The Plain Dealer/James A. Hatch

Chief Hongisto and Mayor Kucinich.

Columnist's view of

new Cleveland chief

Here is an outsider's perspective on Cleveland's new police chief. The writer is a Washington-based columnist who specializes in state and local government issues.

By Neal R. Peirce

Can America's most innovative and unconventional law enforcement official, famed for his jail reforms and defense of homosexuals in six years as sheriff of avant-garde San Francisco, find success as police chief of Cleveland, a raw-knuckled, heavily ethnic and black industrial city?

Richard Hongisto's appointment to head the Cleveland police came as a total surprise to virtually everyone except the man who picked him -Dennis Kucinich, the equally unconventional 31-year-old politician who recently won election as Cleveland's mayor.

Kucinich, a combative populisttype leader, believes Hongisto can "professionalize the police department and democratize it to make it reflect less the values of a paramilitary group and more the humanistic values of compassion and concern for the victims of crime.”

Hongisto is still hazy on the details of how he'll fill that tall order. Yet one thing is sure: If his controversial yet highly successful record as San Francisco's sheriff is any guide, Cleveland is in for a shock. And U.S. police administrators may see some startling reforms.

Richard Hongisto comes from a Minnesota Iron Range family of Finnish extraction that moved to San Francisco in 1941. The future sheriff grew up there, served 10 years as a city police officer, left the force to study criminology at Berkeley, and in 1971 placed this ad in a radical underground newspaper:

"Dick Hongisto is running for sheriff in San Francisco. He is not a pig, and he needs your help. Drop by 1640 Market, or call 861-4318 for a rap. Hongisto."

Conservatives called Hongisto an "outright revolutionary." A coalition of young people, minorities, wealthy liberals, poor workers and San Francisco's estimated 40,000 gay voters elected him twice, Hongisto's brash ways made him probably the nation's best-known sheriff.

Hongisto said prison was "cruel, stupid, expensive and ruins life for all of us." He said judges should “earn their fat salaries by working full days." He hired women, minorities and a handful of avowed homosexuals as deputy sheriffs. "The only job a male homosexual is occupationally unqualified for," he told me, "is stud duty in a heterosexual whorehouse. Since when is it job-related how you find pleasure in your bedroom?"

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In his most important job as sheriff -supervising the San Francisco jails Hongisto effected reforms that would be the envy of any U.S. prison system.

San Francisco's jails, when Hongisto took over, were an abomination notorious, Corrections magazine reported, for their "violence, filth and overcrowding.'

Yet when people are sentenced to jail, Hongisto said, “They're not sentenced to contract disease, or to eat bad food, or to be raped or to be assaulted by racist guards.”

Hampered by a low budget, Hongisto had to resort to "innovative scrounging," including substantial federal aid, to clean up the jails. But he did succeed. Adequate medical, dental and psychiatric care were obtained. Food was improved; sanitary conditions brought up to standard. Overcrowding was eliminated and guard violence reduced

dramatically.

Hongisto instituted numerous rehabilitative programs: vocational

training, re-entry and employment programs, work-release and furloughs; alcohol and drug treatment. San Francisco's jail conditions became, in the words of the director of the American Correctional Association, the "least oppressive" he had seen in the nation.

To break up the "plantation mentality" of the old guard culture, Hongisto not only added to his staff substantial numbers of blacks and females and one-time marijuana drug offenders (especially Vietnam veterans), but he recruited hundreds of young volunteers people he characterized as "very idealistic, very energetic, very committed to the whole idea of rehabilitation and humanizing criminal justice."

Jail is such a "school for crime," so psychologically debilitating, Hongisto says, that he'd like to remove from the prisons all youthful offenders except hardened heroin users and those convicted of violent crimes. The rest, mostly jailed for larceny, could be better channeled through halfway houses "self-support groups" such as San Francisco's Delancey Street or the Synanon movement that can provide an "alternative family” setting, helping youngsters in trouble with education and getting a job.

If anything, Hongisto's challenge in Cleveland will be tougher than the one he faced in San Francisco. While he won't be responsible for the jails, he heads a police department that is plagued by slow response times to calls, labors under a primitive communications system, lacks adequate vehicles and recently suffered a "blue-flu” work slowdown.

Other law officials, Hongisto says, urged him to shun the job "unless I'm the kind of person who enjoys jumping into a pit of snakes."

But Hongisto has Mayor Kucinich's full support in creating a more community-responsive police department. A certain first step will be aggressive recruiting to increase the number of blacks on the force (now only 200 of 1,800) to a level closer to the 40% black share of Cleveland's population. And any white officers who mishandle black citizens are sure to incur the chief's wrath.

Hongisto, in fact, is a dangerous man to cross. Mild-mannered in appearance, he made no bones in San Francisco about resorting to administrative reprisals to put down "truculent little rebellions" in his staff.

Hongisto also attacks "inane, repetitious and irrelevant" civil service promotion tests and the system's bars against lateral entry into responsible positions by minorities or especially skilled outsiders. He calls this a form of “institutionalized racism."

But Hongisto recognizes the immense difficulties Cleveland's police labor under. He has shown his concern for patrolmen by adding 10 minutes to their lunch hours. And he is likely, as he did in San Francisco, to fight vociferously with the city council for an adequate budget.

Just as he walked the jail corridors and "rapped" in San Francisco, Hongisto is likely to walk Cleveland's streets, to form strong bonds with ethnic and black neighborhoods alike, and to find ways to turn juveniles toward productive, non-criminal activities. He also wants to help "senior citizens living in rough neighborhoods who are afraid of going out of their houses for fear of being robbed.”

Can police efficiency and a humanistic approach go hand in hand? The relative success or failure of Cleveland's Chief Hongisto may soon give us the answer.

• Washington Post