Police chief Cathy Lanier is tooling around the rougher regions of the nation’s capital on an idyllic summer afternoon when she slows down to point out an intersection where she encountered a guy spaced out on synthetic drugs a week before. “He was lying in the middle of the street, eyes rolled back, drooling,” she says. “This stuff does strange things to people. It’s the new scourge.”
Earlier this month, Jasper Spires is thought by police to have been high on synthetic drugs when he allegedly stabbed a recent American University graduate 40 times and left him dying on a crowded Metro subway car over the July 4th weekend. It was, by all accounts, a senseless crime reminiscent of an earlier era in Washington when drug markets flourished—the type of crime that horrified waves of recent D.C. arrivals who have known only gentrifying neighborhoods, trendy restaurants and rising home prices. The new drugs have Lanier worried. “They’re imported from China,” she says. “Drug markets are changing by the day. It’s hard to keep up.”
The District’s 47-year-old top cop is behind the wheel of her spit-shined, personal patrol car. She’s wearing a starched, white, short sleeve shirt, regulation blue trousers, black leather boots polished to a high sheen. Her chief of staff, Inspector Ralph Ennis, rides in the back, with me at shotgun. Her Glock 17 is strapped to her belt.
We’re cruising Bladensburg Road, an industrial stretch in the city’s Fifth Ward, along the eastern border with Maryland. This is the Washington that tourists—and even local politicians—fear to tread. You can see the Capitol dome from high points along Bladensburg, but the intersection by Benning Road is decidedly down at the heels, lined with tire dealers, empty lots, fast food joints and store-front churches. The neighborhood is both synthetic drug central and ripe for redevelopment; real estate speculators are snapping up corner lots. “Not fast enough for me,” Lanier says.
She hooks a left onto a side street and heads into Trinidad. Seven years ago these streets ran with blood. Thugs would drive in, shoot rivals and speed off. Lanier threw up roadblocks. A judge would later rule them unconstitutional, but they helped stem the violence. Now row houses in Trinidad are going for seven figures.
Lanier rolls down her window and flashes her winning smile.
“Hey ladies,” she says to a pair of young women sitting in a car.
“Hey, chief!” they respond. They dish about the enormous house under construction across the street. “Crazy,” Lanier says.
This is how Chief Lanier presents herself to Washingtonians: folksy, accessible, unadorned. Casual conversations like this help explain why she remains the most popular public official in Washington, D.C. She shows up at public hearings, community meetings or the occasional gala absent an entourage. No security, no phalanx of deputy chiefs, no body woman. Many big city chiefs scowl. Lanier hugs. At nearly six feet, with thick, shaggy blond hair, cocoa brown eyes, and a habit of embracing cops, pols and community leaders, she packs plenty of presence.
Even as other major cities have in the last year struggled with police-community relations, and protest movements like Black Lives Matter have spread nationwide, Lanier has presided over a capital that has remained relatively free of conflict between cops and the community—largely the result of stringent use-of-force regulations the Metropolitan Police Department implemented years ago following its own controversies.
Even as police chiefs across the country are under siege—defending police practices in Ferguson, Charleston, New York and Baltimore that have resulted in the killing of unarmed black men, Cathy Lanier is unassailable, roundly revered and breezing through her eighth year as chief under what is now her third mayor. Lanier is so well thought of that bestselling thriller writer David Baldacci created a character based on her a starring role in his 2009 novel True Blue. One public opinion poll pegged her approval rating at 84 percent in the District.
“Being a chief of a major city for eight years is way beyond normal,” says Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a national nonprofit research group. “The average is three to four years. She’s had a remarkable run.”
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/washington-dc-police-top-cop-120248.htmlNeat article.
