crimes Unit with taking special responsibility for interagency liaison.
But the most direct FPD efforts to build support in outside agencies have involved training. Most simply, the FPD invited employees of other city agencies (among others) to most of its own internal training sessions, in order to give them a sense of what the police were trying to do (an idea Lanam says he got from another agency during the site visits).10 Administrative Analyst Phil Hawthorne explains that the FPD “made it a part of our training to have those people involved . . . so they would learn about [C.O.P.P.S.] and sort of make the same commitment to the thought processes that we’re looking for.” And indeed, Rana Sampson, who ran a number of training sessions for the Department, recalls: “Fremont was so open . . Anybody who wanted to attend could come to their training.” Sampson’s sessions, at least, were in fact attended by a number of outsiders, including citizens, councilmembers, other agency employees, and the City Manager.
Pleased with this aspect of its internal training sessions, the FPD invited Sampson back on two occasions specifically to speak to agency heads and some of their staff. The first appearance, which she made jointly with Chris Braiden from the Edmonton Police Department, was simply intended to explain C.O.P.P.S. to the rest of city government. As Sampson describes it, the FPD wanted to help those agencies understand “what the police department was doing and why they were doing it.” Moreover, the training would hopefully “build some expectations in the system about how the [FPD] was changing, and that that would mean that the interaction with the city would be changing as well.”

But even after these sessions, the FPD felt there was more work to be done: According to Lanam, “there was still some confusion on what we were doing and what it meant to different departments.” In order to address this confusion, Fremont invited Sampson back yet again, but this time for a more novel approach to interdepartmental training—one that focused on community problem-solving in general, not just problem-solving by the police. In other words, Sampson would train the other departments in how to do their own problem-solving. As Lanam explains:

Perkins immediately lent her support to the idea, and she personally called Sampson to see if she would agree to the idea.

Sampson herself was initially resistant, because although she had spoken to other agencies about police problem-solving, she had never tried to apply the concepts directly to the agencies’ own work. “That I had not done,” she remembers.

But in the end, Sampson put her misgivings aside and agreed to take on the task, largely because she could tell that Perkins (who she had met years earlier at a PERF conference), was truly committed to the idea: “I just got the sense that she was really serious and committed to finding ways for city government to be more effective,” Sampson remembers.

By all accounts, most of these sessions went well. Sampson recalls: “It was fascinating. I tried to think about it a lot beforehand and talk to a bunch of different people in the departments. . . I learned as much from it as probably the people in the class.” The basic intuition Sampson tried to convey was what the notion of problem-solving entailed. As she explains:

Participating agencies apparently liked the experimental training sessions. For example, DES’s Roger Shanks describes at least one idea that emerged out of the sessions that he intends to carry forward (specifically, an intervention centered on the problem of developers who fail to follow their approved plans).

In any case, Sampson’s training sessions fed directly into the FPD’s agenda, as well as reinvention more generally, because they presumed an ideal of community problem-solving that transcended departmental boundaries. Sampson explains: “I told them that as you get more community oriented in your own area, I think the lines start to blur between the different departments and the problems they are working on. Police may focus on a landlord who caters to renting to criminals. The Fire and Buildings Departments focus on the same landlord but for other reasons. Often times it’s more effective to work together rather than providing each service piecemeal.”

Building Support and Capacity in the Community

Finding the Community
Reinvention and a supportive city manager simplified the FPD’s job of building ties to other agencies, but a different, and in many ways more difficult task faced the department outside of city hall. The need for dialogue with the community was clear: If the department intended to set priorities based on the values of the community, it needed some way of finding out what these values were. But as described above, the city of Fremont simply does not display the same degree of community organization—or at least the same type—as many other cities that have moved towards community policing. Most simply, Fremont’s relatively wealthy, low-crime environment does not spark much self-initiated neighborhood activity around public safety issues (though that does happen at times, and under the guidance of CSO Mike Nottoli, Fremont’s Neighborhood Watch program has become expert at channeling these bursts of interest). In the words of Neighborhood Resources Manager Claudia Albano, who Perkins hired as part of her neighborhood initiative, “Fremont is a middle-class community with some wealthy areas. There isn’t the incentive to get involved in an Alinsky-style organization, for example [referring to radical community organizer Saul Alinsky]. The problems are just not that dire—there aren’t any drug houses or insurmountable crime problems like there are in more urbanized areas. . . There are fewer neighborhood groups where people are frustrated enough to organize at that level.”

Moreover, physical geography and design present a different sort of problem. Fremont is a sprawling city of over 90 square miles, crisscrossed by the trademark wide streets of California’s automobile culture. As a result, “neighborhood” in Fremont feels radically atomized, often down to the level of the housing development. For example, as recently as 1956, Fremont was actually five distinct towns, and one might think that those boundaries would still hold some meaning for residents. But Albano explains that in many cases they do not:

Indeed, early on in C.O.P.P.S. and in reinvention, the department and the city as a whole tried to organize large “town meetings” around these areas, but attendance was not particularly strong. Albano argues that the meetings were called at the wrong level of aggregation: “A lot of people don’t identify with Centerville,” she maintains, referring one of the old towns where the city called a meeting. “They live in Cabrillo, for example. They’re technically sort of in Centerville, but they don’t necessarily identify with Centerville. So where’s the incentive to attend the meeting?”

In Lanam’s eyes, the lesson to be learned from those meetings was that the FPD needed to look more closely at the “communities” it was trying to approach.

Lanam believes that the original town hall meetings were “a great effort,” but that the department “need[s] to improve upon [them] and go back into the focus groups and the stake-holders for different issues and say, ‘We want your representation.’ . . . That’s the only way you actually get into finding out what the community wants.” Thus in his eyes, listening for the voice of “the community” means properly identifying that community’s contours.

Economies of Scale
Moreover, because those contours were so complex and disaggregated, and because the communities they defined were so little focused on explicit public safety concerns, it also meant being resourceful in finding opportunities for contact. Partners in government like Albano are crucial in doing so, as Lanam explains in this recent example:

Along the same lines, the FPD has repeatedly turned to the Fire Department’s CERT groups and the school district’s PTAs to gauge community sentiment and solicit volunteers; and to the Economic Development department’s Retail Network, which seeks to organize commercial establishments in the city. Moreover, the department has also returned these favors from its partners in city government, as when Albano recently used an appearance by the department’s new $200,000 mobile substation as an opportunity to undertake her own organizing; and as when the Department of Human Services has used the FPD’s business contacts to get business participation in one of its youth programs. In these ways, the city’s interdepartmental working style has allowed agencies to pool their resources in order to reach out to Fremont’s somewhat fragmented community.

The Reporting Area Project
If these economies of scale are one means of keeping a handle on Fremont’s many communities, the FPD hopes that its new Reporting Area (RA) program will provide another. In essence, the RA program assigns every officer in the FPD to one of 94 small, four- to five-block areas of the city, making them experts on their respective neighborhoods. According to Lanam, RA officers are told “You have this large response area for emergency calls for service. But you are responsible to maintain or keep track of the smaller five or six block neighborhood. So some time during your shift and during your week you are going to go down and keep track of that neighborhood and resolve the issues down there.” In practice, that means directing the RA officers to identify and meet with relevant neighborhood groups and businesses, to learn about the area’s concerns, and to coordinate a departmental response. The brand-new program currently operates only on a pilot basis in one of the city’s three geographic zones. But when it becomes permanent, the FPD intends to make each officer’s RA assignment last for at least 3-5 years.11

Though it is too soon to tell whether the program will work or not, Lanam hopes that it will help the FPD keep track of community concerns. On the one hand, when the FPD or anyone else in city government proactively decides to undertake a neighborhood initiative, the RA officer should be able to identify the relevant stakeholders. As Lanam puts it, “it identifies your different focus groups. . . We can reach out to Centerville, [because] their structure’s in place.” On the other hand, the RA’s also serve as more reactive antennae that alert the FPD to emerging crises. Lanam explains:

In this capacity, the RA program serves as an “early warning system” that will hopefully help the FPD head off emerging problems—something it has had difficulty doing in the past, given Fremont’s indistinct state of organization.

Working with the Public
In all these ways, the FPD has tried to strengthen its relationships with Fremont’s citizens at the level of individual communities. But the department has also undertaken some broader efforts to garner support from the public at large. Steckler has tried to get the message out about C.O.P.P.S. by opening a citizen’s police academy that educates its students about how the FPD operates. Any Fremont resident can attend the academy, but Steckler made a special effort to encourage attendance by community leaders (such as Councilmembers JoNelle Zager and Bill Pease). On another level, the department has tried to develop support by soliciting community input on important policy changes. Steckler has created an informal “advisory board” made up of Fremont citizens for this purpose, drawing on the contacts he has developed in his active private life to do so (he sits on two different fundraising boards in Fremont, and has been president of the local Rotary Club and Salvation Army). For example, the FPD Chief recently convened this group when he was considering revising the department’s pursuit policy. Finally, the department has tried to make itself more accessible to the public by opening a storefront substation in the isolated North End of town, with another similar station currently in the works. In addition to providing a place for officers to write reports and interact with the public, the substation serves as a miniature service station for all of city government; the volunteers who staff it are trained to answer questions about all city agencies, make referrals to them, and to help residents fill out some government forms. Applying the same principle of “one-stop shopping” to the business world, the FPD has created a Business liaison position, and also designated one of its high-tech crimes detectives as liaison to that category of businesses.

But the most visible way in which the FPD has reached out to the general public is through its expanded volunteer program, which is coordinated by CSO Donna Gott. FPD management had decided to pursue a volunteer program during their initial research on C.O.P.P.S., and they charged Gott with starting a program in Fremont. As she remembers the logic: “[They] found that in order to bridge the gap between the police department and the community, what better way to do it than get the citizens involved in what we do to help make our job easier? Break down those barriers by getting them involved.” So Lanam sent Gott on site visits to Santa Ana and San Diego in order to learn about those departments’ programs first hand, and through those programs she got ideas about where volunteers could be used, as well as how to recruit them.

The FPD ultimately gave Gott the goal of having 100 volunteers working for the department, up from the 8 who did so on the eve of C.O.P.P.S. She remembers the charge as a daunting one: “I didn’t think it was possible,” she remembers. “I grew up in Fremont, and knowing the kind of community it is, 100 seemed like such an enormous number . . . It is just a bedroom community. . . . A lot of parents work and there are a lot of younger families. And I just didn’t know how I was going to go about recruiting.” Gott started out by calling a meeting with the 8 volunteers who already worked for the FPD, soliciting ideas from them on what volunteers could do and how to recruit t