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HLet's face it, the reason I am not there today is be­cause ofpolitics."

- JACK HARRIS

Former Phoenix Police Chief Jack F. Harris is waiving his right to remain silent on the stormy ending to his storybook career.

I BY ADAM KLAWONN I PHOTOS BY TROY AOSSEY

OFFICE POLITICS AND ALMOST 40 YEARS OF CHASING BAD GUYS should have left Jack F. Harris a husk of a man. Instead, he has just gone for a 2o-mile bike ride from Bell Road down into Paradise Valley, and now he's ready to talk about why he is no longer Phoenix's top cop. The reason involves illegal immigrants, he says. But on

top of that, there's a dead police sergeant, an internal fraud investigation, an officer accused ofmur-

Phoenix Magazine SEPTEMBER 201139

Phoenix Files People

10 highlights from Harris' career

--e Police department tackles homeland security issues for World Series

2001

2006 --e Police arrest "Baseline Killer" : for allegedly committing a string of robberies, rapes, kidnappings and murders

---... Police arrest "Serial Shooters," who commit­ted at least six murders and wounded at least 19 others

---... More than 100,000 people march Downtown to protest immigration sweeps.

2010 --e Following SB 1070, police department launches illegal immigration task force. Har­ris states that immigration

:

checks are not a good use of

department resources, anger- ~

ing the Phoenix Law Enforce- ~

ment Association

----. Police sergeant Sean Drenth found dead; investigators cannot determine whether

death is suicide or homicide

,--------e. Internal police probe finds

about 30 officers may have been paid for off-duty secu­rity work they didn't do

----. Police officer Richard Chrisman accused of allegedly shooting an

unarmed suspect and his dog

'-----. Internal memo accuses police: department of inflating kid­napping stats to collect $2.4 million in federal funds; 2011 audits determine kidnapping stats were under-counted

,... Harris resigns

dering a suspect (and the suspect's dog) and accusations of falsifying crime statis­tics to obtain federal funds. Harris was chief for almost seven years, but he says the last 18 months were the most difficult period of his career.

Harris, 61, is unique

School in 1967 and attended Phoenix Col­lege. His father told him he thought a career as a police detective would be cool. So Harris earned his two-year degree in police science. When he was notified that he was being draft­

ed for the Vietnam War, Harris joined the Ma­

Harris says the last 18 months of his 39-year career were the

among cops nation­ rine reserves and then wide. He is one of the the National Guard, be­

hardest.few officers to go from the street to the top office in a big-city po­lice department in his hometown. His ten­ure includes home­land security issues for the 2001 World Se­ries, immigration mass marches Downtown, serial killers and a raft of other challenging cases. Meanwhile, the rate of property and vi­olent crimes in Phoenix has dropped every year since 2003, according to FBI crime report statistics.

Harris says he's proud ofhis accomplish­ments. But right now, he's having fun. In May, he ran San Francisco's popular Bay to Breakers 12K run. These sorts ofevents used to be his shtick. But with one artificial knee (due to a blown ACL he suffered years ago), Harris thought it better to throttle back and run half the race. Then he realized he was almost to the beach. "I thought, 'I'm just going to go ahead and finish.' I did the whole seven-and-a-halfmiles," he says.

The day after being interviewed byPHOE­

NIX magazine, Harris was set to go joyriding with a friend on a speedboat. But what to drive there? The blacked-out 2009 Chevrolet Corvette 206? The new Dodge Ram pickup? One ofhis two Harley-Davidson motorcycles? Choices, choices. He likes motorized toys, and savings from his salary ($193,377 per year) plus a generous state pension ($95,715 per year) buys a lot of fun.

"There's a world out there to enjoy," he says. "And I'm enjoying the retirement part of it. I've been working since I was 15 and never had a real serious break. There are days I look out and say, 'You know, this could get boring if I don't have enough things to do,' but I haven't found that yet."

Life wasn't always so carefree. The son of a truck driver and a waitress, Harris grew up in west Phoenix near 35th Avenue and Van Buren Street, living in the Alzona hous­ing project for low-income families.

Harris graduated from Carl Hayden High

ing hired by the Phoe­nix Police Department while serving in the guard's reserves. He completed a nine-year military commitment.

As Phoenix's population boomed, Harris grew up with the department. He started in south Phoe­nix and was an offi­cer for 11 years, then spent four to six years at every rank - except detective - on his way

to the top. He says his three favorite positions involved overnight shifts as a motorcycle officer on the DUI squad; posing as a "buyer" with the depart­ment's vice and narcotics unit; and orga­nizing complicated police barricades as a SWAT team lieutenant.

The serial rapist case and the serial shoot­er case were the peak of his tenure as chief, Harris says. At press time, Mark Goudeau was on trial for allegedly committing a string of robberies, rapes, kidnappings and murders as the "Baseline Killer" in 2005 and 2006. During the same period, authorities believed a "Serial Shooter" was terrorizing the Valley. Thrns out, two men were involved: In 2009, Dale Hausner and Samuel Dieteman were convicted of murder and other charges in that case.

But the intangible parts of his chief status aren't so obvious. For example, when more than 100,000 people marched through Downtown in April 2006 to pro­test immigration sweeps and promote civil rights, Phoenix police were ready. Harris credits the department's community re­sponse teams for bringing in the organizers and Hispanic leaders to negotiate a better route than Central Avenue, which was un­der construction for light rail.

"Some people thought, 'Oh, you're just giving in to the immigrant community,'" Har­ris says. "Well I can guarantee you, if100,000 people want to march down the street right now, they can march. You can't stop them.

continued on page 42

40 SEPTEMBER 2011 Phoenix Magazine

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PhoenixFilesPeop~le~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ continuedfrom page 40

So the best we can do is do it with the least amount of disruption to the community and the most safety for everyone involved."

Maybe Harris should have been watch­ing out for his own safety. As public support for stricter immigration enforcement in­tensified, Mesa Republican Senator Russell Pearce's pet legislation gained more steam at the state Legislature. By the time Repub­lican Governor Jan Brewer signed Senate Bill 1070 into law in April 2010, her popular­ity had skyrocketed. Other politicians were jumping on the political bandwagon.

As a result, Harris says, key officials at City Hall changed their position; Harris did not. He had joined with several other police chiefs in major U.S. cities and, as a group, they de­cided routine immigration checks were not a good use of their departments' limited re­sources. (A federal judge eventually blocked the most controversial parts of SB 1070 from talring effect in August 2010, and the Arizona Attorney General was still challenging that decision at press time.)

Under Harris, Phoenix police waded into the immigration fight. He says the depart­ment brought 10 federal immigration agents into the office to work on violent crimes that may involve illegal immigrants. It also launched a task force with the state Depart­ment of Public Safety and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to pursue human smugglers and locate drop houses.

But police officers should not be involved, in the day-to-day activities ofcatching illegal immigrants who are not involved in violent crimes, he says. After all, he adds, there may be 300 Phoenix police officers covering 510 square miles and a million-and-a-halfpeople in the city - and that's on a good day. Should the cops really be chasing gardeners?

"You have to decide: Am I going to use my resources to go after the smugglers, the drug dealers, the murderers, the rapists, the bur­glars, or am I going to tell my officers, 'Ifyou want to spend your day picking up landscap­ers and takin' 'em over to ICE [U.S. Immigra­tion and Customs Enforcement], go ahead' - that doesn't make any sense. It's not that we [police chiefs] agreed there shouldn't be more enforcement of immigration laws. It's just a matter ofpriorities, that's all."

Harris' position angered officials at the Phoenix Law Enforcement Associa­tion (PLEA), the union that represents the department's police officers. "That kind of started the 'Let's get the police chief fired' philosophy that has been going on over at PLEA for several years," Harris says.

PLEA President Mark Spencer says Har­

"You have to decide: Am I going to use my resources to go after the smugglers, the drug dealers, the murderers, the rapists, the burglars, or am I going to tell my officers, 'If you want to spend your day picking up landscapers and takin' 'em over to ICE, go ahead' ­

that doesn't make any sense."

ris should be recognized for his 39 years of service but that he ultimately played politics with the illegal immigration issue by not al­lowing officers more leeway in calling federal authorities if they believed they encountered an illegal immigrant while on duty. Spencer credits SB 1070 and police officers' limited use of its new rules with driving Phoenix's crime rate down because officers were able to detain more illegal immigrants.

"I hope the next chief has the ability to see the value of community partnerships and see the value of police labor," Spencer says. "In other words, I hope the next chiefunder­stands the importance of people who pay to get the work done - taxpayers - and the peo­ple who actually do the work - police officers. I think that's crucial. And there truly needs to be a commitment to the rule oflaw."

While the illegal immigration debate blew through the department, Harris found himself addressing several internal police scandals. In October 2010, Phoenix police Sergeant Sean Drenth was found dead out­side his patrol car near 19th Avenue and Jefferson Street. Investigators couldn't fig­ure out if Drenth's death was a homicide or a suicide.

Drenth was implicated in a three-year internal police probe that found about 30 of­ficers may have been paid for off-duty secu­rity work they didn't actually do. Harris says investigators forwarded their findings to the state Attorney General for prosecution two years ago, but it took 18 months for attorneys to sift through the details and file charges.

It wasn't as big as it was made out to be, Harris says: Most of the officers had likely clocked in a bit late and clocked out a bit early to get to their off-duty security jobs but had been paid for that time. They weren't taking money under the table, and the dam­ages involved less than $1,000 per officer. In the end, only four were charged with felony

- JACK HARRIS

fraud, and at press time, their cases were at various stages in the legal system.

Which leaves us with the case of Rich­ard Chrisman, a Phoenix police officer who was fired in March after authorities charged him with second-degree murder and ani­mal cruelty. They claim he shot an unarmed man suspected of domestic violence - and the 29-year-old man's pit bull - after re­sponding to a call for service from a south Phoenix trailer park in October 2010. Chris­man has pleaded innocent to the charges, and the trial was under way at press time.

But the incident that shattered Harris' dwindling support at City Hall involved kid­napping statistics. In an internal city memo, a Phoenix police sergeant reportedly com­plained that the department had inflated its kidnapping statistics to collect $2.4 mil­lion in federal grant funds to combat the is­sue. The complaint triggered audits, which later found that the number of kidnappings were under-counted. Harris was vindicated, but it was too late: Fed up with the politi­cal drama, he had already turned in a one­sentence resignation letter in April and left.

Harris says he has no regrets. He says he may consider working as a consultant, an expert witness on law enforcement issues in court trials, or an executive in the pri­vate-security business - but not for at least six months. Being chief is still too fresh.

"In retrospect, it is probably more art than science," he says of the job. "You cer­tainly learn the technology and the ins and outs of the criminal justice system. But the one thing that surprised me, and that I think surprises most cops who become police chiefs, is the politics of the job. And let's face it, the reason I am not there today - even though I was getting close to retire­ment anyway - is because of the politics."

- Adam Klawonn can be reached at phxmag@citieswestpub.com.

42 SEPTEMBER 2011 Phoenix Magazine