New police chief lives by ‘The Zimmerman Code’

 

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO – When San Diego’s new police chief, Shelley Zimmerman, was growing up in a Jewish family with two brothers and a sister in Beachwood, Ohio, their father, Philip, a trial attorney, instilled in them what he called “The Zimmerman Code.”  It sounds very much like the philosophy that the 31-year police veteran wants to instill among this city’s police officers.

The Zimmerman Code, according to the chief, is: “We support each other, and we always treat all people at all times with respect.”

The late Philip and Elaine Zimmerman could derive much nachas from their children, who grew up at the Park Synagogue in Cleveland.  The oldest brother, Bud, is a cardiologist in New York.  The oldest sister, Renee, is a teacher in North Carolina.  Shelley made San Diego history as its first female police chief.  Her younger brother, Rob, is a trial attorney, as well as a Shaker Heights, Ohio, city councilman and vice mayor.

With Passover coming up, Chief Zimmerman reminisced in a recent interview about her mother’s cooking.  “Mom is one heck of a cook.  Oh my God, her chicken soup, her brisket, her matzo balls – my mom is the greatest cook in the world!  Nobody’s better than my mom for cooking.  Her chicken soup is the best, and I want to go on record that it’s the best!  Her chopped liver is made from scratch; her everything, her standing rib, it’s just amazing, and she’s a great baker too!”

What many Jewish families might consider an aspect of  “tikkun olam” (repair of the world) was known in the Zimmerman household as “always looking out for the little guy, or as my dad would say, ‘those who can’t look out for themselves, it’s up to us to look out for,” Zimmerman said.

Growing up, “If I saw someone being picked on, I wouldn’t allow that to happen,” she said.  “I would step up not to let that happen. I tried to always know what the right thing was.  A lot of it was that we would take the time to listen to other people, to spend time with them if we saw that someone was hurting or wasn’t having a good day.  We’d go out and try to make it better for them.”

It would be hard to say if Chief Zimmerman is more enthusiastic about her mother’s cooking, or about sports.  She is a huge sports fan who is devoted to Ohio State University, where she majored in criminal justice. Zimmerman visited San Diego in 1980 to attend the Rose Bowl game between Ohio State and the University of Southern California.  “We unfortunately, I’m sad to say, lost that game 17-16 when Charles White of USC scored a touchdown with about 20 seconds left, and after about another couple of years, I will be over it.”  From Pasadena, she and friends “rented a car and we came to San Diego and went to the Zoo.  We drove around the city and went to the beach (in January) and I’m looking around and I went ‘Oh my God, this is the most beautiful city I have ever seen.’  I had no idea that places like this existed.  It was just beautiful, fantastic and I decided right there and then – I was always an outdoor person—that I had shoveled my last driveway.”

So she returned to Ohio State to get her degree, and thinking she would go to law school in San Diego, “I ended coming out here. I didn’t know anyone.  I didn’t have a place to stay.  I didn’t have a job.  I had about $200 in my pocket, one suitcase and my guitar.”

She took some odd jobs, and then in 1982, went to the Police Academy.  “I joined the Police Department thinking I would still go to law school.  I had put myself through college, and I figured I would put myself through law school.  I thought, ‘How perfect, the Police Department is hiring’  and so here I am, 31 years later the chief of police.  It goes to show if you work hard, anything is possible.”

Among her early assignments was serving as a driver and bodyguard for San Diego’s first female mayor, Maureen O’Connor.  Dropping some materials off at Police Headquarters one day, she was called into the office of Bill Kolender, who was the first Jewish police chief of San Diego.  He was aware that Zimmerman, too, was Jewish.

“I walk in and he introduces me to his aunts,” Zimmerman related.  “He said ‘this is Shelley Zimmerman.  She is a police officer and a Jewish police officer,’ and the two aunts look right at me and what do they say?  ‘What the matter with you, you couldn’t have married a doctor or a lawyer?’  I laughed, and I said, ‘Chief, come on, not only do I have to get that from my family; I have to get it from yours?’ And that became our joke, we always talked about it.”

Early in her police career, Zimmerman went undercover, posing as a junior at Patrick Henry High School.

“The Department had gotten many complaints that there were drug usage and sales going on at high schools and one of them was Patrick Henry,” she recalled.  “I’ve always looked young and … I posed as a junior at Patrick Henry.  Within a couple of days—actually the very first day—I saw blatant use of drugs: narcotics, marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, psilocybin, acid, PCP.  I had to go to class, do homework, and in the end I made over 100 purchases, and more than 70 students were arrested.

“I would make purchases throughout the day, not every day, but sometimes multiple times a day.  Some days, more than five narcotics purchases right there in class, or in the school.”  She impounded the drugs, put them into evidence, and wrote reports.  “Those who did not plead guilty, I had to go to juvenile court or to adult court if they were over 18.  I had to attend expulsion hearings.”

While Zimmerman was there, “the school had a smoking section where kids could go and smoke, and a lot of the purchases were made in that area. You were allowed to leave campus, no one checked.  You could come and go as you pleased. … A lot of the things made it quite easy for the students to either use or sell narcotics.  Even in some of the classes, they were making pipes to smoke marijuana as part of their shop class projects!”

Following the mass drug busts, changes were made at the high school located in the San Carlos neighborhood of San Diego.  “It is a closed campus now,” said Zimmerman. “They don’t have a smoking section.  The kids weren’t even old enough to smoke cigarettes and yet the school had a smoking area.”

Students were utterly surprised when the arrests were made.  “One said, ‘you can’t be a cop, you can’t be a narc.  There is no way you could be a cop.  I was going to vote for you for homecoming queen!’”

More gratifying to Zimmerman was that later some students who were busted actually thanked her.  She recalled one student who told her “I was going down the wrong path and you gave me a huge wake up call.”  Others called to let her know that after turning their lives around, “they had graduated from college or had families.  One called up and said he became a doctor, and said it wouldn’t have happened probably if it hadn’t been for this.”

Mother’s cooking, sports, and her job all are things Zimmerman says she just loves.  Over more than three decades at the police department, she said, “there hasn’t been an assignment I haven’t liked.  There aren’t any bad assignments, just bad attitudes.

“Being a San Diego police officer means the world to me,” she said more than once during an interview in the same office where she once met Bill Kolender’s aunts.  “It has been an honor and a privilege to wear this uniform and this badge, an honor and a privilege.  I don’t take that for granted any single day that I am out here.”

She said she “had a lot of different assignments—almost all the patrol commands, many investigative assignments, including internal affairs and vice.  And yes, I have posed as a prostitute.  I have infiltrated book making rings when I was working undercover.”

The way she took to teaching younger officers how to make a narcotics bust was what prompted her superiors to recommend that she take the sergeant’s exam, a suggestion she said that  she first resisted because she liked what she was doing.  She said she also had to pushed to take the lieutenant’s exam, again because she loved the work that she was doing.

As she was promoted through the ranks, to lieutenant, captain, and assistant chief, there were incidents, large and small, which she is not likely to forget.  As the captain of the Northern Division—which is located adjacent to the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center—she had to keep passionate sides separated in disputes over the seals at the Children’s Pool, the Christian cross atop Mount Soledad, and deal with people legally toting guns on the beaches in her division.

At the time it was legal to “open carry” a gun, which meant you could strap it onto your side, and as long as it wasn’t loaded, you’d be within your rights.  Similarly you could carry over your shoulder a long gun.

Legal or not, other beach goers were made nervous by the guns—especially because of the mass shootings that had occurred in schools, fast food restaurants and other venues across the country.  It was an anomaly, said Zimmerman. Signs posted on the beach said “you can’t have alcohol, you can’t have a fire, you can’t have a dog, but you can bring your gun?”  So Zimmerman had her officers patrol the beach, telling the gun toters, what they were doing was legal—and the police would respect that—but at the same time, they would be on the beach to answer any questions from the public.  Eventually the Legislature revoked the ‘open carry’ law for handguns and long guns.

Zimmerman was incident commander when a  pilot bailed out of an FA-18, and it crashed into a home in University City, killing four members of a family.  She worked two large wildfires, both of which threatened her own home in Scripps Ranch.

Did she ever feel there was a “glass ceiling”—unspoken rules preventing women from getting ahead?

“If you can do the job, you get to do the job,” she answered.  “The standards are the same, as they should be.  You pass the tests, everybody has to.  It doesn’t matter if you are a male or a female, 6 foot 5 or 5 foot 4.  Everybody passes the same test.”

She added that she never worried during her career about promotions.  “If you had told me that I would be chief of police someday, it was never my goal.  It wasn’t a blip on a radar screen.  I just wanted to do the best job in whatever assignment I had.  The opportunities in the department are absolutely endless.  I didn’t stay in any assignment more than 3 to 4 years; I would switch from patrol division to another division, or from one detective assignment to another assignment.

“I’m curious, I love all aspects of it,” Zimmerman added.  “Everything is fresh; everything is new and exciting and you have the opportunity to help people.”

Our interview on Monday, April 7, turned to some of the issues she is facing as chief, among them, protecting San Diegans against hate crimes, dealing with allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of some police officers, and responding to perceptions among some minority groups that they are victimized by racial profiling.

“Usually a couple times of year, we will get leaflets that has a swastika on it, and other (non-Jewish) communities will suffer hate crime also, and we go out and thoroughly investigate,” Zimmerman said.

“We all want the same things,” she emphasized. “We all want to be safe in our neighborhoods.  It shouldn’t matter where you live. It shouldn’t matter your race, religion or orientation—none of that should matter.  Everyone should feel safe.”

She recommended that all institutions– schools, places of worship, businesses — “be vigilant.  We all have to look out for each other.  It is critically important that people look ahead and put procedures in place… Obviously during the High Holidays, we work closely with the temples, synagogues and with the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) to provide the extra eyes out there.”  During Ramadan, the police similarly work closely with the Muslim community.

It’s important for police to have ongoing relationships with all communities, and especially with institutions that might be at risk “so we know exactly what we are going to do.  We need preparedness for everything, whether it be a shooting, a power outage, a fire, an earthquake.  We have to be prepared and vigilant all the time.”

Zimmerman said that when she starts work each day, she reviews the list of police who are on duty, so that if something major happens, she will know who will be available to work over the next 12, 24 or 48 hours.  “We can’t prepare enough—any institution, school, mosque, supermarket, movie theatre, anything.”

Since being appointed chief by Mayor Kevin Faulconer and confirmed by the City Council, Zimmerman has been conducting Town Hall meetings, at which the subject of racial profiling by the police keeps coming up.  Meanwhile, she has to deal with several officers who have been accused of sexual misconduct.

“Let me first deal with racial profiling,” she responded to questions about these topics.  “Even if one person in the community has the perception that our department racially profiles, then we need to change that perception to make sure that it is one of cooperation with our community.  I don’t think we have done as good a job as we should have so far as effectively communicating why we have stopped somebody.  If we could take a little longer, those extra seconds to say why we stopped somebody, to give them the explanation, I think that would go a long way.  If the perception is there, that is the reality for the community, and we, as a community policing department, we need to trust the community.

“It takes year upon years to build up the trust of a community and it can take seconds to erode that trust away,” Zimmerman comment.  “And so that goes to the other question – I won’t just say ‘sexual misconduct’ but any misconduct.”

Holding up the badge she wears on her uniform, the chief declared:  “This badge that I proudly wear, that we all proudly wear, it is not just a piece of polished metal.  It represents the people of San Diego. It is our symbol of service above self, of professionalism, of honesty, of integrity and of the oath that we all took.  And to put it in perspective, we get about 1.3 million calls that come into our communications center every single year.  We have 300,000 enforcement contacts, be it an arrest, a citation, a field investigation, a report.  We come in contact with millions of people… and these few incidents over these years have overshadowed all that great work.  For those few officers who have made the terrible decision to discredit our badge, dishonor our noble profession, we don’t want them in our department.

“That is why the professional standards division under my administration is coming back,” she added.  “Their main purpose, and I don’t talk a lot about it because I want it mysterious, their main purpose is to go after those very few who have overshadowed the fantastic and great work that our officers and civilian personnel and volunteers have done every single day.  It is not easy to become a San Diego police officer; there are very stringent requirements.  We’ve gotten it right a thousand times over the years, but we haven’t gotten it right every time.  That is why I absolutely welcome this Department of Justice cops program assessment to come in because if they can show us, somehow tell us, how we can improve our processes that we don’t even have to hire someone who is going to make the terrible decisions to dishonor our badge, I want to know this information.  I want to know this so we don’t have to hire them.”

The police chief said she is encouraged by what she has heard from other cities about officers wearing small video cameras to record their field contacts. She said it can have a positive effect on both the police officer and the civilian who is being interviewed.  Both know that what they say and do will be subject to review.

On the subject  of hiring, Zimmerman put in a pitch to anyone who might be reading this article:  “We are in a major hiring mode,” she said.  “We have half of our department eligible to retire in the next four years and about half of our patrol force has six or fewer years in our department, and for some commands it is closer to 70 percent. We are in challenging times right now, because it is so competitive for police officers.  Last year, I gave about 3.5 percent of the people who applied a job offer—not many, the standards here are very high.  If someone would like an honorable career, a noble career, an opportunity to make a positive difference in somebody’s life every single day, we’re hiring.  If you know of somebody who is interested in becoming a police officer, contact our recruiting unit, 531-COPS or www.joinsdpdnow.com .

Zimmerman also invited community members to become volunteers, saying “if just 1 percent of our communities were all working together, that’s a force multiplier of 13,500 people.  That is not just a team, that’s a championship team that can’t be beat.”

There is the RSVP (Retired Senior Volunteer Program) which involves teams of two riding in a specially marked patrol car, and keeping an eye on various neighborhoods; the Neighborhood Watch program, and Volunteers in Policing (VIP), “which is mostly inside, taking phone calls, giving information, tips on crime prevention, filing.”  Another important volunteer opportunity is for “crisis interventionists, who are on call 7/24.  Let’s say we get a call about someone who committed suicide.  It’s not a criminal investigation, but the family needs assistance.  With the short resources that we have –we are one of the lowest staffed major city police departments—we do the training and they know what needs to be done, and they can walk the family through the steps.  The officers can go back to answer other radio calls.”

Moreover, she said, “we have cadets for young individuals who maybe want a career in law enforcement, and we have chaplains who assist out there.  There are a lot of ways to get involved with the police department.”

Our interview concluded much as it started, with the chief expressing the kind of values that would have made her father proud, so much in keeping were they with the “Zimmerman Code.”

She said she would like to see “everyone working together from the different communities, talking together about how to solve problems, building those relationships, talking to each other.  It gives everybody ownership of the entire city!”

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Donald H. Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World, which seeks sponsorships to be placed, as this notice is, just below articles that appear on our site.  To inquire, call him at (619) 265-0808 or contact him via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com