Pubdate: Tue, 24 Mar 2009
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: A03
Copyright: 2009 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Amy Goldstein, Washington Post Staff Writer
Note: Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

COMMUNITY POLICING DEFINES NOMINEE TO LEAD DRUG OFFICE

As Seattle Police Chief, Kerlikowske Is Known for Pragmatism

Ten months after R. Gil Kerlikowske became Seattle's police chief, two
of his officers arrived at the home of JoAnna McKee, where she ran a
co-op giving medical marijuana to patients and teaching them to grow
their own. Neighbors, the police told her, had been complaining. Soon,
a "cease and desist" order was tacked to her door.

But instead of shutting down the Green Cross Patient Co-Op,
Kerlikowske's director of police-community partnerships made a
suggestion: Move it from her West Seattle house to a commercial area.
She found a nearby storefront, and under Washington state's medical
marijuana law, people could once again bring doctors' orders to get
relief from pain. "The police could have come in here like
gangbusters," McKee said. "But they didn't. It was a case of let's see
whether we can work this out so everybody could get what they want."

That episode the summer of 2001 typifies the approach to illegal drugs
that Kerlikowske, nominated by President Obama to lead the White House
Office of Drug Control Policy, has displayed during nearly nine years
as Seattle's top law enforcement officer. In a city with greater
tolerance for drugs than much of the United States, he has seldom
bucked the prevailing local sentiment. Seldom, though, has he been out
front.

In his 20s, he worked as a scraggly-haired undercover narcotics cop in
his native Florida, trying to get users and dealers off the streets.
He has an adopted son with a history of addiction and crimes. Years
after others in Seattle's legal community began pushing for it, he has
been talking lately about alternatives to drug arrests.

According to legal and community leaders in Seattle familiar with his
work, his views are in sync with the drug policies Obama has said he
will pursue: a reorientation away from the Bush administration's
intense focus on curbing the supply of illegal drugs and toward
greater emphasis on preventing and treating addiction. As drug policy
director, he would oversee a staff of more than 100 and a $440 million
budget. In particular, Kerlikowske has supported King County's drug
court, one of the most active in the country, which gives people
arrested on drug charges a chance at treatment rather than jail.

Yet in Seattle and three other cities where he has been chief,
community policing -- not drug policy -- has defined Kerlikowske's
career. The word "drugs" is not in a list of accomplishments on the
police chief's Web site. When word began spreading last month that he
might be chosen for the White House job, Bruce Chamberlin, a friend
and admirer since both were police chiefs in Upstate New York, called
to congratulate him. "He was studying up on all kinds of things,"
Chamberlin said, "because he felt he had a way to go to get up to speed."

Kerlikowske, 59, is, people who know him say, intellectual, a
relatively soft-spoken figure who shows up at countless community
meetings day and night. Most of all, "the chief is pragmatic," said
state Rep. Roger Goodman (D), who is a consultant to the King County
Bar Association's drug policy project, which advocates for marijuana
to be regulated and taxed.

In 2003, Seattle residents placed on the ballot an initiative to make
marijuana possession the Police Department's lowest priority. John P.
Walters, the Bush administration's drug policy director, flew out to
lobby aggressively against the initiative. Kerlikowske opposed it,
too, but more mildly. The law was needless, he argued, because his
officers already deemphasized marijuana arrests. It passed anyway.

"We believe it speaks to the man's integrity that after it became law,
he chose to follow it," said a statement issued following
Kerlikowske's nomination by the producers of Seattle Hempfest, a
two-day "protestival" that bills itself as the world's largest
gathering to support legalizing marijuana. City police are assigned to
the event, where people smoke openly, but arrests are rare.

Growing up in Fort Myers, Fla., Kerlikowske was drawn to law
enforcement early. In high school, he worked part time for the local
sheriff's department, fingerprinting prisoners and photographing crime
scenes, according to a White House official familiar with his
background. His mother worked for a judge, and he met officers and
detectives when he visited her after school. He entered the Army and
became a member of the military police, providing security to the
presidential helicopter while Richard M. Nixon was in the White House.

In Florida, he joined the St. Petersburg Police Department and became
a detective quickly. His police partner in vice and narcotics, Hal
Robbins, said they made drug buys and arrests. "We talked about the
fact it's an issue that's so large you can't ever hope to arrest your
way out of it. So you are looking at . . . treatment, prevention and
enforcement."

Kerlikowske has made no secret that he has seen drug's damaging
effects firsthand. He adopted his first wife's son, Jeffrey, at age 2.
Jeffrey Kerlikowske, now 39, dropped out of high school, moved out of
the house and has been arrested repeatedly on drug and other charges
since he was 18, police records show. The father and son have not been
in touch since 1995, sources said.

Kerlikowske struck his friends as ambitious. He moved from St.
Petersburg to run two smaller police departments on Florida's east
coast, and in 1994 he became Buffalo's police commissioner.
Chamberlin, who recently had become chief in nearby Cheektowaga, N.Y.,
remembers feeling as if he was "no longer out there like the Lone
Ranger" when Kerlikowske arrived with his talk of community
relationships. His first year in Buffalo, the two of them visited
local newspapers and television stations and would phone in when they
liked or disliked a story.

Kerlikowske became a familiar figure, riding around Buffalo's
neighborhoods on a bicycle. One snowy Christmas Day, he was walking
off Christmas dinner with his wife when he noticed a young man knock
over a woman and run off with her purse, Chamberlin said. The chief
stopped a passing snowplow, asked the driver to pursue the thief and
arrested him.

He spent two years in the Clinton administration's Justice Department
as deputy director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing.

He arrived in Seattle in 2000, following a chief who had left under
pressure after notorious riots the year before at World Trade
Organization meetings there. Two years ago, Kerlikowske became the
center of controversy himself, when a citizens report on police
accountability concluded that he had been too soft, at times, on
officers accused of misconduct. Others said the city's rules were at
fault.

"Without a lot of fanfare or hoopla, Gil has made clear that, as far
as the police are concerned, they are really to give attention to the
prevention-rehabilitation side of things, as well as the enforcement
side of things," said Hubert Locke, a retired University of Washington
professor of public affairs.

 From soon after he arrived, Kerlikowske has attended meetings of the
King County Drug Court's policymaking committee himself, rather than
sending a representative, as chiefs before him had done. He did not
oppose when the court expanded eligibility from people arrested on
possession charges to ones dealing small amounts of drugs, said Mary
Taylor, the court's program manager.

The year after he arrived, public defenders began to challenge the
department's long-standing pattern of drug arrests by seeking to
dismiss certain criminal cases on the grounds that officers arrested
minorities on such charges more often than whites. Two years ago, when
the City Council approved money for experiments on alternatives to
arrests, Kerlikowske did not oppose the move, recalled Lisa Daugaard,
deputy director of the Defenders Association, a nonprofit public
defense law firm. Still, she said, "it was not incorporated into the
department's own vision of how it was going to approach drug
enforcement."

But starting last summer, Daugaard said, people in the community began
to hear the chief talking about a new approach, directing commanders
in the department to meet with social service groups about ways to
rechannel police efforts from arresting people to getting them help.
"This was," she said, "before the November election."
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake