Once a showplace of the New Deal era, the streamlined Municipal Building wears its age like a proud, if battered, survivor.
A gritty shadow covers portions of the limestone front, and the marble lobby opens into an interior dimly lit as if still on alert for a World War II air raid. It takes a trip to the fifth floor to dispel the notion that the longtime tenant, the Metropolitan Police Department now overseen by two Chicagoans, remains locked in the past.
There, in a cavernous room, a wall of 27 giant video screens monitor key spots around a city rich in targets for criminals ranging from petty thieves to terrorists. Fixed and mobile cameras — some hooked up to a police helicopter — feed the continuous stream of images.
Officially known as the Joint Operation Command Center, it’s part of an intelligence and communications facility that symbolizes the many changes wrought by the two Chicago police veterans, Chief Charles Ramsey and Executive Assistant Chief Terrance Gainer, who in 1998 took charge of a law enforcement debacle, a dysfunctional department in a superpower’s capital city teetering near bankruptcy.
“The department was in need of change,” Ramsey says with cosmic understatement of an institution low in resources, morale and public confidence.
Crimes far surpassed that of other major cities, with a woeful rate of closing cases. As a result of massive hiring in the late 1980s and early 1990s forced by Congress, which oversees the District of Columbia, many police were clearly unqualified, in some cases having not undergone background checks.
There were shortages of bullet-proof vests and computers. In some instances, cops and detectives had to use their own cars and pay for their own gas. Half the officers were not certified to use their guns which, a prize-winning Washington Post series made clear, they used at depressingly high rates. Rotary phones remained in use, many toilets didn’t flush and, there were no written performance reviews.
The previous police chief, Larry Soulsby, had resigned in late 1997 amid charges of financial impropriety. It was merely the latest indignity.
For years the city was known as the Crime Capital and the Murder Capital. Adding to its shaky image was the arrest of the flamboyant Mayor Marion Barry on cocaine charges in a 1990 FBI sting operation. Barry, who later served six months for possession, had lowered police hiring standards in the 1980s to please constituents, helping to explain why many of the better officers joined forces in suburban jurisdictions.
Rising through the ranks
The D.C. financial control board, an agency created by Congress in 1995 to help revive the city’s fiscal health, chose Ramsey as police chief. Ramsey, who was runner-up for the job of Chicago police superintendent, then named Gainer his assistant. The chief’s annual salary is $150,000; Gainer’s, $125,000.
Ramsey had risen through the ranks in Chicago from an 18-year-old cadet to deputy superintendent in charge of training, research and development, labor affairs and counseling. Gainer left the department in 1987 to serve as deputy director and later director for seven years of the Illinois State Police.
Both were old acquaintances who had met years before when Ramsey, 51, was a police officer and Gainer, 54, a homicide detective on the West Side. A lawyer, Gainer had served as the chief legal officer of the Chicago Police Department in the early 1980s and taught at the University of Illinois.
Each has family roots in Chicago’s South Side. Ramsey grew up in Englewood and graduated from the old Parker High School. Both his parents were born in Chicago, where his 90-year-old father — a retired CTA bus driver — still lives.
Gainer was raised in St. Margaret of Scotland parish and graduated from Mendel High School. A decorated Navy veteran of Vietnam, he has a family tree well-stocked with Chicago police officers: a grandfather who headed the motorcycle division before his retirement in 1934, four uncles (his father failed to meet the minimum height of 5-feet-8 so instead worked as a milkman for Bowman’s dairy), four brothers, and several in-laws.
Ramsey now believes the command and control center is probably the nation’s best. When a hijacked plane slammed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, agents from the FBI, Secret Service and other agencies convened at the center to track the details of the unfolding tragedy.
When he arrived four years ago, Ramsey recalled, this so-called communications center boasted a single computer and two television sets — both leftovers from a previous presidential inauguration. There was no way to communicate with officers in the field in this convoluted city with 32 separate law-enforcement agencies that is also surrounded by two states.
“When I first came from Chicago, I thought it would be very confusing,” said Ramsey, who rose through the ranks to deputy police superintendent after 29 years on the force.
“But most of these agencies are very small and have limited jurisdiction — some over a single building like the Supreme Court or a complex like the Smithsonian,” he added. “We work so often with the [U.S.] Park Police, the Secret Service and Capitol Police that there is very little, if any, confusion.” over anything.”Ramsey and Gainer early on were able to obtain $100 million from the city to renovate crumbling and outdated department facilities. Training and morale were pumped up, and pains taken to make personnel and policies reflect the city’s changing demographics and lifestyles, including the nation’s first Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit.
Ramsey bolstered the department’s technology profile by installing 600 mobile data computers in patrol cars and communicating directly with local police stations and substations via video conferences.
As an architect of Chicago’s acclaimed community-policing program, Ramsey has taken the city’s operation a step further.
Focus on neighborhoods
Under Ramsey and Gainer, the department’s crime-prevention efforts focus on a neighborhood’s specific problem such as drugs and prostitution. The chief has created an Office of Youth Violence Prevention that provides teenagers and young adults with training in athletics and life skills. He also initiated a program to discourage the flood of prostitutes who descended on downtown streets at night.
Looking back on the events of Sept. 11, he observed, “I think we did relatively well considering the magnitude of what was taking place.”
For a few days after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, Ramsey’s department provided extra protection for embassies and key federal buildings. He also assigned a special detail to the White House and the vice president’s residence for the first two weeks following Sept. 11. The anthrax scare only complicated life, especially in the capital.
The impact of the tragic events, Ramsey believes, has provoked an unprecedented sense of insecurity.
“Normally, when we think of safety and security, we think of street crime,” he said.
“Now you have to add that extra dimension of a possible terrorist attack. So you look at areas of vulnerability that were never really on the front burner: the water filtration plant, reservoirs, bridges, railroad yards, and the chemicals that are going in and out of there.”
During the first 18 months, Ramsey and Gainer concentrated on rebuilding the infrastructure, or as Gainer put it bluntly in an interview, “dragging the department into the sunset of the 20th Century.” The police force has around 3,600 members — less than its authorized strength of 3,800 but the most per capita of any U.S. city.
Soon after Gainer’s arrival on the job, he recalled asking for a pager, and he was told it would take time to fill the request. There were those rotary phones, the malfunctioning toilets and an aging vehicle fleet, with department vehicles then, on the average, 10 years old, compared to the current 4 years. “Physical things were a large part of the problem,” Gainer said. “The department had also failed to invest in its personnel with good in-service training. It wasn’t because the officers lacked the desire or heart. But a lot of what we know about the best practices in policing has to be nurtured.”
Wanted men
Curiously, neither Ramsey nor Gainer had sought jobs with the Municipal Police Department. Terry Hillard, Chicago’s new police superintendent, was “a very good friend of mine,” said Ramsey, “and I was prepared to stay and help him.”
In fact, Ramsey recalled, he told the firm conducting the search for a new police chief that he wasn’t interested. ” Nevertheless, the city administrator and a member of the D.C. financial control board flew to Chicago to discuss the job with him at the O’Hare Hilton.
“I even told them that it would be better to pick someone from inside the department,” Ramsey said. “But they convinced me to come out and visit.”
At the time, however, no outsider knew that Ramsey was being considered for the job. He recalled watching a television news program in his hotel room about the leading candidates for police chief.
“They didn’t have me in it at all and my thought was, `Thank God, they don’t know I am here,'” he said.
As he left the hotel for dinner at the nearby Morton’s steakhouse, Ramsey ran into Gainer who happened to be in Washington for a DNA conference.
“I gave him a little hesitation song and dance,” said Ramsey. “But Gainer says, `I know why you are here. They are looking for a new police chief. Gov. Edgar is not running again, and I’m interested in making a change. If you get the job and are looking for a good No. 2 man, give me a call.'”
Gainer had spent two years in Washington from 1989-1991 as a special assistant to U.S. Transportation Secretary Sam Skinner of Chicago. In that post he initiated a nationwide drug-testing program for more than 220,000 employees of airlines, railroads, transit companies and trucking firms.
Gainer’s remarks caught Ramsey off guard.
“I never thought he would be interested,” Ramsey said. “Terry could run his own department. When he decided to come on board, it was the best thing that ever happened to me and this department.”
So far the two Chicagoans have won high marks, especially on Capitol Hill, for turning the department around.
“Ramsey had to take over a department that had lost credibility and its operational respect,” said Eleanor Holmes, the District of Columbia’s non-voting representative in Congress. “He has taken the department and brought it back all the way.”
According to Holmes, Ramsey possesses the rare combination of “toughness and a wonderfully congenial personality.” Mark Plotkin, a veteran commentator on D.C. politics, underscored the chief’s “great interpersonal skills” and “media savvy,” which were evident in his handling of the case of missing intern Chandra Levy, which brought an intense national spotlight that only went away after the Pentagon and World Trade Center bombings.
Forward movement
Kathleen Patterson, a city council member who chairs its judiciary committee, credits Ramsey for “a lot of forward movement of resources to the department.” Still, she noted complaints by the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), including the notion he polishes his public image at the expense of front-line police officers. Last summer union members voted to oppose the renewal of his employment contract next year. In testimony before Patterson’s committee in December, Gerald Neill, chairman of the FOP’s labor committee, accused Ramsey and his management team — “complete strangers to Washington” — of “continuing disregard for most things local.”
Strangers? Ramsey and Gainer seem to have adjusted to life in the capital quite well.
Ramsey has remarried his former wife of 12 years, Sylvia, who moved to the city with their son last summer. They have a modern townhouse near the Mall. Their son attends Gonzaga College High School, not far from police headquarters.
Neighbors
Gainer and his wife, Irene, recently settled in the same neighborhood as the Ramseys. He speaks of his family of six children as “Clan Gainer East”:
The youngest, a son, attends a suburban Jesuit prep school; a daughter is a college freshman; a son just joined the department; a daughter, an attorney in the Washington office of Sidley & Austin; another son, an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia; and the oldest, an FBI agent with the hostage rescue team at Quantico, Va.
Ramsey said he had his doubts about moving to D.C. “Once I thought about the tremendous opportunity of serving in the nation’s capital, the challenge of a department in need of a new direction, I changed my mind.
“I don’t think I would have left Chicago for any other city in the world.”
