Why Washington's Best Cops Walk Its Safest Beat
Cooper, Matthew
Why Washington's Best Cops Walk Its Safest Beat by Matthew Cooper The city's murder rate is soaring. And the Secret Service prowls the poshest streets. Deputy Chief James Barnes is not only...
...In 1969, Eugene Rossides, an assistant Treasury secretary, put it eloquently: "There will be no conflict of jurisdiction or duplication of effort, due to the planning which has characterized this effort ." But there was a double effort last December when a couple of dozen demonstrators gathered at the French embassy to protest that government's ties to Ayatollah Khomeini...
...The Uniformed Division doesn't make a lot of the arrests you might expect, like demonstrations, which the D.C...
...And they'd see full-page warnings that read: "Eyes and Ears are not renewable resources" They'd be in on the softball picnic reunion of Richard Nixon and the agents who have been guarding him since the fifties...
...The Uniformed Division was there with three squad cars, the D.C...
...Chawing on a toothpick so hard that its 45-degree angle almost touches his salt-and-pepper moustache, Barnes looks like the ex-Marine that he is...
...police who take the congressmen off in the paddy wagon...
...When it comes to investigating crimes, the Uniformed Division defers to the local police...
...The worst luck seemed to befall the Italian embassy where, on separate occasions, the ambassador was mugged and his butler was rolled for pocket money...
...Options like that were not even mentioned at the obscure hearings of the Subcommittee on Buildings and Grounds of the Senate Committee on Public Works that led to giving the Secret Service nightsticks and badges...
...The D.C...
...Dirty blond, with a silver chain, Steve Suter has wrists thicker than my forearms...
...Then repeat that four-hour cycle...
...On 17th Street, a gentrifying strip with a pricy Mexican restaurant and a gay steakhouse, a Secret Service squad car has its lights ablaze...
...police officer—who wisely chose to run across the Dumbarton bridge and past several Secret Service guards at the Turkish embassy...
...It's out there," said Tom Mach, raised in both North Dakota and the D.C...
...At the Polish embassy on 16th Street they are there into the night...
...But there aren't a great many terrorists out there...
...While most police departments administer a physical but once a year, the Uniformed Division makes its officers sweat it out every three months...
...Barnes and Knopick aren't regular cops, they're the exceptional cops of the U.S...
...People will look at you and ask, and you'll say that you're a federal agent ." When he came to the Secret Service, he was given the training that every officer goes through...
...For years, Washington's local police force protected the diplomats, just as New York City's police force protects the missions of the U.N., albeit with some federal monies...
...Its leading marksmen have taken competitions from the Border Patrol, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and other federal law enforcement agencies...
...Hey, Bill, can you come out here a second," he shouts, an., Officer William Knopick responds in about a :..cond...
...Only in Washington do federal patrol cars drive past boutiques with names like Toast and Strawberries and in neighborhoods like Kalorama where the officers of the Secret Service's Uniformed Division are ubiquitous and where a townhouse runs "$700,000 and up to a lot of million, maybe five," according to Jill Denton, a Washington, D.C...
...I try to get here at 7:00 and then I can start work by 9:30," Barnes said as we toured the top floor gymnasium at the Uniformed Division's L Street headquarters overlooking what there is of Washington's downtown skyline...
...They'd get the jump on the Secret Service road race (where the start was marked by the fire of an Uzi and the finish monitored by a Park Police helicopter...
...Up and down "Hogan's Alley," officers have to pick off simu-terrorists without downing bystanders...
...Well, they'd spy the reprint from The Walking Magazine on how to prevent injuries when you're on your feet all day...
...Balding, he's a likable black Lou Grant...
...To break up the monotony, the shifts are a mix of two hours of "fixed patrol" (i.e...
...Twice a day...
...Security needed beefing up, but there was a host of ways to meet that goal, such as providing federal funds to place patrolmen at the most troubled embassies...
...Those embassies had also been protected by local police...
...Both officers are inside the 7-11...
...It's instructive to look closely at that first hearing where Sen...
...Top secret, you know...
...About two dozen officers, men and women, were scattered across the gray carpet moving free weights and Nautilus...
...He calls me "Buddy...
...Of course, it's hard to know whether that training pays off...
...And it's hard to work up a lather over a small division of a small agency...
...But any part of town with art deco Thai restaurants is going to have less crime than one with crack houses...
...A lot of the guys have Secret Service T-shirts (available downstairs along with mugs and other souvenirs...
...police and the Park Service police handle...
...The Uniformed Division's mission to protect the embassies literally leaves officers riding shotgun past sleepy mansions in some of the city's best neighborhoods...
...There were ten rapes in the 2nd district...
...And there's no opposition group to serve as a healthy critic...
...There were 303 aggravated assaults in the 2nd district...
...It's an impressive crew...
...While most agencies have opponents that will try to put them in a half-Nelson—think of industry and environmentalists keeping EPA in line—no one is on Massachusetts Avenue chanting, "Hey, hey, ho, ho...
...In the corner near the rotary torso machine was a VCR and monitor for workout tapes...
...I take only small comfort in the Xeroxed posters near the elevator annoucing a seminar for "Fighting Fat" Officers were told to bring their own brown bag lunches...
...All the officers I spoke with acknowledged that boredom was a problem...
...Of course, there's nothing terrible about extra police protection...
...There was genuine fear as well...
...Last month at the headquarters in Washington he showed me some guys he considers pretty tough...
...But it wasn't," he said...
...Speaking of those long stints on patrol, Suter says that it requires concentration to stay alert...
...For liberals like Sen...
...And the Uniformed Division remains invisible in part because it wants to...
...To get some idea of how wearing it can be to patrol embassies for the Uniformed Division, stand in front of your house for two hours...
...We strode out of his spare, large office to the trophy case down the fluorescent-lit hall...
...The people in that area are very well protected as a benefit of our being there for the embassies," said Inspector James Cottam, the head of the Foreign Missions branch of the Uniformed Division...
...He has that first-day-on-thebeach pale and a build that might pass for a pharmacist's...
...Suter has been trained as a counter sniper...
...Those at the top throw a tarp of secrecy over what seem like less than sensitive matters of national security...
...But it isn't James Bond...
...53 in the 7th...
...At the Secret Service I was allowed to a look at copies of Service Star under supervision...
...If you are going to have guards around the embassies just standing around, what's wrong with them standing around the buildings where the drug pushers are...
...There's just one problem: the best cops in Washington walk the safest beat...
...The Uniformed Division must be effectively monitored ." The diplomats welcome the security...
...I asked a public affairs officer what kinds of cars the patrolmen drive...
...This same government-in-the-sunshine policy extends to what at any other agency would be a promotional item—the in-house magazine...
...When the South African embassy gets picketed, it is the D.C...
...We called it 'the country club '," said Barnes...
...It's too small for cleaver-wielding groups like the National Taxpayers' Union, which has never taken a hard look at the agency...
...At most agencies, the public affairs officers can't wait to put it your hands...
...The Uniformed Division won't disclose a list of the arrests they've made...
...force itself has only 3,800 officers...
...959 in the 7th...
...Had I the slightest doubt, now I know I'm a wimp...
...He replied: "There are four things I can't talk about—manpower, equipment, methods, and cost ." This left plenty of room for discussion...
...A fourcolor pie chart tells what to wear if they want to go out for a run...
...area, where his father was an agent with the Customs Service...
...police in the embassy security business seems to violate the rule on which the Executive Protective Service was founded...
...The son of a police officer, Suter put in seven years as a fireman in suburban Maryland before joining the Uniformed Division in 1975...
...Matthew Cooper is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...In its stead, it wanted an "Executive Protective Service" at triple the strength-850 officers—with roughly a quarter of the new troops assigned to stake out the embassies around the city...
...Last year there were 228 murders...
...keeping an eye out for terrorists coming across the lawn) and two hours of moving patrol, either in a squad car (shotgun-equipped) or on a scooter...
...In the first months of 1988, the pace quickened...
...All totaled there are 3,100 federal cops in Washington...
...But more was at stake than security...
...Nadine Winter sits on Washington's city council...
...You always have it in the back of your mind that there is the threat of terrorism and you remember what you were trained to do...
...They wear badges...
...police two...
...To those who weren't there, including myself, it is hard to imagine a city under siege...
...While it seems like a government expense that budget cutters would go after, it isn't...
...For Republicans it was an easy vote to side with the new president and a back-door way of accomplishing other ends...
...Drug wars in the worst neighborhoods have pushed the number of homicides in Washington to a ten year high...
...The guy who sells you Sudafed probably cannot, like Bill Knopick, do 60 push-ups in a minute...
...But he also has his name proudly etched on that plaque, holding most of the records for the 40-49 age group...
...They both had been with the war zone 11th Precinct in Anacostia before coming to the Uniformed Division...
...All mentioned how the Uniformed Division caught the killer of a D.C...
...Leonard Bernstein and the jellyfish To understand why, you have to go back to 1969 when the Nixon administration proposed scrapping the White House Police, which, since 1922, had managed to protect the executive mansion's grounds with 250 officers drawn from the Washington Metropolitan Police...
...The country club "Sure, the boredom is there," Barnes said of the patrols...
...Currently, that's a 17-week mix of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia and the Secret Service's own academy in Beltsville, Maryland, where officers take courses in everything from "Marksmanship Fundamentals" to the "Effects of Weather Orientation" They re-enact crises on a Universal Studios version of a city block...
...there were 57 in the 7th district in Anacostia...
...As you might expect, other neighborhoods in Washington are a wee bit more boisterous...
...the other is wrestling a magazine to the ground...
...In the 2nd police district, a wealthy enclave that encompasses much of the Uniformed Division's beat, there were five homicides in the first 11 months of 1987...
...One is subduing a 310-calorie chocolate "Sport Shake...
...Her ward includes much of Anacostia and part of Northeast Washington, including the infamous H Street corridor, a black hole for urban redevelopment programs where three years ago, Catherine Fuller, a working mother of six, was gang raped, sodomized with a metal rod, and then killed in an alley...
...realtor...
...What would the KGB or PLO learn if they stumbled on one of these...
...Obviously, there's the chicken and the nightstick problem...
...This year it's asking for 117 new staff positions...
...The neighborhoods in the 2nd district surely have less crime because Secret Service officers cover the streets...
...The Reagan administration pumps up the Secret Service budget...
...But then, keeping the D.C...
...But the Uniformed Division is just one of 20 federal police forces in Washington, such as the Capitol Hill Police, with 1,250 officers, and the Park Service Police, which stands at 320...
...Other parts of Washington patrolled by the Secret Service may not be a country club but they're safer than where most Washingtonians live...
...The Mexican ambassador joined the Italian ambassador and several others in petitioning the State Department for more protection...
...While it's best known for those inconspicuous agents with Ray Bans, suits, and wires coming out of their ears, the Secret Service also marshalls a police force of 985 cops in its Uniformed Division...
...Nixon and the Uzi The Uniformed Division isn't just out of the line of the city's worst gunfire, it's safe from the political shots that hit most federal agencies...
...They are a common sight in Northwest Washington where they guard the White House and most of the embassies, consulates, and chanceries under their jurisdiction...
...It's hard to see why the extra force was necessary...
...I laughed...
...They drive midnight-blue squad cars and take to the streets in crisp uniforms: white shirt, black pants, yellow stripe down the side...
...On a typical night you can see the officers, as I did, poised for hours outside the Turkish embassy...
...You go to New York and the police have ripped uniforms," he said...
...Every day...
...Your basic mugging...
...Deputy Chief James Barnes is not only the kind of guy you'd want to have a beer with, he's who you want by your side when the guy at the end of the bar draws a knife...
...Cottam turned serious, looking concerned that I wouldn't get it...
...It's something you've got to fight against ." That point was underscored by two officers of the Foreign Missions branch whom I spoke with...
...Like Barnes, he's a huge guy...
...Compared to other elite federal agents, the Uniformed Division looks good...
...There was more to the request than Nixon's dreams of an imperial presidency...
...Although some of the first White House guards were put in regal brown uniforms with white tunics...
...I'm not of the opinion that we can't do better...
...It was, after all, just two years after the riots that triggered the deployment of the National Guard, not just to the charred 14th Street corridor but to the steps of the Capitol...
...Like Barnes, he's an instantly likable guy who spends weekends with a youth group run out of his Masonic lodge, the Knights of Pythagoras...
...Robert Dole told the head of the Secret Service: "The budget should give you enough to start rolling, which might set an example for some of the foreign countries to add more protection for people in our embassies in 170 countries around the world ." How putting guards on affluent Kalorama Road would help our embassy in Karachi wasn't instantly apparent, but Dole seemed to think it would...
...Then drive to the supermarket and back home for two hours...
...It's amazing that they stay in such good shape...
...Moving down the row of trophies, some of which looked like bowling souvenirs, and others that spoke with authority, like silver statues of 1920s-looking patrolmen with their arms cocked in the firing position, Barnes gets to the last plaque, the one with physical fitness awards given to his crew...
...In Anacostia, Bobby Parker, a 23-year-old, is gunned down mob-style as his car pauses at an intersection...
...We ought to have uniforms in the neighborhood as a deterrent to crime," Winter said...
...At the Secret Service training center, it is the officers of the Uniformed Division who teach the Ray Ban agents how to shoot...
...And like Barnes, he's got a puppy poster in his office...
...At the same subcommitee meeting where Dole provided his own rationale, Young did a liberal's pirouette: while praising the 400,000 person antiwar march on Washington and the "fine people on that platform, including my friend Leonard Bernstein:' he also took the opportunity to rail against criminals and "judges who have backbones like jellyfish" He ranted, not quite explaining how tripling the White House Police would give the judiciary spine...
...Members of the city council plead with Mayor Marion Barry to send National Guard troops to their wards...
...He said it held other attractions besides the family ties: a 20-year retirement (now 25 years), a good salary (currently $23,487 to $33,811), and the satisfaction that comes with being more than a local or state officer...
...Are they all where they should be...
...So why aren't those top cops where they're really needed...
...A couple of officers mentioned drunk driving arrests...
...Some officers will take it easier while others will stand guard as if "the next wave is coming over the hill...
...And there were some particularly embarrassing street crimes visited against the diplomatic community...
...That guy was great," he said, still chawing and pointing to a black-and-white photograph of a stocky 1940s cop, "he was incredible...
...Stephen Young, the hearings provided an opportunity to show that Democrats, after losing the 1968 election partly because of law and order issues, were still tough...
...Some have their doubts...
...In Mount Pleasant, two women buy it in front of their children, shot down by thugs from a Jamaican narcotics ring...
...A few hundred cops here, a few hundred there, and pretty soon you're talking serious protection...
Vol. 20 • April 1988 • No. 3
