Picking a New Police Chief: Design the Process a New Mayor Should Follow

How would you set up the the process to pick a new chief of police for a mid-sized city?

Amidst a corruption scandal, Pittsburgh’s police chief resigned this Spring.  (He has announced he’ll plead guilty to the charges against him.)  This happened with an election for mayor already underway; a short time later, the heavily-favored incumbent dropped out of the race and announced that he would leave the choice of a new chief to his successor.  In a post on March 6 (here), I spelled out what my criteria would be for a picking a new chief.  These included unquestioned integrity, experience as a chief or deputy chief in a police department not less than half the size of Pittsburgh, and a commitment to diversity of all kinds in the ranks.  I said that no excellent candidate, whether an insider or an outsider, should be ignored, and that the process of selection the new chief would be critical, given the circumstances of the chief’s resignation.

Imagine that you have the ear of the new mayor-to-be.  (Which candidate this is will be largely determined in the Democratic Party primary, one week from today; whoever wins the primary is overwhelmingly likely to win the general election in November.) What would be your advice on how the process of selecting the new chief should work?  I can think of a number of possibilities, including:

1) Put together a small group of experts — present and former chiefs of police, law enforcement experts, etc. — to give private, candid advice to the mayor-to-be, regarding what to look for in a successful chief.

2) Create a citizens advisory board to advise the mayor on this important choice.

3) Hold a town hall meeting or two to gather a large and wide swath of public comments on the choice.

4) Conduct focus groups, each with members drawn from all of the important stakeholder groups: citizens, rank and file officers, police union officials, the faith community, the business community, neighborhood advocates, etc., to ascertain what kind of person, with what kind of qualities, the mayor should look for.

What are your ideas?  Have you been through this process before, in any role?  I would very much like to hear from anyone and everyone with thoughts on this.  The choice is coming for Pittsburgh, and it’s going to be crucial.

Thanks for your help.

NYPD’s New High-Tech Gun Detector: Back to the Future

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal titled “Police Tool Targets Guns” says that the NYPD has taken delivery of a “T-Ray” scanner: a device that can detect weapons concealed under heavy clothing.  The device “detects terahertz radiation, a high-frequency electromagnetic natural energy that is emitted by people and can penetrate many materials, including clothing.”  The scanner “sees” the shape and size of the weapon against the body of the person carrying it, because the material of which any gun is made does not emit terahertz radiation like the human body.

NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said the police were very “hopeful” about the potential of the device.  While the current version of the tool is “about the size of an old-style projection television,” the NYPD would like to see the technology reduced in size so that it is “small enough to carry on an officer’s gun belt.”  Privacy advocates raised some concerns, but also expressed hope that the device could make the NYPD’s controversial stop and frisk program unnecessary — or at least less intrusive.

All very interesting — but to me, this isn’t new.  In 1996, I published an article called “Superman’s X-Ray Vision and the Fourth Amendment: The New Gun Detection Technology” in the Temple Law Review.  (The official citation is 69 Temple L. Rev. 1.)  The article highlighted a nascent technology: a device that could scan people for millimeter wave radiation, emitted by all human bodies.  The device used the radiation to produce images of weapons hidden under heavy clothing.  The article explained the technology, described how police could use it , and explored the ways that the device would fit into the Fourth Amendment and other aspects of the law.   Here’s a small slice:

[R]esearch and development efforts have begun that would give police officers something very much like Superman’s x-ray vision. Two private companies and one government laboratory, each with its own design, have started work on technology that will allow police officers to “see” through clothing to detect whether a person is carrying a concealed weapon. The idea is to produce a commercially and technologically viable device that could do an “electronic frisk” of a suspect from a distance of ten or twenty feet.

So, here we are — back to the future.  The millimeter radiation technology never achieved what researchers hoped for in terms of portability — they could never make it  small enough to be handheld — or in terms of use at a a distance.  Perhaps the terahertz technology will do better in both respects.  Assuming it does, the terahertz devices will face many of the same Fourth Amendment, legal, and privacy issues  that I pointed out almost twenty years ago.

In my next post, I’ll discuss what some of those issues are.