My Day in the Life of a San Leandro Police Sergeant

I recently took a ride-along with a sergeant of the San Leandro Police Department. The revelations that occurred left me pensive and unsettled as I challenged and was challenged about basic principles of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. Yet, at the end of our four-hour appointment, I was able to shake hands with a person whom I disagree with on levels so fundamental that it was a wonder we were able to stay in the same car for 10 minutes. Whether that’s a testament to the sergeant, myself, both of us, or some higher power, I leave for you to discern.

But let me back up a bit and provide some context. While this was my first ride-along with SLPD, it wasn’t my first ride-along with law enforcement. I’ve taken ride-alongs with police departments in Costa Mesa (CA), Billings (MT), Las Vegas (NV), Harrison (AR), and Scranton (PA), as well as Border Patrol and the Sheriffs in Imperial County (CA). I’ve also been a victim or almost a victim of many different crimes from childhood through early adulthood, particularly antisemitism as a skinny Jewish kid living behind the Orange Curtain in Southern California. I’ve been in fights for my life, attacked by wild animals, held at gunpoint, shot at, stabbed, nearly drowned, beaten with flag poles, doxxed, swatted, stalked, harassed, and more besides. Police have saved my life, helped my family, and protected my community. Yet, I’ve also served as a witness to police misconduct against BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and immigrant communities, as well as people suffering from mental illness over that same period. After college, I was a legal advocate for disabled individuals in 27 states, where I handled 575 cases personally, another 386 on appeal, and consulted on several thousand more. My clients ranged from victims of police brutality as young as five to as old as 58, and former police officers that included beat cops, sergeants, lieutenants, captains, and even a couple of police chiefs. In my career with the judicial branch, I continue to work closely with law enforcement on a regular basis, such as CHP and the 58 county sheriff departments in California. Through those experiences, I’ve become proficient in self-defense, skilled at crisis intervention and deescalation, as well as highly accomplished among the intersections of bureaucratic breakdowns in public administration and the generational challenges in our communities. I've seen the need for a mixture of creativity and innovation to be both efficient and responsive. Suffice to say, when it comes to reimagining public safety, police reform, and improving our legal system, I’m everyone’s huckleberry.

So, back to the ride-along. For those who’ve never been on one, there are really just two types: boring and bad. Boring is good because it means you probably didn’t have to deal with anybody having a rough day. Bad is… well, bad, because it means you have to deal with a lot of people having more than just a rough day. Boring usually means nobody got hurt. Bad usually means a lot of people got hurt. Typically, the people that take ride-alongs are primary stakeholders that have power over the law enforcement agency in question, such as city councils and boards of supervisors; or, they're prospective recruits who are interested in a law enforcement career themselves and what to learn more, maybe network with the specific department they want to work in. It's rare, to say the least, for community organizers, activists, advocates, and/or abolitionists to go for ride-alongs. But, I hope, that my experience may convince my peers to reconsider and actually request ride-alongs en masse.

My ride-along with the sergeant wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t boring either. We had several passionate, personal, and political arguments that aren’t really relevant to this narrative, but the result of them was a greater understanding of each other as a person. I got to know the sergeant as a father, a husband, a Christian, and as a police officer. Simultaneously, I like to think that they got to know me similarly too, as a father, a husband, a Jew, and a public servant. We definitely leaned into having those uncomfortable yet crucial conversations where I believe progress is made. He was open to all questions (yes, even stupid ones), accomodating to any needs I might have, relaxed about formality, and truly interested in what I had to say. It made our other interactions more honest, brutally so actually, more engaging, and more meaningful, even when we unintentionally offended each other. Which we did. And that’s okay! Because we’re both adults and professionals. We learn as much from our mistakes as we do from our success (sometimes even more). I believe that we can’t solve our problems if we aren’t willing to identify what those problems are and I question any person who is more upset about the people pointing those problems out than the problems themselves.

For instance, I learned 1) that I’m infamous among SLPD as an overly harsh critic who doesn’t see how hard our officers work and holds them to impossible standards instead of recognizing that they’re human too. This infamy has resulted in me being referred to almost always by my full name: Stephen Michael Tow. 2) Because of #1, no one in the department wanted to take me on a ride-along due to their mistrust of my intentions and tactics. 3) The sergeant specifically requested to be the one to take me on a ride-along. 4) Most cops, like me, are insomniacs. 5) Most parents, like me, have no idea what we’re doing and just figuring it out as best we can day by day, including when is the best time to get kids a cell phone. Now, all of these were things I could’ve guessed, more or less, but the fact that he shared them with me freely was encouraging.

Conversely, the sergeant was emphatic that he sees the flag of the thin blue line as a symbol of support for law enforcement and particularly a solemn tribute to fallen police officers. To him, it isn’t a symbol of White supremacy or police brutality, but a message of encouragement and solidarity, that the person cares about police officers, that sees them as worthy of trust, respect, and honor, as they navigate a difficult and dangerous profession. While these are noble sentiments, and I can even understand how easy it is to take them at face value, the reality is far different. The flag of the thin blue line was created in 2014 by a White college student named Andrew Jacob in direct opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement and to personally profit from the ensuing conflict. Since then, the flag has made appearances at various regressive gatherings, from Charlottsville in 2017 to Waukesha County in 2020, and more besides. I urged the sergeant to be skeptical in accepting help or support from people who, knowingly and unknowingly, link support for law enforcement with a symbol of hate. They weren’t friends of cops on January 6 when they attacked and killed capitol police during the insurrection, and they aren’t law enforcement’s friends now either.

I moved on to asking specific, pointed questions about staffing levels. SLPD has been operating on an emergency schedule, where shifts are 12 and ½ hours long, with a day shift and a night shift. Mandatory overtime comprises approximately 25% of their total shift time. This lack of a swing shift is uncommon for best practices in other police departments. The lack of a force increase from Friday night through Sunday morning is also uncommon, since that is when minor offenses happen most often. There are seven beats with one officer per beat, one of whom doubles as a police service technician, supervised by two sergeants and one lieutenant. Indeed, I was surprised to hear that not only had we eliminated our K9 division, we had converted all of our PSTs to sworn officers. This doesn’t leave a lot of time for cops to walk their beats and develop any kind of community-oriented policing practices despite ours being a “full-service” department. Ideally, the sergeant estimated he would like us to have two additional officers per shift, one of whom is a dedicated PST, plus a full swing shift of seven. That equals an additional 13 officers. The approximate cost of a single SLPD officer at the low end is $150,000 in pay and benefits. Times 13? That’s almost $2 million. Per year. With a conservative estimate. At the high end? Over $350,000 per officer and about $4.5 million per year. 

We briefly discussed the statistics, that SLPD’s budget has increased by 60% between 2010 and 2020, despite an overall decrease in violent crime, property crime, calls for service, arrest rates, and clearance rates. SLPD clears maybe a quarter of the violent crimes that occur and not even five percent of the property crimes. The sergeant disagreed with those metrics but did make a fair point as to why that happened. He noted the changes and increase in our population, the need to provide competitive pay and benefits to retain good officers, his experience that most crimes are committed by non-residents, the increased limitations on lawful tools officers can implement, and changes in technology. Those are all valid points but, in my opinion, are not explainable enough for how a 60% budget increase over the course of a decade has resulted in marked decreases in our effectiveness, responsiveness, and efficiency.

Notably, though, we both strongly agreed that Alameda County’s revolving doors and terrible conditions at the Santa Rita Jail and John George Hospital were having a significant and negative impact on crime and safety in San Leandro. We agreed that there were certain calls that shouldn’t be going to police officers but do because the programs intended to alleviate and assist them are poorly designed, terribly implemented, and/or hugely underresourced. (E.g. the CATT program’s difficult rollout.) We disagreed, somewhat, as to why that is. For the sergeant’s part, that’s because those programs were never going to work well anyways. For my part, that’s because we’re way too leveraged in overpolicing rather than actually investing in those provably cheaper and better options.

This eventually led to a discussion on tactics in actual situations SLPD officers confront. We talked about the incident at the McDonald's on Washington as an example. The sergeant was straightforward that tasers, pepper spray, and batons are inferior tools at best. His preference was for hand-to-hand engagement with an unarmed individual that is aggressive and not backing down, even if that results in a broken arm or dislocated shoulder to the suspect. The sergeant ran me through a common verbal drill-down exercise where I’m asked what I'd do in a quick-fire pattern based on the seconds of time cops have to respond and adapt compared to the hours and days people have to pick apart what we think they could’ve or should’ve done. The point is to put you into a place of uncertainty that recreates what the officer may have felt in order to explain why they may have acted the way they did. Having experienced that conversation before, I wasn’t surprised by it, but I was surprised by the sergeant’s lack of faith in deescalation, based in large part on his belief that many of the calls for service they receive are for people who are unwilling or unable to be talked down. Indeed, my impression was, similar to most law enforcement, that the sergeant believes the potential damage to a suspect is worth the tradeoff in better protecting an officer. This is a mindset created through trained repetition and sustained by a culture of fear that cannot be changed overnight. It takes significant time, retraining, effort, and accountability to promote a guardian mentality that eschews violence, to engender an understanding that the police have to protect and serve even the guilty, to reframe expectations so that civilians are not held to a higher standard of conduct during street-level encounters than trained peace officers. Because the reality is, most people (including police) are not violent, most people do not want to fight, and most people just want to be left alone to go about their lives.

I countered that, by seeing an armed officer, particularly these days, many individuals are going to be afraid and unwilling to trust that a given cop is going to have their safety in mind, particularly those who have become institutionalized to negative experiences with law enforcement, jails, prisons, courts, etc. However, social workers, crisis intervention specialists, and even nurses deal with equally hostile people every day without the need to use force. In fact, I’ve done it myself hundreds of times with some of my former clients when they were agitated and started to become aggressive, from isolated conference rooms to packed hearing chambers. I utilized deescalation tactics to successfully calm them down, for both my safety and theirs. (A federal agency’s office building is not a safe place for people to have that kind of breakdown, where armed security can, will, and have shot people dead.) A primary technique is a submission position where you move back to create space to maneuver while holding empty hands up and slightly out, facing forward, and crouching down a bit to appear as nonthreatening as possible. You need to use a calm voice and employ conversational language that is focused on making the person feel that you're listening to them, taking them seriously, care about their concerns, and truly want to help them find a solution to whatever issue is making them agitated. The goal is to help the person understand what their anger or fear or rage or desperation is trying to tell them. Once a basic rapport is established, you ask them to sit down and you sit with them, side by side rather than face on, at an appropriate distance. You make sure to ask about their boundaries so that you can respect them and avoid breaking trust or causing another upset. It works. It’s saved me multiple times. I see no reason why police could not successfully use it themselves.

In between these conversations, we went to various calls and pulled one person over. The sergeant is typically there to supervise and assist, not be the primary responder. However, we had a call for a woman arguing with staff at a local big box store which he took the lead on because he was concerned it may be someone he had dealt with before. (It was not.) Another woman made a poor lane turn and was driving a little fast. She was given a lecture and a warning. Both times, I was allowed to observe fairly closely, even being able to exit the car. We also cruised by a domestic dispute that was already being resolved when we arrived, just to see if help was needed or desired. I did not see enough to make an informed opinion on what happened other than it seemed like SLPD had the situation under control. While the sergeant was courteous, supportive, and professional, I noticed that the people were unarmed, nonviolent, and that both incidents didn’t require an armed officer to resolve, let alone multiple armed officers. (I was told that SLPD policy is for officers to have one person to back them up when responding to calls.) Indeed, research and practice have shown that shifting certain responsibilities away from the police is not just better for the public but also better for officers as well. Because there's a cavalcade of ad hoc services police aren't trained for, not intended for, and that can be handled better as well as cheaper by other professionals, without the inherent risk of confrontations between cops and communities. The current status quo is unsustainable and ineffective, and the level to which the sergeant showed how thin the department is stretched at the moment confirms this sad fact. But by reinvesting resources in other community services, we can change that.

Each call for service or update sparked another area of discussion, sometimes directly related and sometimes completely tangential. But a point I reiterated as much as possible is that it’s possible to hold police officers in high regard and believe they should be held to equally high standards. While too many people mistake that as incompatible, I understand that it’s a reflection of the enormous amount of power and trust law enforcement is given in our society. Police officers are the only profession with their own bill of rights. They’re entitled to enormous deference and protection under qualified immunity that very few other civil service jobs are provided. Their jobs are dangerous, and so are a lot of other jobs with far less prestige. In California, it’s more dangerous to be a taxi driver or a welder than a cop, yet those professions aren’t given the same privileges for good reasons. I’ve witnessed the benefits law enforcement can provide, and I’ve seen the cruelty they can inflict too.

However, as much as I have railed against incidents of what I sincerely believe and what a prepoderance of evidence shows to be misconduct or brutality, the issue isn’t about individual good or bad cops. This is about a system that is failing cops and communities by design because it was never intended to serve the roles being demanded of it. Indeed, even the best police officers are going to eventually confront a situation where there are no good choices, where they can only make bad choices, and where they will ultimately cause irreparable harm to others, as well as themselves and the communities they serve. Why? Because the laws and policies as currently written are a cage while the training and resources provided to them are a hammer, forcing every problem to become a nail fraught with pressure. What's really needed is a multitool for multifaceted issues. I stressed this to the sergeant with as much conviction and passion as I could voice. I’m not here to hate cops. As unbelievable as some may think, I’m actually here to help them, in no small part because I’ve seen the good they’re capable of, not just in my life, but in the lives of others as well. Indeed, as strange as some may think, I respect our police officers and it’s precisely because of this that I insist on holding them to the high standards set by law and set by themselves as a reflection of the equal respect they continue to hold in our society. That is the virtue of common ground and good faith that I hope will lead to a better world, even if I don’t live to see it.

While I wish there had been more time to dig deeper into other questions and issues, such as overdue police reform, necessary oversight, corrupt unions, or increasing militarization, there are only so many hours in a day and, in this case, four hours was the amount allotted. Ultimately, our ride-along ended with a heartfelt coda. We agreed that the point is to rebuild trust between the police and the community, to humanize officers and activists, to make the police’s job easier and protect those members of the public who aren’t being as well protected, to dismantle unsustainable systems and replace them with healthier ones, as well as to work together to help people and save lives.

Some key quotes (because, if you know me, you know I love a good quote) that highlight the areas I found the most meaningful takeaways from the ride-along are:

"Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground." — Sara Ahmed

"We don't rise to the level of our expectations; we fall to the level of our training." — Archilochus

"When facts are reported, they deny the value of the evidence; when the evidence is produced they declare it inconclusive." — Saint Augustine of Hippo

​"Sifting through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way." — Charles Bukowski

"The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion." — Paulo Coelho

"How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct." — Benjamin Disraeli

"While you’re worried about “bad apples” / We’re wary of the roots / Because no healthy tree / Naturally bears strange fruit" — poem by Jessica Foster, June 2020

"When things are not good, it is usually imagined that a review, or possibly a reorganization, will make things better. No one ever asks whether the best is being made of a lousy situation." — John Kenneth Galbraith

"I'm not asking for equal punishment. I'm asking for equal mercy." — Emily Galvin-Almanza

"Fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you." — Ruth Bader Ginsburg

"It never gets easier, you just get better." — Jordan Hoechlin

​"We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in the oppression of any person and a denial of their humanity and their right to exist." — paraphrase of Robert James Jr.

"The surest way to keep a problem from being solved is to deny that problem exists. Telling people not to complain is a way of keeping social issues from being addressed. It trivializes the grievances of the vulnerable, making the burdened feel like burdens. Telling people not to complain is an act of power, a way of asserting that one's position is more important than another one's pain. People who say "stop complaining" always have the right to stop listening. But those who complain have often been denied the right to speak." ― The View From Flyover Country: Essays, by Sarah Kendzior

"When we disagreed with one another about the solution to a particular problem, we were often far more vicious to each other than to the originators of our common problem." –– Audre Lorde

"Blessed is he who plants trees under whose shade he will never sit." — Indian proverb

"With great power comes great responsibility." — Proverb, origin unknown

"Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone." — Rebecca Solnit

"I decided that I was supposed to be here to catch some of the stones people cast at each other." — Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

"​Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work but neither are you free to abandon it." — The Talmud

Lastly, the sergeant asked me what I thought, how I would describe my experience, what suggestions I would make, and whether I had any requests for him. I commended him for his conduct, balancing professionalism, responsiveness, and sincerity. I recommended he read two books: The Black and the Blue, by Matthew Horace, a 28-year career law enforcement veteran, and Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson, from the Equal Justice Initiative. But, most importantly, I was upfront that I intended to do a write-up of this experience. I assured him I wasn’t looking to get him in trouble or place him in a difficult position and asked for his permission to share this report with him in order to get his feedback and input. I want(ed) to ensure I was accurate in what I described and what I told about our interactions and to allow his voice to have a place in this narrative. Because I believe the sergeant is a good person and a good cop, as much as one can be the former while also the latter. I only wish that was enough, but under our current system it isn’t.

I still stand by my criticisms of the department and the criminal legal system as a whole, but after this experience, I hope I can learn to better temper those comments in the future so that they’re less likely to alienate potential allies and more effective at galvanizing broad-based support. I also still believe that, for now, as much as I remain an abolitionist, we need police; specifically, we need good police in our communities as partners, as one of many groups equally educated, engaged, and empowered to act, to build a better San Leandro for everyone. So, in that spirit, I strongly encourage others to sign-up for a ride-along and share your experiences too.

Take note and take care.