Keeping the Peace : Joe McNamara, Chief of the San Jose Police Department, Is a Surprisingly Well-Liked Cop for Being a Harvard-Educated Gun-Control Advocate

San Jose Police Chief Joe McNam ara left Harlem al most 20 years ago, but the habits he developed during his 10 years as a cop there have stayed with him. For one thing, he avoids carrying anything in his right hand: In the New York ghetto, he never knew when he might need it to draw his gun. And when McNamara pays someone a visit, he doesn’t ring the bell; he stands to one side of the door (in case someone inside wants to shoot him through it), and he knocks. The knock is also a throwback to his years in Harlem. “We had many elderly people who unfortunately . . . would commit suicide by turning on the gas,” he says. “You press the bell, that creates a spark, the whole place would blow up. So we knocked.”

But McNamara also developed another, more revealing habit in Harlem: In his career as a beat cop, he never fired his gun at a suspect, even though he says he would have been within his rights to shoot on about 150 occasions. Despite such circumspection, or perhaps because of it, McNamara was never shot by a suspect, either, though he was stabbed “a couple of times.”

McNamara’s first arrest, when he was a 21-year-old rookie, was typical of his restraint: On patrol alone in Harlem, he spotted a crowd gathered around a man who had just been stabbed to death with a butcher knife. Suddenly, the murderer burst out of the crowd and began to run. McNamara chased him for several blocks, tackled him from behind, wrestled with him and finally forced him up against a wall. Only when McNamara got handcuffs on him and noticed that they barely fit around his wrists did he realize what he had been up against: The killer was huge--a good eight inches taller than the 5-foot-8 patrolman.

McNamara’s distaste for using guns has been constant through his career, even though it has contributed to his reputation as a “controversial” police chief. It led to his resignation in 1976 as Kansas City chief of police after a turbulent three-year term there, and it was a major issue in the power struggle he waged with his own officers during his first four years in San Jose. This time, however, McNamara emerged with enhanced authority, a revitalized police department and a reputation as the most progressive police chief in the United States.

Having quelled the fires in his own backyard, McNamara has since turned some of his attention to national issues. In the past year he has repeatedly appeared on network television to argue for tighter gun control laws, and in the process has become a bete noire of the National Rifle Assn., whose lawyers twice in the last eight months have threatened to sue him.

McNamara brings imposing credentials to the gun control debate. He is one of the few police chiefs in the country with a Ph.D. (a doctorate in public administration from Harvard in 1973). He is the author of three books, including a best-selling detective novel, “The First Directive,” and a crime-prevention manual called “Safe and Sane.” He is even an accomplished horticulturist, caring for 23 varieties of roses at his San Jose home. Cops and roses may not seem to mix, but the combination underlines what an unusually peaceable policeman McNamara is.

TO ANYONE WHOSE IDEA of police work has been shaped by television’s “Hill Street Blues,” McNamara’s office must be disappointing: Instead of Capt. Furillo’s frenetic, gloomy lair, McNamara’s office is bright and almost eerily quiet.

McNamara looks younger than his 51 years. He sits behind his oversize desk, speaking in a voice so soft that his visitor must sometimes strain to hear, and giving the impression that he has as much time as the visitor requires.

Yet the impression is deceptive, a sign not of lack of pressure but of McNamara’s grace under it. An often fidgety man, McNamara suffers from insomnia, a malady he says he contracted in his first years as police chief in Kansas City. He turned to writing to cope with the insomnia, and he still begins some of his writing stints at 2 in the morning.

McNamara is, moreover, an unrelenting competitor. Says Donald Lucas, a Santa Clara County car dealer whose acquaintance with McNamara began on the tennis court: “He’s a scrambler. He will not let a shot get by him, and I think he relates his police philosophy to his tennis court philosophy. He’s just as tenacious as hell.”

Says Hubert Williams, Newark, N.J., police director for 11 years and now president of the Washington, D.C.-based Police Foundation, “McNamara is just a remarkable human being that we’re fortunate to have in American law enforcement. I have known him for many years and have watched his career develop, and I have been extraordinarily impressed with his policing capabilities. To be specific, it’s very easy for people who run police departments to go along with the wind. The perception is that you survive longer that way. But the thing about McNamara is that he’s always had his feet on the ground and is willing to stand for principles.”

McNamara wins equal praise from San Jose’s community leaders. He became police chief there in 1976, when the department was plagued by citizens’ charges that its officers were invariably insensitive, occasionally brutal. McNamara instituted an affirmative-action program, disciplined officers for racism and use of excessive force, and insisted that they interact regularly with citizens in both formal and informal settings. Before he took over, San Jose’s Mexican-American Community Services Agency was a focal point for organizing protests against the police department. Its director, Esther Medina, says McNamara “has made such an incredible difference. It used to be like the police were the enemy. That has changed 180 degrees.”

Now McNamara is on the front lines of an unprecedented conflict between law enforcement leaders and the NRA. Until a year ago, such a rift was unimaginable. The NRA has long conducted classes for policemen in firearms safety and marksmanship, and a lot of police officers are among its 3 million members. Many in law enforcement considered the two groups’ interests synonymous. Then, a year ago, the U.S. Senate passed the McClure-Volkmer bill, legislation backed by the NRA to weaken the 1968 Gun Control Act in ways that most police leaders considered dangerously misguided. By the time the bill was signed by President Reagan in May, the top cops were furious with the NRA. McNamara was among the most visible, repeatedly appearing on network television shows to argue for gun control, and against the NRA.

Says Williams: “Joe has been out front on the gun-control issue for a long time, long before the leadership of law enforcement coalesced into some unity to speak on this issue. I can remember, going back seven or eight years, when police were much closer to the NRA. Joe McNamara was standing up then, talking about the problems with guns and loose laws that put guns in the hands of too many people.”

Though McNamara has been speaking out on gun control since 1970, the conflict wasn’t joined until last year. The NRA objected to McNamara’s public statements that the NRA opposes limiting sales of machine guns and outlawing armor-piercing “cop-killer” bullets, and that “substantial amounts of (NRA) money come from the manufacturers of ammunitions and weapons.” Warren Cassidy, until recently the NRA’s head lobbyist and now its acting executive vice president, was quoted in People magazine as saying, “Chief McNamara is simply an ideologue. . . . His statements against the McClure-Volkmer bill are utter idiocy.”

Here is what McNamara says about McClure-Volkmer: “It’s an incredible decision that at a time when our country is so concerned about terrorists--we bombed Tripoli--we make it easier for terrorists and criminals to transport weapons across state lines. (These are) just bizarre kinds of decisions.”

His father was a policeman, but as a teen-ager in the Bronx, McNamara had no intention of following in those footsteps; he wanted to be a baseball player. He gave up that ambition for the prospect of a college education, but he dropped out of Fordham University’s Business School without a degree. Only then did he deign to take the police civil service test. On the written test, he finished first out of about 14,000 applicants.

“My father was just so obnoxious going around bragging about (the test result) that it was destiny, I guess--I had to take the job. And it was fun.”

It was more than fun. As a Harlem cop, McNamara saw the debilitating effects of racism, and, according to his wife, Rochelle Wall McNamara, “became quite a bit more liberal.” McNamara explains the change this way:

“When you see what happens in a place like Harlem, where people are born with no family structure, there’s no society, there’s no community, there’s no value system that we can identify with . . . then I think you begin to recognize the duty that society has to try to help people become part of society.

“The unemployment rate for minority teen-agers is like 82%, 85%, and it’s not that they’re just temporarily out of a job. The fact is that many of these kids will never work because they don’t know how to read, they don’t have a background where they’ve learned how to get to work or school on time, they’ve usually dropped out of school . . . and to think that you’re going to prevent their committing crimes just by having enough cops and prisons is crazy.

“When you work as a policeman in a place like Harlem, and you see 12-year-old girls taken out on their first maternity in an ambulance call (we delivered a couple of babies--in fact my partner pulled one kid out of a toilet. (He) actually burst into life, and he would have drowned)--that’s what society doesn’t recognize. You’re dealing with the results of prejudice and deprivation every day. I developed an enormous amount of sympathy for the underdog because of those years of experience.”

In 1967, after three “rather vivid” incidents in which McNamara encountered suspects with shotguns, he decided it was time to leave Harlem. He became a sergeant and then a lieutenant, taught at the police academy, and did night duty in two other New York ghettos, Bedford-Stuyvesant and the “Fort Apache” precinct of the South Bronx. At the same time, he was a part-time student at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, finally getting his Bachelor’s degree in 1969.

He was then selected one of four criminal-justice fellows in a Harvard Law School fellowship program, and four years later he had earned his doctorate. A cop among students who distrusted authority, he was an anomaly at Harvard.

One story from those years reflects McNamara’s ability to defuse potentially hostile confrontations. He says that in 1969, while students were rioting at Columbia University, Harvard Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz challenged him to a debate. Dressed in a coat and tie, McNamara began by telling his audience of 300 law students: “Excuse me if I’m a little nervous. Usually when I’m talking to students I’m wearing my helmet.” McNamara says that the audience “cracked up.”

Harvard broadened McNamara as much as Harlem had. “For the first time I looked at all these college students and realized that here was a different value system, and that you couldn’t explain some of the things that were standard police practices by saying, ‘Well, that’s the way it is, and that’s the way it has to be.’ These were young, idealistic people who would not accept that, and I’ve always been an idealist.”

McNamara’s public-administration degree contained seven fields of study: criminology, constitutional law, organizational behavior, comparative government, Congress and the presidency, state government and local government. It was an appropriate prescription for a prospective police chief, and McNamara quickly put it to use.

When he heard that Kansas City was looking for a police chief, he applied. He prepared for his interview by studying a report written by a fellow New York City police officer who had served in Kansas City for several months on an exchange program. The report was full of useful information. It said, for example, that burglaries in the city had increased at an astounding rate, but that the police force had no program for dealing with it.

“I really didn’t think I was going to take the job--I was going through the process of an interview,” McNamara says. “But I gave them some friendly advice and said, ‘Here’s what you should do about your burglary problem.’ And they said, ‘How do you know we have a burglary problem?’ I said, ‘Well, look at the statistics,’ and I gave them about five years of statistics, so they were shocked.” He was hired on the spot.

McNamara had a hard act to follow--he succeeded Clarence Kelley, who had resigned to become director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation--and it didn’t take him long to run into trouble. On McNamara’s ninth day on the job, a Kansas City policeman shot and killed a 14-year-old black fleeing a burglary. McNamara attended the boy’s funeral and issued a directive that police could shoot only when a suspect endangered others’ lives.

Those two acts earned McNamara the opposition of much of his police force and many Missouri politicians, and they ensured that his tenure would be wracked by contention. Referring to those days, he says, “One of the things that occasionally gets under my skin is (when) people say, ‘You’re a controversial police chief.’ What in the world is controversial about saying the police shouldn’t use more force than they have to? We have a fundamental duty to protect human life--we shouldn’t be taking a human life unless it’s absolutely necessary. I don’t think that’s controversial; I think people who argue differently are controversial.”

Every time McNamara changed a policy in Kansas City, he faced resistance. “People would say, ‘If it was good enough for Clarence Kelley, why are you changing it?’ ”

He became a target of death threats and hate mail. A police car was stationed in front of his house to protect him and his family. “It was not the most pleasant experience,” his wife says.

In 1976, the state legislature approved a pay raise for Kansas City’s 1,300 police officers but denied one to McNamara. He considered that the “final straw.” He resigned from the Kansas City post after his application to become San Jose’s police chief was accepted.

In San Jose, McNamara at least enjoyed the advantage of replacing an unpopular police chief, Robert Murphy. Many minority citizens were outraged by a series of police shootings and by the force’s refusal to discipline the officers involved. Furthermore, the police, instead of investigating citizens’ complaints, often tried to intimidate the accusers by haranguing them. McNamara eliminated the intimidation by moving the complaint center out of the police administration building and by hiring a Spanish-speaking civilian to handle the complaints of Latinos. He also fired or forced to resign about 50 officers he believed guilty of racism.

Those and similar moves gained him popularity in the community but enraged his officers. During his first four years as chief, they fought him on issue after issue. They gave him a vote of no confidence, demanded his resignation, and in 1979 went on strike. In 1980, McNamara says, a city council majority was poised to fire him and probably would have except that one of the councilmen had to resign after twice being arrested for public drunkenness.

It was about then that McNamara’s popularity turned the corner. After a U.S. Civil Rights Commission report acknowledged the changes McNamara had brought to the department--saying that between 1976 and 1979, police-community relations in San Jose showed “remarkable improvement”-- criticism of him began to subside. As time went on, police officers noticed that citizens were no longer hostile to them and began to like working on a force that received national recognition.

McNamara now enjoys considerable popularity among his rank-and-file officers. One of them, David Earle, was shot through the eye while chasing a burglar; McNamara stayed in the hospital for six hours while Earle was in surgery, then visited Earle’s family. After Earle recovered, McNamara overcame bureaucratic obstacles blocking Earle’s return to the force by making him a detective. “I don’t know any other chief in the country, or in this state anyway, who would have let me come back to work full-duty,” Earle says. “That’s unique. That’s incredible. That’s because he cares.”

Even Carm Grande, president of the San Jose Police Officers Assn., whose relationship with McNamara is necessarily adversarial, concedes that McNamara has provided “brilliant leadership.” About all he faults McNamara for is taking too much credit for the department’s success. Grande says McNamara is “too publicity-oriented.”

The sole poster on display in McNamara’s office is about gun control. “In 1980,” it says, “handguns killed 77 people in Japan, 8 in Great Britain, 24 in Switzerland, 8 in Canada, 23 in Israel, 18 in Sweden, 4 in Australia, 11,522 in the United States. God bless America. Stop handgun crime before it stops you.” In the last year, McNamara has received national attention chiefly because of his views on gun control. He says the poster presents the essence of his argument on the subject.

McNamara’s version of ideal gun-control legislation has four facets: People would not be allowed to carry firearms in urban areas; gun owners would have to submit to licensing, which would entail a waiting period and background check; machine guns would be banned except for the military and for law enforcement, and a quota would be placed on the number of weapons that manufacturers could produce.

A quota is necessary, he says, because Americans already have more than 100 million guns and because the desire of firearms manufacturers and dealers for profit is now “what determines firearms policy in this country.” The last point is an oblique reference to the power of the NRA, which, McNamara believes, gets most of its money not from gun owners but from manufacturers and dealers.

NRA lawyers have warned McNamara that such statements are untrue and “legally actionable.” McNamara has said that the NRA’s threat was “a heavy-handed attempt to intimidate me” and that he won’t surrender his “First Amendment rights to speak freely.”

In part, the argument between McNamara and the NRA is about whether police chiefs or the NRA more accurately reflect the views of rank-and-file police officers. Leaders of many police associations say they first became upset with the NRA a year ago, when they learned that NRA representatives were telling members of Congress that police supported the NRA-backed McClure-Volkmer bill. The NRA represented McClure-Volkmer “as being something we wanted,” says Neil Behan, Baltimore County police chief and president of the Police Executive Research Forum. “When we looked at it carefully, we found it was something we didn’t want, but by that time it was through the Senate. We felt we’d been had.”

The McClure-Volkmer law loosens restrictions on transporting firearms across state lines, excludes some people who buy and sell weapons from gun dealers’ regulations and eliminates record-keeping requirements on weapons sales made out of dealers’ private collections. Most law enforcement groups fought these provisions and succeeded last month in enacting another bill that in their view limits the damage done by McClure-Volkmer.

The NRA argues that the law-enforcement organizations and chiefs such as McNamara and Behan don’t speak for rank-and-file police. McNamara is “certainly entitled to his opinion,” says Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s head lobbyist. “We just believe the rank and file police officer does not hold that position. Whenever we’ve surveyed the law-enforcement community, it comes out that 80% to 90% of officers favor the individual’s right to own firearms, and they don’t believe you’re going to get at the crime problems by restricting the honest citizen’s right to own firearms.”

“I simply don’t believe that,” answers McNamara, “and I think the greatest proof is the reaction recently to the NRA’s efforts to pass the McClure-Volkmer bill, where you saw the rank and file speak out for the first time. In my opinion the overwhelming majority of rank-and-file officers oppose the NRA.”

McNamara believes that the split between law enforcement groups and the NRA is “a very encouraging thing,” but he doubts that gun control laws will get tougher. “You’re up against one of the most powerful lobbies in the country. They have a lot of money, and they hire very good professional talent to lobby.”

That sober, even pessimistic, assessment is typical of McNamara’s views on crime issues. He believes that violent crime and drug abuse, already at levels high enough to question whether Americans can “still call ourselves a civilized society,” will increase over the next 15 years. In McNamara’s first novel, California is depicted as thoroughly corrupt, with government and police officials involved in a cocaine and child-molestation ring. And McNamara won’t say that his portrayal is strictly fictional.

“I think we’re just totally hypocritical,” McNamara says. “The current thing now is talking about how corrupt the Mexican government is, and yet look at Abscam. The reaction of Congress to Abscam was to pass restrictions so that the FBI can’t do that sort of thing again. I think that was the tip of the iceberg.”

If San Jose’s police force can be excluded from that bleak assessment, many people believe much of the credit belongs to McNamara. “My real concern about Joe McNamara is that one of the other major communities just might offer him an opportunity he can’t refuse,” says Donald Lucas, the car dealer. “If he were to leave San Jose, it would be a loss we would suffer for years and years.”