 Almost from the day it was founded in 1848, the folks across the bay in San Francisco have been making jokes about Oakland. There's no there, there, poetess Gertrude Stein is supposed to have said. Well, the jokes may live on, but Oakland is no longer that faceless other city across the bay. Today, California's fourth largest city is a booming center of industry, commerce, art, and culture. Oakland's new glamour and prosperity are not shared equally by all of its citizens. Nearly half of the city's population is non-white and many are poor. They do not patronize the symphony or the museum, they don't use the Coliseum or the airport very much, nor do they hold their share of the jobs created by Oakland's new industry, port, and transportation facilities. Oakland town doesn't even set your cold in brutal cities. I'm ashamed and most of all, it just ain't got no pity. Most of Oakland's black and brown citizens came here from the south during World War II, lured by recruiters for government and private industry to work in shipyards and defense plants. After the war, the shipyards closed and many factories moved to the suburbs, leaving most non-white workers behind. Technology put still more workers on the unemployment and welfare lines where they were joined by newly dispossessed farmers and farm workers forced off the land by the growth of agribusiness. During the 50s, Oakland became a stagnant, seething ghetto of impoverished blacks and chicanos surrounded by the white affluence of the Oakland Hills and suburban Alameda County. To contain the misery and violence of the ghetto, Oakland's all-white police department earned a reputation for head-knocking brutality that has left a well-remembered legacy of bitterness in the minds and hearts of many who lived in that time and place. I was growing up in the late 30s and early 40s. At that time, the police department was perceived as brutal, and for the most part there was extreme fear on the part of black people in West Oakland at that time when the police would ever come into the community. I remember one specific situation where several young blacks were being apprehended by the police or they went into their homes to pick them up for some alleged crime. And I remember one particular police officer kicking one of the young people who couldn't have been more than 13 or 14 years old. I think that the black panthers raised a very significant issue, and that was the brutality of the police when they came into the black community. The police were in the same position as most of government, not being in fact responsive to citizens' needs. In our recruit schools, we inculcated for many years, in my opinion, in our policemen what I would characterize as a gung-ho law enforcement orientation. We taught them laws of arrest, search and seizure, and patrol division, patrol procedure practices, which could only result in an officer oriented in a very narrow law enforcement way. So as we went about in this police department as an operational style in the 50s and some part of the 60s, of stopping people on various pretexts, which is a mandate, as it were, from the police department itself. We incurred very, very bad relationships with our community. Today, there is a whole new relationship developing between the people of Oakland's ghettos and the police. Police officials hold regular meetings in the community, and they are well received. This is one of the greatest things I've seen in Oakland in my 30 years here. I never thought I'd see today. Back in 47, 48, I could see policemen come and sit down and let you criticize it. It's our responsibility to get out in that community, and we'll be here if you want us. And I'm here, quite frankly, to assure you that those men that you see sitting here and men that work 24 hours a day, seven days a week in the Oakland Police Department will be striving to achieve a goal that they're going to take in a humanistic approach to policing. I don't care how frustrated our policemen happen to be because they're working hard or how frustrated the citizen happens to be because he had a way to long time for the policeman. I want to see every citizen treated with dignity. I would say that there's been some tremendous change on the part of the police. I think they're moving away from the head-knocking, brutal, physical approach, and trying to be more public relations-oriented, more community relations-oriented, and hopefully more sensitive and liberal in their approach to modern law enforcement. And I see some dramatic effects because, as I said, I've been here when the case was juxtaposed in very hard terms. In a moment, a look at how things are going in Oakland these days between the people and the police. Come on, Ligaron. Boy, won't you let the sun go down on your misshare town? Join the department in about 1965. It was very different from what it is now. I think you're a lot more aggressive than. I don't much care for the word harassment. I'd say there was a time we were head-knocking the department. Yeah. There are about 700 men in the Oakland police department. An overwhelming number are white and most live in the suburbs outside the city. Patrolman John Dixon joined the department after a stint with the Coast Guard. He grew up in Hollister, is a family man, and likes his work. To this extent, he is a typical Oakland policeman. In the past, there was a quota system. It wasn't down on paper, but it did exist. You were expected to write a certain number of citations, and if you were a good policeman, you made a certain number of arrests. The quota system had to result in more aggressive policemen. They had to go out of their way to find certain things, and maybe they went a little far where we were trying to produce numbers in arrests and just about every way. What has happened is that Chief Gaines said no more quota system, and there isn't any today. And that's fantastic. We spend more time today talking to people in a lot of situations where they probably would have gone to jail before. And I mean a lot of situations. Prior to 1968, the mid-1960s at least, the philosophy of the department was to operate basically as a legalistic style of police department. Gradually, through the late 60s and into the early 70s, we began to change style of operation into what is frequently referred to now as a service style of police department. George Hart is Oakland's new police chief. He assumed leadership of the department in October 1973, when Chief Charles Gaines retired after 27 years on the force. The change came about because it had to come about, to be responsive to the community. The community was saying to us, I think, that we want a police organization which services the entire community in a fair and impartial manner. And we want a police organization in which we can have confidence. First, we'd like to get you to think as well as you can about the way you looked at police work and the way of operating before you even started recruit training. Oakland's new policing style is a product of an unusual collaboration between the Oakland police and a group of social scientists. One of these scientists is J. Douglas Grant, former chief of research for the California prison system. Grant and his colleagues had been remarkably successful in helping convicted criminals overcome their own violent behavior through a process of self-study. In 1969, they convinced police officials that by helping violence-prone policemen study their own behavior, they could reverse the upward spiral of violence between the police and the people of Oakland. Former chief Charles Gaines agreed it was worth a try, and they went to work under a grant from the federal government. Today, the self-study process is carried on by the department's conflict management section. At the time, there was no regard to the quality of the work. It was just, you know, basically a numbers game. One idea that developed early in the self-study process was that of tape recording actual confrontations between Oakland police officers and potentially violent citizens. The recordings have proved invaluable in understanding how to avoid conflict and are now used in training new police officers in the art of discretionary decision-making. A police officer probably has the broadest powers of discretion in carrying out his functions than any other citizen. What we're going to do today is sit down and listen to two patrolmen as they intervene in a family dispute. We're not saying that everything that they do in this tape is the right way to do it, but they made certain decisions throughout this tape and we're going to sit down and critique these bit by bit. This is an actual street incident to real policemen and real people. Some individual officers, when they come into the Recruit Academy, feel that they're coming in to be trained to be a tremendous crime fighter. They don't realize that that's only a portion of their training, how to combat crime. A lot of it is going to be in how to deal with people, how to solve people's everyday problems, how to meet the everyday problems of the community. All right, then. Unless you're going to arrest me, arrest me. If you ain't going to arrest me, man, I can't like to talk about it first. Say, look, man, that's my wife. I'm a husband, man. You ain't got nothing to do with it. You understand me? You understand me? You ain't got nothing to do with it. Don't tell me to call it all, man. What we're trying to provide or promote is the officer who does his job, does it well, does it efficiently, who does in fact produce, but who at the same time is a very humanistic individual who understands his community, who understands himself and his department. Okay, he's told you in probably 20 different ways what the problem is. Does anybody know that one of the officers already has identified it? He doesn't want him back. I'm not telling them not to use force because there are those instances and those times when they must use force. But also what I'm saying is that there's all different ways to establish your authority as a police officer. You can establish authority by humor. You can establish it by showing concern. Your physical force is not an absolute. That's not the only way one controls the situation. What I need is a woman, man, but I can't seem to find myself a woman, though. I'm looking for it in this one right here, but I can't seem to find one. I've been getting drunk almost every night since I've been home, you understand? What's the problem? He's screaming it to you. It seems like it might be sex. Why didn't you say it earlier? It's a very simple thing. Until he started screaming it. Until he started screaming it. Quite old sex. But the Oakland police do more than just talk about violence prevention in their academy classes. Each time an officer must use force in the performance of his duty, it's reported to a computer. And periodically, the computer selects out those officers with an unusually high number of such critical incidents. They are then invited to appear before a panel of fellow officers who review in meticulous detail his handling of situations that resulted in violence. We're asking you to be very candid with us. We're asking you to admit your mistakes. Every guy on this panel has made some of the same mistakes that you've made. None of us here that are perfect. What we're trying to do is find better ways of doing things. The action review panel is both voluntary and confidential. No record is kept and no disciplinary action is involved. An officer may sit for as long as eight hours while his peers question and analyze his actions, his judgments, his personal attitudes, even his mannerisms. Yet since the panels were started in 1971, no man has refused to participate. The moderator of the action review panels is Officer Bob Crawford of the Conflict Management Section. In this case, the first-ever film, The Man in the Hot Seat, is Officer Bernie Gerhardt. Details, complainant state suspect had an illegitimate child three weeks ago but refuses to stay home and care for the child. Suspect would not talk to ROs and had to be physically subdued to be taken into custody. Okay, what happened? I don't remember it. He realized that things like this, our official records, it can be subpoenaed into court and you could be put on a stand being sued and somebody could hit you with a report just like that. And like you say, six months later you might remember it. Two years later you'd be looking at the guy and say, I had to physically subdu a 17-year-old girl who had only been out of the hospital for three weeks after having given birth to a baby and I don't remember a thing about it. It could color you looking very, very poorly. He has sat on panels before, but I think it struck him being kind of different to be sitting in that seat rather than in one of the other seats. You should have had your head blown off with your own. You had a machine gun, I don't know. You need to kill both of them. Listen to what he's saying. This is the thing. You could have had your head blown off with your own gun. I know that. You can't handle two guys promptly. I don't care how great you are. In his case, he realized he had a small man's complex. He kept thinking that he had to take the first affirmative action in a rest situation to overcome the small man thing, which he doesn't have to do, because he works very effectively. I might be wrong about what the whole object of these panels are, but when a person starts showing up with one of these after another, we're supposed to look into why, and I just wanted to ask a question. Is he one of these men? He's not as big in stature as some of us, and he's appeared in about four or five of these remarks. I've talked to a lot of belly button and all that. Does he have a small man's complex? And he's taken out on the kids. I just wanted to, you know. Okay, the thing about the size. Okay, when I first came on, I did have a size problem. I'm only 5'8", and I was 155 then, and I had what this comment referred to as a small man complex. I'm not defensive about it. I don't think I am. I'm quicker to act because I'm aware of my size, especially when the person is bigger than me. If there was no peer panel, if there was no one to call attention to the fact that an officer did have a particular problem, whether it be a small man complex or what have you, he would act this out on the street, and it would be misread. I have seen the real hard egg come up here, sit through the panel, totally reject the panel, yet go out and do a different job that he was doing before. You pointed up some things that I was aware of, sort of halfway, and didn't think it was really showing too much. It's good to have other people tell you something that you think you're already aware of. Because then you know that other people are aware of it, and you'll make a better effort to control it or whatever, I think. That panel was good. You picked a good panel. There is an officer here that I don't respect. And from that aspect, I think it's good. If there were a bunch of turkeys sitting here, not a left a long time ago. And you'd have heard about it in the locker room. The suspect is considered 5150, should be considered armed and dangerous. Both are wanted for conspiracy and forgery. Since the inception of the action review panel and other self-study techniques, there has been a dramatic drop in the number of conflicts between the police and the people of Oakland. Resistance to arrest and assaults on police officers dropped as much as 30% in a single year while citizen complaints against police officers have been cut in half. But policemen are traditionalists. Many still admire the ideal of the super cop, the tough, resourceful and courageous lawman who always catches the crook. And some of Oakland's finest are still uncomfortable with their department's new style and philosophy. There's basically two parts to the job. One part is enforcing the law. And the second part is, let's say, helping people. Our relationships with people hold out better than they used to be. But as far as enforcement of the law, we're slacking off. And that's part of the job. John Dixon works in the hardcore ghetto of West Oakland. The neighborhood is very poor and almost exclusively black. It is not an easy beat for a white policeman working alone. You've got to be realistic. Your child may go through some more as a result of my talking to her. I don't think he can go through no more than any other kid that's on the street, too. Damn, of two minds. The move has been good. We're dealing with the people in a much better frame of mind. The results are much better. When I go into people's houses, you don't get as much of a hassle as you used to do. And yet, at the same time, you're still respected as a policeman. The public accepts this more than they did before. I find that, in most cases, I get a lot more cooperation. And you find that more people are at least willing to give you information on the side than they were before. More people are inclined to give you a helping hand, where before, I think, very few people were. I don't have to get involved in no burglary. That's what I understand. I remember when I first came on that if you did make a car stop, you immediately got a crowd. Today, you not only don't normally gather the crowds, but when you do gather a crowd, the people don't tend to be as hostile. The equality of the arrests we're making now are much better. No doubt about it. But I think that we're getting kind of lethargic. We're sitting back. We're accepting the fact that we're a service-orientated department. Which I think a person is inclined to think that we're a Tibetan-called people. And I think that's what a lot of us are doing. We're just sitting back, waiting to be called. Unless you want to run up here. We're more community-relations-orientated. More of a service-type department. And I think at the expense of enforcement, law enforcement, the so-called service style is not, per se, a weak approach to the problem at all. If anything, it's a stronger approach. You can have an effective, alert police department, which does in fact engage in heads-up police work, aggressive patrol. That's what the community wants. That's why we exist. Would you like the department to go back to the head-knocking, legalistic department that it used to be? No. I don't think anybody wants it to go back that far. Not that far. Why? It would just create the same old problems we had before. A hostile society, problems on the very simplest of things. Just talking to people on the street. I don't think we'd have as much success if we went back to that. I believe, probably more than I believe anything, that the officers in this department do in fact want to do and do in fact accomplish a very capable level of police in the Oakland community. I believe that they support totally the concept that any police organization can only operate in a bare and lawful manner. Do you think you have to make a choice between community relations and good enforcement? No. I think they can work hand in hand. It's obvious they can. Because the hand-knocking is on the wall.