Introspective, Intellectual, Free-Wheeling : Woman Police Captain, 1 in 64, Meeting Future in West Valley

A printed sign hanging on a wall of the West Valley Police Station on Vanowen Street in Reseda presented this message:

“The only good hype is a booked hype.”

But the word “booked” was crossed out in the slogan about drug addicts, and over it was written “dead.”

The commanding officer noticed the change while taking a visitor on a tour of the station.

She was not pleased.

“This isn’t right,” she said in a voice that managed to convey both the forgiveness of a disappointed mother and the self-assured authority of a captain of the Los Angeles Police Department.

“Somebody take care of this right away,” she added as a general admonishment to five or six uniformed officers nearby.

Later, Capt. Diane Harber appeared genuinely surprised by a suggestion that her reaction to the sign may have demonstrated a woman’s touch in the leadership of the 180 officers she commands at West Valley Division.

“Is that hype a human being?” she asked. “We serve human beings.

“You see stuff that is so tragic all the time, all you’ve got to hold onto is humor to keep yourself sane. I don’t want anybody thinking that the truth is, ‘The only good hype is a dead hype.’ ”

Just a few minutes with Harber, 52, reveals an ardor for her mission that is seldom observed in one who has stayed 30 years in any company, let alone a metropolitan police department.

Only Woman Captain

Harber, the highest-ranking woman in the Los Angeles Police Department--the only woman among the department’s 64 captains--can be as tight-lipped and cynical as her job requires. But in conversation, she also shows an introspective, intellectual, free-wheeling bent.

Prodded, she will dig through the past, volunteering that she may be the only division commander in the department with almost no experience on uniformed patrol.

Left to her own, though, she will probably bring up the future, which, she believes, holds a promise of abundance for society through technological progress.

“How do you take the wonderful world of what could be, these tremendous breakthroughs, and translate it into dealing with these problems we have here that just seem absolutely insurmountable?” she asked.

Her freshness, her optimism for the LAPD’s mission seem irrepressible.

“I come home often thinking, where did we get this magnificent institution?” she said of the department.

That zeal wasn’t always there.

The Old Order

Harber was on the force 15 years before circumstances allowed her to think of attaining anything but the rank of “policewoman, Sgt.”

From her appointment as policewoman on May 5, 1957, to the formulation of unisex policies by then-Chief Ed Davis in the early 1970s, there had been police men and police women . There were many of the former, few of the latter.

The job of the policewomen was to staff the women’s ward of the Central Jail and to ride with policemen on juvenile patrol. The highest rank was sergeant.

That hadn’t seemed important to Harber at first.

“I came on the job really rather frivolously,” she said.

Having just graduated from the University of Wyoming with a degree in foreign relations and a husband still in school, Harber read a newspaper advertisement recruiting policewomen for the Los Angeles Police Department.

“This just looked like a wonderful opportunity because it paid as much as a man, very, very well, two to three times as much as I was making then,” she said.

She thinks she did poorly on her oral exam.

“They asked me why I wanted to be a policewoman and I told them the truth. I said that I had to put my husband through college and it looked like it would be a lot of fun. I told them I could guarantee that I would be working at least two years.”

Her fears of flunking proved unfounded.

Eight years later, Harber, still on the job, was promoted to policewoman sergeant. Then there was nowhere else to go.

“Absolutely none,” she said. “My husband was through college. I had two children. They were both in nursery school.”

Her primary ambition was to make the day shift. The job wasn’t as much fun anymore.

“So much of it just looks like carrying water and chopping wood,” she said. “You just show up and do certain tasks, a lot of which are very uninteresting and rather menial.”

Form Department

Harber took a job in the business office designing police forms. That gave her an entree to her next job, working with what she recalls was a “funny band of people in the back room.”

They were dabbling in new technology, designing the department’s first computer system to replace the card files, which then held the department’s information on warrants, arrest records and bookings.

As an old hand at forms, she found a spot on the team. Like everyone else, she had to learn from scratch.

“Computers and communications technology were pretty heady stuff for a bunch of garden-variety cops to be playing with,” said the team’s former leader, Bill Herrmann.

Herrmann, now command security officer at the Naval Weapons Station in Seal Beach, was the visionary. Harber, he recalled, was the realist.

“She sort of put things in perspective,” Herrmann said. “When we were trying to emulate Rand and Systems Development Corp. in terms of out-thinking their think tanks, she was the one that was bringing us down to earth.”

Impact of Watts

Early in the project, on Aug. 11, 1965, the work of the computer team was unexpectedly halted by a general mobilization. Watts was in flames.

It was a day when Harber’s feelings about her job were transformed.

On her way to her assignment in communications headquarters, Harber saw the flames.

“You could see them moving down Central Avenue, and they were on their way to us,” she said. “It took the National Guard it seemed like forever to mobilize. At least 12, maybe 24 hours, and we were trying to hold the line.” She said she answered a panicky phone call from Morningside Hospital. A woman pleaded: “ ‘We need help. Can you send it now?’ ” Harber said.

“We didn’t have any cars to send, and she was screaming: ‘They’re coming in the front door!’ And I remember I hung up the phone and . . . I had tears in my eyes.”

“It was just like all those little things that just bring it right up close to your face, how near we are to societal disintegration at any time.” Harber said. “Something in that made a difference. It really put it up front to me--how important law enforcement, the police department, really is. You really got to see what was holding the city together, that you were the front lines. That phrase, ‘the thin blue line,’ took on new meaning.”

Seven years later, Harber was still deep in technology when feminism hit the Los Angeles Police Department.

Davis was chief. Davis bristled at feminists. They were made bristly by him. Davis didn’t hire any policewomen. He didn’t think the department needed them. He once said he would hire a female police officer when the Los Angeles Rams hired a female linebacker.

But in his heart, Davis said, he struggled over the issue. His solution was to go unisex. The department would have only police “officers,” whether they were men or women. They would all meet the same physical requirements.

Harber, who stands 5 feet, 6 1/2 inches, didn’t measure up. But Davis made an offer to the department’s approximately 100 policewomen. He said they could go through the Police Academy as new recruits, prove themselves, become police officers and go on the streets.

Answers Challenge

Harber hadn’t been active in the women’s movement. But she was the first to take up the dare. She went through the academy and became the first female uniformed sergeant to take to the field.

“I think she’s terrific,” said Davis, now a state senator representing the West Valley. “Diane is one of those people who had the pride and the courage to make the transition, even though she was petite by what the male standards were.”

So after a decade in the heady world of computer technology, Harber went to Skid Row in a patrol car.

“It was a really frightening time,” she said.

It wasn’t physical fear. “I’d been through hundreds of fights,” she said, referring to her years in Central Jail. “Physical contact and fights really meant nothing to me. After you’ve crossed that barrier, you just do it.

“My fear was of failure, mistakes. I knew I would be under constant scrutiny.”

She is frank about her errors.

“One of the things I had been told in sergeant’s school was not to get involved, to stand back and watch. I had believed that to be a rule. So, what happened is, some altercations that I observed go down, I hadn’t jumped in and participated in the cuffing of the suspect, which I could have done very easily. Because of that, people got the feeling, you know, it substantiated their fear about a woman--’You can’t count on them when the going gets rough.’ ”

In 1976, she was promoted to lieutenant.

In the following years, she was a community relations officer in North Hollywood and later head of planning and implementation for the Valley Traffic Division in Van Nuys.

Harber was promoted to captain in 1981 while serving as the chief’s liaison officer to the Los Angeles City Council.

She took her first command that year, assuming charge of Central Detective Division downtown. After that, she commanded the Hollenbeck Patrol Division in East Los Angeles. It was another challenging time.

“I did not have experience at the patrol function and the multitude of things that go on there,” she said. “I knew about management. I read good. I write good. But there’s just a whole array of information that I didn’t know about and that was necessary to make good, sound command decisions. And so it was real tough.”

Termed ‘People-Oriented’

Officers who have worked with and for Harber generally speak highly of her. They characterize her as a “people-oriented” administrator who tries to manage by consensus.

“She relies a lot on the advice of her subordinates, which is smart,” said one officer in the West Valley station. Harber supervises 180 uniformed patrol officers and 20 civilians. She reports to Capt. Bayan Lewis, commander of the West Valley station, whose own duties include overseeing detectives, vice officers and record-keeping.

Only one officer of several interviewed criticized Harber. He said some of his colleagues consider her indecisive in accommodating requests that often conflict and in disciplining officers.

And perhaps, he suggested, Harber is too attuned to women’s issues.

“She does have a hard row to hoe because so many people are looking for faults, especially in a department that is just getting around to opening up the way for females,” he said.

In spite of her quick career rise, Harber renounces any claim to being a pioneer among women. In almost everything, she asserts, she came in behind Connie Speck, the first woman captain on the force and the first commander of a division. Speck preceded Harber as commander of West Valley Patrol.

Today, however, Harber is the top woman on the force. Speck, who is a year older, has retired.

No Plan to Retire

Harber has no intention of retiring, even though she has been eligible for eight years. “There’s no reason to retire,” she said. “As long as you’re doing a job that you like, especially one that’s on the cutting edge, as the LAPD is, I see no reason to leave that opportunity.”

Her life now has reached a plateau where police work is primary. Divorced, she has a 26-year-old daughter in the Navy; her other child, a son, died after an illness. She lives alone in a house in Tujunga.

Off the job, Harber doesn’t spend much time with fellow officers, she said.

She’s more likely to be found in a night class on futurism at UCLA or at the department’s own Forum 2000, a series of seminars on trends in society and technology. Not surprisingly, a conversation with Harber was the inspiration for the series, said its creator, retired Deputy Chief Clyde Cronkhite.

Harber is an admirer of Buckminster Fuller, the late futurist who postulated that in the coming age of technical wonders, only stupidity on the part of bureaucrats could block universal prosperity.

How does that vision fit in with the work of a cop?

On the Cutting Edge

“Reviewing his work and listening to him speak, it talks to a great time of change in the world,” Harber said. “And law enforcement is right on the cutting edge of change. As one of the institutions that represents society, we are probably more important than we were in the past. We are the ones to first sense that change societally. Usually, it is in some form of disruption.”

Not even the West Valley is immune, she said.

When she took the job, Harber found some all-too-familiar signs of that social disruption, such as street hypes--heroin users who roam the streets and often obtain money for their drugs by committing burglaries.

She took a tough stance, starting a program to train officers in recognizing hypes and testifying in court.

Arrests of hypes have gone up significantly, officers said.

“I don’t have a big head of steam about judging them morally,” she said. “But I don’t like to have victims. Put a hype in jail and you’ve saved three victims.”

Her view of victims is broad enough to include the growing number of illegal aliens that she also found upon her arrival in the West Valley.

“Regardless of how one feels about the economic issues of it, regardless of how one feels about their draining the resources, taking jobs, the point is, they’re people here in our area,” Harber said. “They really do not particularly have good feelings about the police. Their experience with us has not necessarily been positive. If we don’t provide them some way of interacting with the police, we’re just going to raise our crime rate and eventually create problems for people that are residents of the area.”

Harber has stationed a Spanish-speaking officer two days a week in a Canoga Park Catholic church. The officer gives assistance to anyone who comes, without questions.

“I think it’s beginning to work,” Harber said. “I’m told that our stock has gone up 500%.”

And that’s not a sign of a woman’s touch, Harber would say. Just good police work.