Robert Martin
Robert Martin, the public safety director of Susquehanna Township, has always been a reader.
Growing up in Prospect Park, a borough just south of Philadelphia, he owned a copy of the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World, which he read constantly, along with the encyclopedia. As an adult, he keeps up the habit, consuming studies, usually related to law enforcement, and books, usually dealing with more cosmic themes. Last month, after finishing “Man’s Search for Meaning,” by the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl, he picked up “Biocentrism,” a monograph on the ascendancy of the biological sciences.
“When I watch TV, if I’m not watching sports, it’s the book channels, where they’re interviewing authors,” he told me, during a visit to his office, in a squat municipal building on Linglestown Road, one morning in early February. “That’s what I watch. My wife will come down and be like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ And I’m like, ‘That’s what I watch!’”
Martin is tall, with round cheeks and a friendly, wholesome manner—he greets acquaintances as “buddy,” he says “oh my gosh.” The day of my visit, he wore a suit with a purple patterned tie, black-framed glasses and a class ring from one of his alma maters, Valley Forge Military Academy & College in Wayne, Pa. He started serving Susquehanna Township in 1988 and retired this year as chief of police, a position he held for 16 years. Upon his retirement, the township appointed him to his new position, where he will continue to oversee the department, as well as the fire services.
In January, during his first press conference as mayor, Eric Papenfuse announced that he would be tapping Martin as a public safety consultant through the first six months of his term. Two days a week, Martin will advise Harrisburg’s own police chief on ways to strengthen the department. The arrangement will cost the city nothing—Susquehanna is underwriting one of the days, while Martin is donating the other one. In addition to any organizational recommendations, Martin will also focus on developing a strategy for community policing.
At first hearing, community policing can sound like a bit of public-relations pablum. It seems to take something that ought to be implied—what other kind of policing is there?—and dress it up to convey an impression of change. “Community Policing Defined,” a pamphlet distributed by COPS, an office of the U. S. Department of Justice, offers a snapshot whose opacity rivals David Brent, the master of “management speak” from the BBC series “The Office”: “Community policing is a philosophy that promotes organizational strategies, which support the systematic use of partnerships and problem-solving techniques, to proactively address the immediate conditions that give rise to public safety issues such as crime, social disorder and fear of crime.”
Nonetheless, at the mayor’s press conference in City Hall, everyone invoked the phrase with enthusiasm. Martin called Harrisburg’s chief, Thomas Carter, a “walking textbook of community policing”; Papenfuse announced a companion initiative, the appointment of a full-time “community policing coordinator,” whose job is to “revitalize citizen involvement in fighting crime.”
This is largely because the concept of community policing, however nebulous, has defined Martin’s tenure in Susquehanna Township—one that has been marked by a growth in the police force, a drop in crime, and a spike in citizen involvement. By his own accounting, the concept of community policing has motivated the design of his department’s website, has informed how he trains and promotes his officers, and has guided his interactions with the public, who seem to have responded, by and large, with grateful affection. Clearly the term means something. But what?
Well, for starters, it seems to be the sort of policing where being a voracious reader plays a role. Years ago, someone remarked to Martin, who holds two college degrees and certificates from Harvard and Princeton, that being a college graduate wouldn’t make him a better police officer.
“Well, it may not make me a better cop in terms of the nomenclature of writing a police report or making an arrest,” he told me. “But it will broaden my perspective of human beings. And I have a feeling, in some way, that’s gonna make me a better cop.”
Though Martin’s reading habits, as he puts it, make him “a little different from most police officers,” they’re also central to how he thinks of his profession, which, for him, is about much more than handcuffs and tickets. Nowadays, when he interviews officers being considered for promotion, he concludes by asking which book they’re reading. “I want my officers to be readers,” he said. “I want them to expand who they are.”
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The Department of Justice’s COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) office was formed by the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the Clinton administration’s omnibus crime bill and the largest law-enforcement act in the nation’s history. Among the law’s provisions were the Violence Against Women Act, the federal assault-weapons ban, now expired, and a boost to prison funding. The law also provided for close to $10 billion in grant money to be disbursed to law-enforcement offices around the country in support of “community-oriented policing.” The funds, though aimed mostly at hiring and retaining officers, could also be used for crime-prevention programs and for training in skills like conflict solving and mediation.
In addition to distributing grant money, the COPS office also serves as a repository for advice about best practices. One of the standbys of the COPS website is “The Beat,” a podcast featuring interviews with officers and other experts about developments in community policing. In February, “The Beat” released a series of interviews about a program called “Coffee with a Cop.” The program, which follows a national template, involves partnerships between local police departments and restaurants, which provide pots of coffee and seating space for officers to interact with the public.
“When you really look at how we communicate with the public, we are always answering emergency calls and never really have a chance to sit down and have a cup of coffee with somebody,” an officer tells the interviewer in one episode. “So, this is an opportunity to really just sit down and focus on some of the questions that might not be a 911 question.”
One of the tenets of community policing is the idea that citizens should have an open, even cordial, relationship with officers. The most dangerous invention in modern police work, Martin likes to say, is the climate-controlled patrol car—keeping officers from interacting with members of the public except in the event of a crime. An early recommendation he made to Harrisburg’s Chief Carter, which has already been adopted, is the institution of mandatory foot patrols, requiring officers to leave their vehicles for some part of each shift. Another initiative, which he implemented in Susquehanna Township under the name Operation Vigilant Protector, instructs officers to alert citizens of conditions that might invite criminal activity.
“I wanted one more kind of block in our system that got the officers out of the car and sent a message to our citizens that we’re not just driving around,” Martin told me. His department supplies officers with salmon-colored cards to be placed as a cautionary note at the scene of the crime-in-embryo: on the windshield of an unlocked car, say, or on top of unsecured property in someone’s yard.
“They come out for work in the morning, and they see that vigilant protector card on their windshield, their first thought might be, ‘Oh my God, it’s a parking ticket,’” Martin said. “No, it’s a little warning card saying, ‘Hey, you left your doors unlocked, and it’s probably a good thing to lock your doors before you go to bed.’ Then they know, ‘Wow, what a nice gesture from the police department. I appreciate that.’”
This service-oriented approach can even extend to circumstances that might customarily be adversarial. Another hallmark of Martin’s tenure is the judicious use of warnings in place of citations. “I think that one of the greatest tools a police officer has in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a written warning,” he told me. He sees the routine traffic stop as an instrument with “exponential value.” For the drivers pulled over, it’s both an “opportunity to educate” and a chance to make a positive impression by engaging them politely and not saddling them (at least, not the first time) with a fine. And, “if you’re on that traffic stop for 10 to 15 minutes on Union Deposit Road, and 30 to 50 cars drive by, they’ve been impacted as well.“
“I’m a believer in presence,” he said.
Of course, a corollary of constant presence is the feeling of constant scrutiny of our daily lives. You don’t have to have criminal intentions to be wary of increased engagement from the men in blue. What about people who just want to be left alone? When I put this question to Martin, he thought for a moment, then replied, “I think that’s gonna be a small minority. I think folks want to feel protected, and they want to feel secure.” The website of the Susquehanna Township police department has an online form for submitting complaints and also one for complimenting his officers. Martin encourages citizens to use both. “I get an officer compliment online once a week,” he said. “It’s great.”
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One reason that community policing might elude easy definition is the slipperiness of that initial qualifier—“community.” The sort of folks who will show up for a meet-and-greet with cops over a coffee pot are probably not the sort who have had, historically, the most troubled relationship with the law. How should police go about engaging those portions of the community that, for one reason or another, have learned to distrust them?
Another initiative of Martin’s, which he began implementing around six years ago, is called Operation Honorable Endeavor. It encourages officers on patrol to approach young people they see and, basically, try to get a conversation going. He acknowledges that some aren’t responsive, but his response to officers is, “Keep trying.” “It’s incumbent on us to continue to extend the olive branch,” he said. As he likes to remind his officers, “You never know as a police officer when you have an opportunity to uplift a young person, who maybe does not have anything positive in their household. If you say something uplifting to them, maybe you’re the only person that week that said something uplifting to that young person. Think of that. Think of the power you have.”
As part of his professional development, Martin attended executive-training programs at Harvard and Princeton, where he learned, as he put it, to take “a bit more of a private sector view” of law enforcement. “As a police department, we’re not profit-driven, certainly, but we do have customers,” he said. “And our customers are the citizens we serve.” A concept often attached to community policing is that of “procedural justice”—the idea that the transactional parts of enforcement, like how officers treat offenders and how transparent their rules and procedures are, are essential to the perception of justice being served, and perhaps to justice itself. Some of the principles of community policing look less like principles of law and more like principles of good customer service.
This can apply not only to minor offenders, like speeding drivers, but also to more serious ones. Last year, a Susquehanna Township detective, Aaron Osman, helped solve a serial vehicle-theft case that concluded with an on-foot chase through the snow in the neighborhood of Bellevue Park, in Harrisburg. The perpetrator, an unusually short high school student, whom the officers nicknamed “Peewee,” evaded police for nearly an hour, at one point hiding under a car. After Peewee was apprehended, Osman told me, the two of them discussed the chase, almost comparing notes: “I told him, I give you some credit. I run three or four miles every day… ‘Dude,’ he’s like, ‘I slid underneath this truck and I hid underneath it. You ran by me, but you were about three houses up, when you looked down and you realized there weren’t footprints in the snow anymore.’”
I recounted this later to Martin, expressing my surprise at what it suggested about the relationship between criminals and police—how it could sometimes border on the friendly, or even the fraternal. “That doesn’t surprise me at all,” he said. “And that’s the mark of a really good detective. It really is.”
I asked him to elaborate. “Well, because, who’s to say that, five years from now, Det. Osman may have an opportunity where he needs that person as a source of information? Everybody remembers how they’re treated by law enforcement. Everybody remembers how they’re treated.”
Part of why Martin encourages his officers to read, he said, is that reading helps them understand others. And understanding others, in his view, is the key to good police work. “I look at our profession as, we’re in the human being business,” he said. “I mean, that’s what we’re in. The human being business. Human beings that need help. And as human beings, we’re a very complex thing.”
