voiceofsandiego.org: Editorials... The Shield

Wednesday, May 30, 2007 | For several years, members of the San Diego City Council have complained that they were misled if not outright lied to by the city's employees. Several of them have blamed staff members for getting them into so much trouble with agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission. One of them, in fact, Councilman Brian Maienschein, regularly has avoided closed-session meetings of the council because, he says, he simply can't trust what he is told in them.

Yet only Councilwoman Donna Frye has complained after revelations recently that Police Chief William Lansdowne has regularly made materially misleading statements about crime rates in the city of San Diego. Sometimes to the City Council itself, other times in public forums, the police chief has touted the city's crime environment with statistics and conclusions that were simply untrue. In a 2006 presentation to the City Council committee that oversees public safety efforts, Lansdowne claimed that the crime rate had gone down but that "it would be a struggle for us to do it again next year." The crime rate, in fact, had gone up.

In the same forum the next year, the chief would claim that the city's crime rate was the lowest it had been since 1976. It wasn't.

At that same presentation, he said that overall crime had been coming down each of the previous three years. It hadn't.

Lansdowne said on public television that his officers were responding to the most serious of calls from residents in trouble "within the six minutes that we should." That was not true. Responses to emergency calls were taking an average of seven minutes and were getting slightly worse.

The list goes on. Lansdowne said he is bound to make mistakes -- anyone required to recite so many statistics in so many public forums would inevitably get some incorrect. But while the nature of the misstatements vary, there is one unifying theme among them: They consistently portray the city's crime situation in a better light than the department's published statistics indicated.

And further, the chief's misstatements aren't just transposed numbers and missing decimal points -- he made materially misleading conclusions about the statistics he was presenting. Crime rates were the best since 1976. Or crime had dropped each of the last three years. Or response times were improving.

There was no document that presented the public and City Council with more truthful extrapolations. Nothing that said, in a PowerPoint presentation, for example, that "What the chief is currently saying is incorrect."

No, there is a reason that the police chief and others are asked to publicly speak on issues like this: Speeches have power. A public statement will stick in the minds of the people who hear it. That's why the mayor has press conferences hoping to attract cameras to record his words. That's why the City Council meetings are taped.

And because his public presentations carry so much weight, people should be able to believe the police chief when he says that crime is going down. They shouldn't have to parse through documents to double check his statements and find out that they're not true.

Mayor Jerry Sanders and his staff have unflinchingly come to the chief's defense. Nothing to see here, folks, Sanders says. The mayor and his staff point out that a careful study of the jumble of numbers on a screen or in official city document belied the chief's conclusions. Sanders asserts that the police chief simply made mistakes -- as anyone would -- and that the true statistics are published for everyone to see. This proves the police chief is not trying to hide or spin the truth, he asserts.

In other words, the mayor's message is simple: Don't listen to what the chief says out loud, he might not be telling the truth and you have to double check everything he says. And that's just normal.

But Sanders ran for mayor based on a simple and important message: He would enforce accountability. He wouldn't mislead the City Council or the public about the state of the city. You could trust what he and his staff report. If they made a mistake, he claimed, they would make it right and ensure it never happened again.

The city's true crime rate is, in many ways, comforting and the successes are something for which city leaders can take credit. But a consistently positive series of misleading public pronouncements about the city's true condition points to an alarming lack of controls and concern over the accuracy of these numbers.

And given City Hall's recent history, we shouldn't be surprised that the mayor and City Council would shrug off a potential fault in the city's controls as no big deal.

Can I get an Amen?

Posted by JF | reply to this comment
May 29, 2007 10:21 pm

What would you expect Sanders to do? He and his incompetent staff are in CYA mode. He came to office full of bluster but completely unprepared to actually fix anything. He doesn't have time to address his police chief's corrupt behavior. He is quite busy at the moment trying to cover up Sunroad.

Posted by Larry | reply to this comment
May 29, 2007 11:11 pm

Your editorial stops short of the logical next step: a call for Mayor Sanders to show Police Chief Lansdowne the door. Lansdowne is a liability and needs to go.

Posted by Not Far Enough | reply to this comment
May 30, 2007 1:05 am

Sanders should fire Lansdowne before he gets taken down with him. Do you really need an Alberto Gonzalez on your hands, Jerry?

Posted by S. Ritter | reply to this comment
May 30, 2007 2:03 am

"Not Far Enough", It was brought to the attention of the Police Officers Association several months ago that a vote of no confidence should be taken just for the reasons stated in this letter, and for several one on one promises that were broke by Lansdowne to Officers. The request was shrugged off because of gutless board members unwilling to stick their neck out in fear of retaliation. Facts are facts boys and girls. The quiet and reserved will not speak out until it is too late and we will continue on a road of distruction in San Diego until a catastrophy occurs!

Posted by RW | reply to this comment
May 30, 2007 2:06 am

Sanders should move the Chief over to the CCDC, and then sanction a 30% raise for his outstanding performance. My compliments to the fine work of Mr. Carless.

Posted by Dale Peterson | reply to this comment
May 30, 2007 2:46 am

Great editorial. Are you paying attention Dave Cohen?

Posted by Please! | reply to this comment
May 30, 2007 10:01 am

Please!...I do not and never have excused speaking errors. I don't believe they were maliscious, but he shouldn't have made them. If councilmembers call for his ouster, that's their prerogative. Haven't seen anyone do that yet, though. Great U/T article, huh Please! You still haven't answered my question: what was inaccurate? BTW, in the newspaper business, stories like that are begun weeks, if not months, in advance of being printed. That's precisely the case here; it was being written long before Will Carless' story on the chief appeared in VofSD.

Posted by Dave Cohen | reply to this comment
June 1, 2007 4:53 am

Mr. Cohen, Are you the same Dave Cohen who was the primary spokesman for the police department for most of the past 2 decades? I did a Google search and found your name on gobs of PD stories. Weren't you also a reporter or news anchor before you were the PD's spokesman? Makes your strong backing of the police chief better understood.

Posted by Just the Facts | reply to this comment
June 1, 2007 10:34 am

In the newspaper business, every Quidnunc with stats and claims gets checked and re-checked before a worthwhile story gets printed. Such is the job of an editor. Sanders ain't no editor, tho', boys 'n girlz, and shouldn't treat his Confreres in Malfeasance so kindly. I can imagine a cartoon to go with this piece: Jerry the Janitor prepares to scoop up after Chief Clown Landsdowne bows the wrong way out of the footlights, dribbling cheat sheets out his sleeves. Clowns and enablers, though a San Diego tradition in governance aren't what we deserve anymore. Times are serious; those in government ought to be at least equal to the times.

Posted by Alex Hamilton | reply to this comment
June 2, 2007 4:02 am

In any business I ever worked in, if the people that were paid to generate information for the firm not be relied upon to do their job, they were usually let go. Why should government jobs be any different?

Posted by Common Sense | reply to this comment
June 2, 2007 7:47 am

Whoa....the conversation blew by my concern about a relevant and practical law enforcement code of ethics. I checked out Jim's link to Napa's law enforcement ethics code and it makes my point: it's a creed that doesn't address principles fundamental to public service. Here's my professional code, which, by the way, also needs updating since many feel it's too aspirational: link Nevertheless, if law enforcement professionals, as public servants, also had the duty to promote an ethical organization, change counterproductive department regulations, subordinate institutional loyalties to the public good, protect whistleblowing rights of their colleagues, facillitate legitimate dissent activities in government, guard against conflicts of interest, support the public's right to know the public's business, etc., we'd more likely have an organizational culture that would protect the Police Chief from violating the public trust with his chronic misstatement!

Posted by kmacleod1@cox.net | reply to this comment
June 8, 2007 1:36 am

Sanders has not shown the courage to take on Lansdowne or Aguirre. Strong Mayor my behind. Sanders should be voted out!

Posted by Jack | reply to this comment
June 8, 2007 7:29 am

There haven't been any comments here for awhile so I thought it was time to tell Sanders we haven't forgotten. Sanders refused to hold Lansdowne accountable. Now, my intention is to hold Sanders accountable during the next election. Anyone running against him should make this part of their platform.

Posted by Still Waiting | reply to this comment
July 17, 2007 8:18 am