A Conversation with Gerald Chaleff

Mr. Gerald Chaleff joined LAPD in 2003 under Chief William J. Bratton as the civilian Commanding Officer of the Consent Decree Bureau, tasked with overseeing the implementation of the reform provisions of the 2001 Consent Decree which the Department and the City of Los Angeles entered into with the United States Department of Justice.  In 2009, Mr. Chaleff became the Special Assistant for Constitutional Policing to Chief Charlie Beck. 

Before joining LAPD, Mr. Chaleff was appointed to the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, serving as President from 1999 to 2001.  During this time, he was selected by the City to be part of the team negotiating with the United States Department of Justice the terms of the 2001 Consent Decree. 

Mr. Chaleff has served as a consultant on constitutional policing issues to the New York Police Department and assisted the City of New Orleans in their negotiations with the Department of Justice, which resulted in a Consent Decree.  Mr. Chaleff is presently a member of the National Research Advisory Board of the Data Collaborative for Justice, at John Jay College and the National Advisory Committee for the Early Intervention System of the University of Chicago Crime lab. 

Anthony Mohr:  Thank you for your time, Gerry.  Would you please describe your journey to your work with the police?

Gerald Chaleff:  I always wanted to be a criminal defense lawyer, actually a criminal trial lawyer.  I read a book about Clarence Darrow when I was 12, and the seed was planted.  I graduated from UCLA and was lucky enough to get into Harvard Law School.  After graduation I became a deputy district attorney and after two years decided that I was better suited to be a defense lawyer.  I worked eight years for the Los Angeles County as a public defender in the special trials unit, which specialized in complicated cases including multiple homicides and cases receiving a large amount of publicity.  As a public defender, I was assigned a defendant charged with blowing up part of the Los Angeles Airport, and causing other explosions and threatening more destruction, who was given the name Alphabet Bomber.  After leaving the public defender’s office, I opened my own law firm, which eventually became Chaleff and English.  A few years later, I was appointed to represent a defendant known as the Hillside Strangler.  That trial lasted two years.  After 20 years in private practice, I went to work for Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe for three and a half years, and then I advised our city attorney for a year.  

When I was President of the Los Angeles Police Commission, I was appointed to the team that negotiated with the Department of Justice, which resulted in a Consent Decree.  When William Bratton was appointed chief, he asked me to join the department to help comply with its requirements.  He basically said “you helped get us into this, now come and help get us out of it.”  So, I became a civilian equivalent of a deputy chief in charge of the consent decree, and then eventually constitutional policing, and did that for about 11 years. 

I am now retired and have been consulting with police departments.  I assisted the city of New Orleans in their negotiations with the Department of Justice and consulted with the New York Police Department in its response to court orders.  

Mohr:  How did you get on the Police Commission?

Chaleff:  I supported Richard Riordan when he ran for Los Angeles mayor.  After he was elected, I was approached about being on a city commission.  Initially they put me on me on the Telecommunications Commission.  Next, I spent a year on the Planning Commission.  Then I was asked to be on the Police Commission, which came out of the blue, because I never expected somebody with my background to be appointed to the Police Commission.  I said yes.  After two years on the Commission, I was elected President. 

Mohr:  I’ve heard the term civilian police review board.  Does that apply to the commission you sat on?

Chaleff:  No, there are different variations of civilian review boards.  New York has a civilian review board.  They investigate, handle complaints, and make recommendations to the Commissioner.  In Los Angeles, by charter, it is managed by the chief of police and there's an appellate procedure.  Our Police Commission is like the board of directors of the police department in that they set policy, review major uses of force, and make recommendations, but all discipline is the purview of the police chief. 

Mohr:  What do you think about civilian police review boards? 

Chaleff:  The most important thing is that you have to develop a real sense of trust between the community and the police.  You want to have people on the board who are generally viewed as trustworthy by both the police and people in the community.  You also want the board to act in a manner where people develop trust in what the board is doing. 

Mohr:  Speaking about the community’s trust in police, just a month before George Floyd’s death, a Pew Research Center survey found that “78% of Americans overall -- but a far smaller share of Black Americans (56%) -- said they had at least a fair amount of confidence in police officers to act in the best interests of the public.  By contrast, large majorities of white (84%) and Hispanic (74%) adults expressed at least a fair amount of confidence.”  When breaking these findings down by age, “[o]nly half of Black people under age 55 expressed at least a fair amount of confidence in the police to act in the best interest of the public.  By comparison, 68% of Black people 55 and older had confidence in the police, as did two-thirds or more of younger white and Hispanic adults.” 

Chaleff:  You have to consider what happens in big cities versus smaller municipalities.  In big cities, you historically tend to find that Blacks and Hispanics are stopped more than Caucasians with fewer results coming out of the stops.  There’s a vast storehouse of knowledge that Black and other people of color bring to their contacts with the police that is not the case with Caucasians.  For example, some of the cases, like in Los Angeles in the past and in New York, with a policy of “stop, question, and frisk,” the police have gone into areas that they call high crime areas and virtually stopped everybody.  If you're a Black person or Hispanic person trying to go to work and you get stopped every day, it's going to cause a problem with your trust in the police department.  Now the counter argument is that, it's true that if you go into those communities, they want policing, but they want fair policing.  And so, the question is how should the police conduct themselves?  If you take a shortcut, there are unintended consequences.  Sadly, and more importantly, you may find some guns, but you may also now have a community that doesn’t trust you. 

Mohr:  How would you handle this problem?

Chaleff:  We have a program in Los Angeles called the Community Safety Partnership.  They put officers into housing projects who were specially selected and specially trained and given a salary bonus.  They were told, it's not your job just to arrest people, but to embed yourselves into the community, become part of the community, so that people will come to you when they have problems.  And what happened was that in one area, they didn’t have a homicide for two years.  And when they did, it was solved within forty-eight hours, because the community came forward to help.  The program has now been expanded out to other areas, and I learned recently that while violent crime is rising in other areas, it has dropped more than 30% in those areas where you have this kind of community-based policing. 

Mohr:  I know someone who grew up in San Antonio and had friends who were police officers.  She said back then the job was respected.  The police felt as though they were considered a valuable member of the community.  They came into the schools; they talked to the kids.  Should that kind of program be expanded?

Chaleff:  I’ll bet you every big city in the country has the same kind of program.  The question is how they are supported and how they are received.  If you tell police officers, “You have to do this,” but don't explain why it's good for them and for the community, they’ll go in, but they may not have their heart in it.  If everybody buys into these programs, you will develop some people whom you can keep contact with and mentor and affect their lives.  In Los Angeles, when I retired there were 3000 youngsters, mostly from poor economic areas, in the cadet program who were being exposed to police officers in a positive way.  And when you deal with them on a one-to-one basis, you have a better experience, rather than the one where you’re ordered out of your car and told to sit on the sidewalk or leaned up against the wall.  You develop a sense of community and trust.  When I joined the Police Commission in 1997 -- that’s 24 years ago -- I was asked what I wanted to accomplish.  I said, “I'd like to accomplish a greater degree of trust between the community and the police department.”  And we're still working on it. 

In Los Angeles, we have training for some members of the Community Police Advisory Board and sometimes civilian community training, where they teach how our police officers are trained and what police officers do.  They have nights when people visit the station.  They do a lot of community outreach, because you have to.  There's a thing that used to be called the force option simulator; now it's called Small Arms Use of Force Training Simulator.  You put somebody into a scenario where they have a gun, and it's not that easy to decide when to use it -- they end up shooting the wrong people or not shooting people when you should.  There are lots of on the ground practical challenges that people need to understand about police work. 

Mohr:  Could you give me some approaches you would recommend for large cities in order to build trust?

Chaleff:  Greater transparency in the complaint process, greater transparency when you have a use of force.  Release the video.  Increase the department’s ability to acknowledge when you make mistakes.  Before you introduce a new procedure about reducing crime, do an analysis to make sure that you don't have unintended consequences such as eroding community trust.  Also, I would do a full-scale review of what the police are doing and what things they should or should not be doing.  For example, you hear about traffic stops being referred to, maybe, the Department of Transportation.  There are perils in that.  Same with dealing with the mentally ill or dealing with the homeless.  I would be doing an analysis of all these issues facing a community to see which parts should be done by other people so the police can focus more on core issues rather than being told to solve every government problem -- homelessness, mental illness, anything. 

The phrase “defund the police” means, to some people, get rid of police.  But that's a small, small, small percentage.  For most people, it's reallocating resources.  Should we use more money for the mentally ill, to homeless service centers? 

Mohr:  Let me give you a case that I had several years ago.  It took place at four or five o’clock on a Christmas morning.  A person in the family apparently had a serious mental issue.  He was yelling and screaming.  The police came and tried to defuse the situation.  The man lashed out and started hitting the police.  At that point a crime had been committed, so they arrested him, and took him in.  There was a question of when a psychologist would see him at the jail.  One thing led to another, and the jury verdict was for the defense.  But what should have happened differently, if anything?

Chaleff:  It depends on the kind of call it is, and where you are in the country, because different cities triage.  I would triage the call, and if it's a man with a knife or a gun, I would have teams set up where you have a psychologist, social worker, somebody trained in how to deal with the mentally ill, and police who are trained in how to deal with the mentally ill.  But if it's just a call saying, “We’ve got a person outside on the street just screaming,” with no issue of weapons, then hopefully we have a situation where people who are trained to deal with the mentally ill could go out and take care of it without a police officer.  Because when the police come, it sets up a different situation.  Police will react differently from a professional who deals with the mentally ill and who can identify different triggers.  

In Los Angeles, I think the prior district attorney set up programs to train police officers on how to deal with the mentally ill.  For example, with respect to a person who's schizophrenic or paranoid, there's an exercise where you put a bag over the officer’s head and people start yelling at him -- which simulates what happens to people and that shows the officer how disorienting it is and how people respond.  If you get police officers out there and they start yelling different commands, it's going to create a different dynamic than if you have a social worker go out there, or a psychologist or psychiatrist who knows how to talk to people. 

When I handled cases as a public defender dealing with the mentally ill, there was always a trigger.  Some people sounded totally rational until you mentioned something.  Maybe a uniform would set them off.  Or something else would set them off.  If you know that and you understand that, maybe you can have a better experience, rather than just a confrontation. 

Mohr:  Let me ask you about smaller towns. 

Chaleff:  I’m not an expert on smaller communities, but in smaller communities everybody tends to know everybody.  The people know the officers, so you have a different kind of policing.  Depending on the community and its history, it can be policing that's more discriminatory, or it can be policing that's less dependent on who you are.  I think when we come up with solutions, we have to understand the difference between big cities and small cities.  Sometimes small departments may not be as well trained; they may not have as thorough background checks as big cities.  I think there's not one size that fits all, and for any reform or change to the police department -- any police department -- to work, you have to understand the culture you're trying to imprint on.  That’s why it takes a long time to change some things. 

Mohr:  What should people understand about police culture?

Chaleff:  The main thing you want people to understand is that almost all police officers are there because they believe it's their calling.  I’ve met some of the most incredible people who are police officers.  Most police officers never pull their gun, never shoot anybody.  I’d say 99% or 98% -- some large number in Los Angeles -- and they don't because that's not why they're there. 

It may be difficult for some to understand because usually all they see are the bad things that happen.  That's all the media usually covers.  There's an old saying: if it bleeds, it leads.  It's easy to cover police activities and crime.  I’ll keep going back to this: you have to develop a sense of trust, and in communities of color that historically have not had trust, you have to work at it just that much harder.  That's part of where the transparency comes in; part of it is admitting your mistakes.  

One of the classic examples occurred on May Day of 2007 when the Hispanic community in Los Angeles was having a parade.  They marched to MacArthur Park, and then the police -- for reasons I can go into because I ended up writing a report about it -- reacted badly and tried to clear the park.  They basically ran over people and did some things that they shouldn't have done.  The first thing Chief Bratton did that night was admit what we had done was wrong.  The next thing he did was go out and talk to groups and say the same thing.  And then he empowered me and Deputy Chief Michael Hillman to investigate and write a report on our findings.  In the report, we laid out all the mistakes that the police department had made.  That is the kind of report -- and I’m not saying that because I wrote it -- but that is the kind of reaction you have to have, rather than saying that we didn't do anything wrong, or that it's under investigation, and you hear about it a year later.  Because if you don't tell the story, other people will fill it in. 

Mohr:  Would you comment on the concept of “broken windows?”  I believe this concept is also important as we discuss police culture. 

Chaleff:  “Broken Windows” was an article written by George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson which appeared in the March 1982 issue of The Atlantic.  They basically said you have to police some of the minor crimes like vandalism and graffiti and broken windows, because when people in the community see the community being degraded and not being kept up, they lose trust in the government and the police.  Unfortunately, over time it morphed into zero tolerance.  Zero tolerance means that we're going to enforce everything to the maximum.  That creates real discrimination in certain areas and doesn’t build trust.  It destroys trust because now you're enforcing things that only impact one part of the community.  Zero tolerance led to stop, question, and frisk, and other things.  Broken windows was a good theory, but it was applied in an improper manner.  What happens is -- and I’m not just talking about police -- people find something that works and start taking shortcuts to make it work easier, and it can have negative unintended consequences. 

Mohr:  I remember you once said you can't arrest your way out of a problem. 

Chaleff:  Right.  Almost every police official will tell you that. 

Mohr:  The after-action report which you wrote after the George Floyd protests contained 67 findings and 22 recommendations.  What do you think were the main recommendations and have any of them been adopted?

Chaleff:  I’ll answer the second part first -- I have no idea if any of them have been adopted.  What happened was, without going into the whole long history, L.A. ended up with three reports; now I hear there's a fourth.  A report by the city on behalf of the City Council.  I was asked to lead the team who wrote that one.  There was an internal report by the police department and then a report by the National Police Foundation, which was selected by, and financed by, the Police Commission.  A number of recommendations came out, some of them similar, some of them different.  They all were taken under advisement and I have no idea what happened to them.  As far as I can see, other than the ones the department felt they wanted to do right away, they haven't adopted any of them yet.  They haven't gone through and finished analyzing, which does not make a lot of sense to me. 

It became really clear there was a lack of planning, a lack of training, and a lack of command cohesion, which led to all the problems we had.  That's why people got arrested for the wrong things.  They were on buses for hours and hours and hours.  They were kept in custody for hours in conditions that certainly weren't those recommended by the CDC.  Remember, this all happened during June 2020, when COVID was starting to reach its peak.  In planning, the department was not prepared for this.  Most of the people in the higher ranks admitted that they had not trained for a demonstration that was different from the kind which they could manage rather than try to control.  The department used some less-than-lethal weapons that were really dangerous -- like a 40-millimeter baton round.  When you think of a baton, you think of something really soft.  These are covered with soft material, but trust me; they're not.  They're hard when they hit you.

The report basically said that you have to reevaluate what you're doing, understanding that there are going to be these kinds of protests.  Now because of social media and other things, protestors are able to be more fluid than they were in the past, and so our police department has to respond.  You can say we only have three, four, five, or six days of protest, but those six days can impact the community for years because they see on television police officers, not necessarily in Los Angeles, but in New York and other places, randomly shooting at people with less-than-lethal weapons.  They hear stories about people getting hit in the head, the face, the groin.  It builds a base of people's beliefs about how the police department acts.  At the same time, you facilitate people's right to free speech, not set up confrontations, while understanding that there are going to be confrontations at times, because, as we pointed out, there are some people in these crowds whose job it is to create chaos. 

Mohr:  One of the recommendations that struck me was to purchase software that can be used to analyze open-source Internet and social media content. 

Chaleff:  Right.  LAPD didn’t have any, but that morphed into what some people call the “spy squad,” that we were trying to spy on people.  That’s absolutely not true.  All we were saying is that anything people put out publicly, the department should know so it can know where to put its resources. 

There was one Saturday when the department thought that there was going to be a large demonstration in East Los Angeles, and it turned out there was a large demonstration by The Grove, which is near West Los Angeles.  They weren’t prepared.  They didn't have the resources staged in the right place, and they didn't have the right procedures. Hopefully they will follow what's in our report and other reports so this won’t happen again. 

Mohr: Before we end, let me ask you -- how are the police doing in L.A. and nationwide about hiring women?

Chaleff:  I guess it depends on where you are.  In L.A. we had a consent decree for hiring and I don't think we were ever able to get above 20%.  And I always wanted to.  I think when I left, it was like at 18%.  It may now be closer to 20%.  You need different types of people in policing.  I never tried a case with a co-counsel who was another me.  I always wanted somebody different, who thought differently than I did and had different life experiences.  And the literature will show you that men and women react differently to things, even if they get the same training.  So yes, I think you need diversity in your department. 

Mohr:  Is there anything else that you would like to say with respect to social impact and policies?

Chaleff:  To me, the most important thing is that you have to develop community trust, and that’s both ways.  The police have to trust the community, the community has to trust the police, and the police have to enforce the law in a fair and nondiscriminatory way.  You can't have policing that’s different in one part of the city than another part of the city.  I don't mean how many police you have or the fact that they're going to have different requirements.  Rather, you can’t treat an 18-year-old in South L.A. differently than how you’re going to treat one on the West Side.  And the community has to believe and trust that you are treating everyone equally.

Mohr:  Gerry, thank you very much for your time.

About the Author:

Anthony J. Mohr is a 2021 Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow and has over twenty-six years of service within the criminal and civil justice system at the state level. He most recently sat on the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles County, where he presided over civil and felony trials. Earlier, he was a judge of the Los Angeles Municipal Court, and in private legal practice. Among his numerous professional affiliations, Anthony served on the Executive Committee of the Los Angeles Superior Court and chaired both the Superior Court’s ethics review and response committee and the statewide Committee on Judicial Ethics of the California Judges Association. He serves on the Regional Board of the Anti-Defamation League’s Los Angeles Region.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.