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By Kerry Tremain Lee Patrick Brown is to law enforcement what Carl Yastrzemski is to the Boston Red Sox, says Franklin Zimring, chair of Boalt’s criminal justice program. “He’s legendary.” Brown, who was the first African American to complete a doctorate in criminal justice--at Berkeley, in 1970--headed police departments in Atlanta, Houston, and New York; served as President Bill Clinton’s drug czar; and was elected to two terms as mayor of Houston. Along the way, he helped pioneer the revolution in American law enforcement known as community policing. For these achievements and for his unwavering commitments to education and the public welfare, CAA has awarded Lee Patrick Brown its highest honor, Alumnus of the Year, for 2005. Brown first gained national attention during a crisis he still believes was among the most difficult he has faced--the pursuit of a mass murderer in Atlanta in 1979-81. Over that two-year span, someone murdered 28 African-American boys and young men and terrorized the city. Brown, who was Atlanta’s commissioner of public safety in charge of police, fire, and civil defense, headed the investigation.
After several murders, the killer changed methods. “He began dumping the bodies in the Chattahoochee River. So we staked out both of the main bridges round the clock. Late one night, an officer below the bridge heard a splash, radioed to the top, and police there stopped the only car on the bridge.” The car’s 23-year-old African-American driver, Wayne Williams, was convicted of the killings and is serving two life sentences in prison. The case propelled Brown into national prominence. Brown was the second of seven children born to small farmers in the town of Wewoka, Oklahoma. When he was five, the family loaded their truck and moved to Fowler, in California’s Central Valley. “We all worked harvesting strawberries. Hard work has always come naturally,” he says. His father, who was part Choctaw, completed only the first grade, his mother the second. “She set herself a mission for us kids to stay in school,” he says. “She was the inspiration for me going to college.” Brown is known as a methodical planner, but he fell accidentally into his life’s career. He played football in high school--he still loves the game and follows the Bears--and won a football scholarship to Fresno State. To enroll, he hitched a ride with Len Brown (not related), a longtime friend. “I’d planned to major in P.E., but when we got to campus, they weren’t registering P.E. majors,” Brown says. “Len had majored in criminology in junior college. I signed up because he did.” At Fresno, he also met and married Yvonne Streets. In 1960, Brown began pounding a beat as a patrolman for the San Jose Police Department. While working, he completed a master’s program at San Jose State, and then in 1967 won a fellowship from the Department of Justice--one of 30 nationally selected police sergeants--and enrolled at Berkeley. While pursuing his second master’s degree, Brown lived in two worlds, working as a policeman in San Jose and experiencing Berkeley at the height of the counterculture. “Walking down Telegraph Avenue was an experience in itself. I saw the debates about the war,” Brown says. “And by hearing what protesters had to say, I gained a broader perspective.”
After completing his doctorate, Brown, working as a young professor at Portland State University, successfully created a criminal justice program from the ground up. A few years later, he established a similar program at Howard University. Then, in 1978, Mayor Jackson asked him to become Atlanta’s public safety commissioner. Throughout the Atlanta ordeal, Brown was a steady and steadying hand, setting the style he has been known for throughout his career. His calm, understated manner in front of TV cameras earned him the title “No Rap Brown,” in contrast to outspoken Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown. But his daughter Torri Clark, one of Lee and Yvonne’s four children, says he dropped the strong, silent persona at home. “He was fun-loving and playful, a practical jokester,” she says. Once, when her mother was driving the kids around town, he followed her and turned on the siren. “She didn’t think it was funny,” Clark says. “But in the back seat we were cracking up.” In 1982, a national search team chose Brown to head the Houston Police Department. He inherited a department that was racist, corrupt, and brutal. In two incidents shortly before Brown took over, police officers shot and killed two suspects, then planted guns to make it appear they had been armed. A Mexican-American man drowned after police beat him and then pushed or forced him to jump into Buffalo Bayou. “I started off by developing a set of ten values,” Brown says. “An example was: ‘The role of the police is to protect the constitutional rights of the individual.’ We incorporated these values into all training programs and procedures. When officers were found guilty of abuse, I fired them.” Jerome Skolnick, a former professor of criminal justice at Berkeley and author of The New Blue Line, says, “In Houston, Brown led the way in developing specific and detailed ways to implement the community policing model--the idea that the police needed to be accepted by the communities they patrolled.”
But first, Mayor David Dinkins lured him to New York to head the police department there. “It took a while for the mayor of Houston to forgive me for taking him,” Dinkins laughs now. “But Lee was terrific. Community policing came to New York with him--his idea of police walking a beat and getting to know a community was vastly different from police in cars responding to crises.” Brown’s two-year term in New York was not without controversy. One report criticized his handling of the Crown Heights affair, suggesting he’d not been aggressive enough in halting rioting that claimed the life of a Hasidic Jew, who was attacked after his car hit and killed a young black pedestrian. Brown defends the police response. “After the one incident, there were no other serious injuries or deaths,” he says. “Compare that to riots in L.A. or elsewhere.” Brown also says that he and Dinkins instituted the basic changes in policing that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani later claimed credit for. “Dinkins found money for 9,000 new cops, and most of them came up during Giuliani’s administration,” he says. “That’s absolutely right,” says NYU’s Skolnick. “We never could have had the reforms we did without those new cops.” But Brown was unable to see through all of his ideas for the department. He cut his term short when Yvonne developed cancer; he returned to Houston with her, where she died in 1992.
Meanwhile, Houston’s incumbent mayor and civic groups were encouraging Brown to run for mayor, and he accepted the challenge. He returned to Houston and won the mayor’s race in 1996--the first black to hold that position. Again, he championed neighborhood-oriented government, delivering services though 88 centers, each with a neighborhood council. To improve services, he sent “mystery shoppers” to go to city offices and report back on how they were treated. In 2000, he won re-election over a candidate backed by the Bush family and other prominent Republicans. Brown termed out earlier this year. Now remarried, he is a professor of sociology at Rice University’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. Brown himself seems amazed at where his long career has taken him. “I remember once, sitting in the President’s cabinet room overlooking the Rose Garden thinking, here I am, a poor boy from Wewoka, Oklahoma,” Brown says. “There’s no doubt that my education at Berkeley helped me get there.” |
 (Photo by Paul Howell)
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