Ex-Street Tough on New Turf as Campus Police Chief

Stan Friedman, police chief at California State University, Northridge, sits in his office surrounded by plaques and certificates and remembers the days when he carried a switch blade, participated in gang fights and had run-ins with police.

“Given another set of circumstances, I could see myself having become a criminal,” said Friedman, 43, who heads police and public safety operations at the 27,715-student Northridge campus. “Sometimes, witnessing a young kid coming in who’s been arrested for something, I get a sense of deja vu. “

An officer of contrasts and contradictions, Friedman carries a concealed .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver but practices yoga and meditation, worries about nuclear annihilation and has reservations about capital punishment because “there’s nearly always a possibility that somebody might be innocent.”

If Friedman’s attitudes and outlook are unusual for a police officer, it may be because he has had an unusual life. In addition to once having been a gang member, Friedman was a teen-age runaway, a Berkeley hippie and a college sociology professor. He became a police officer out of curiosity 11 years ago and ended up liking the work.

Because of his background, Friedman said, he can communicate easily with anybody from bikers to businessmen.

Since taking over the chief’s job in May, 1984, Friedman has drawn high marks from students, faculty and administrators on campus.

“I have heard nothing but praise for his professionalism and the way he is discharging his responsibilities from faculty, students and staff members, and also from members of his own staff,” Cal State Northridge President James W. Cleary said.

Friedman grew up in a large house in an affluent West Los Angeles neighborhood. “Then my father died when I was 8, and my mother remarried a guy who was a reluctant parent who made our life really miserable,” Friedman said.

“I did not like it at home,” he said, “so I made it a point not to be at home.” At the age of 11, Friedman began running away from home, associating with hoodlums and gang members, he said.

Friedman said he usually carried a switch blade as a teen-ager and kept a sharpened screwdriver, baseball bat or other weapon in his car. He said he kept the weapons to back up friends in gang fights but never hurt anyone. In one gang fight, though, his leg was deeply gashed by a length of angle iron, he said.

Unlike many of his friends, Friedman stayed in school, although he skipped classes frequently and got poor grades. By 1960, as he neared graduation from Hamilton High School, he realized that he didn’t want to waste his life.

Joining the Army Reserve and seeing experienced sergeants with limited educations taking orders from much younger men with college degrees strengthened Friedman’s resolve to pursue an education.

Fascinated with juvenile delinquency, Friedman chose USC because of its criminology program and received a bachelor of sociology in criminology in 1966. Friedman’s study of the Hells Angels, researched at bars and other Angels hangouts, so impressed a dean of the University of California, Berkeley, where he applied for admission, that Friedman was admitted on a full-tuition National Institute of Mental Health scholarship in 1966.

He grew his hair to the middle of his back, participated in anti-war demonstrations and established a stand on Telegraph Avenue, selling earrings from Borneo. During that time, he also married and divorced.

Friedman received his master’s degree in criminology, took his doctoral orals and completed course work on his doctoral degree. Then in 1969, he left to become an assistant professor of sociology at Ohio University’s Zanesville campus. He intended to spend his life in the academic world but became increasingly fascinated with the police officers who took his classes, partly because of his youthful brushes with the law, he said.

In 1974, he resigned his professorship and returned to California with his 200-page doctoral dissertation, intending to become a police officer and complete his doctorate.

He applied to several municipal and campus departments, accepting the first job offer--with the University of California, Davis, police. Friedman, who left UC Davis in 1979 to become a sergeant on the UCLA police force, beat out more than 75 candidates vying to replace the retiring police chief at Cal State Northridge.

“When I first got here, I walked around the place and I felt there was a broken spirit,” Friedman said, “that people had almost sort of given up, a lack of self-worth, self-respect, pride.”

Determined to instill pride, Friedman ordered all of his male officers to wear neckties to work, had the police station painted and carpeted and had the dents in all of the patrol cars hammered out.

He also took an officer out of uniform and put him in charge of long-range planning.

Friedman now heads a department of 13 officers, two investigators, three administrators, four secretaries, three dispatchers, six civilian information-booth attendants, six civilian parking officers, a civilian environmental health and safety manager and two student assistants, in addition to a radiation safety officer who monitors radioactive materials and experiments on campus.

Friedman’s concerns are primarily thefts, auto burglaries and occasionally a rape.