San Diego Police Chief William Lansdowne is well-known in law enforcement circles for wringing the most out of a thin staff, but locally he is recognized as much for his political decisions as for his police work.
Two years ago, he testified on behalf of a city councilman facing federal corruption charges, and he has urged the City Council to reduce City Attorney Michael Aguirre's authority.
To highlight the need for more police officers, he held up liquor licenses last year for dozens of new restaurants – a tactic Mayor Jerry Sanders made him drop in March.
That same month, he took on Aguirre again, refusing to serve a search warrant on a San Diego business in a political ethics investigation.
Lansdowne, who became chief four years ago, is comfortable taking controversial stands.
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PROFILE
William Lansdowne
Age: 63
Personal: Married for 12 years to Sharon, his second wife; they live in Fallbrook. Two grown sons from his first marriage: Greg, a Santa Cruz County sheriff's deputy, and Erik, who lives in the Bay Area. Three grandchildren: Cassandra, 6; William, 4; and Ryan, 18 months.
Education: Bachelor's degree in criminal justice administration, 1973, San Jose State University.
Military: California National Guard, 1966-72.
Career: Named San Diego police chief, 2003; San Jose police chief, 1998-2003; Richmond police chief, 1994-98; patrol officer, sergeant, lieutenant, captain, deputy chief and assistant chief in San Jose, 1966-94; volunteer reserve officer in San Jose, 1965-66.
Pay: $176,000 a year as San Diego's police chief. About $160,000 a year from his San Jose police pension.
Online: For a multimedia package, go to uniontrib.com/more/lansdowne
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“You can't have a weak chief,” he said.
Lansdowne gets to work before dawn, after an hour-long commute. The chief, 63, and his second wife, Sharon, a retired officer who graduated from the same police academy class 42 years ago, live in a sprawling home in a gated community in Fallbrook.
He regularly puts in 70-hour weeks.
“Some people say he's too much of a showman, but that's the worst thing you hear about him,” Assistant Police Chief William Maheu said.
Lansdowne grew up in San Lorenzo, a working-class city south of Oakland, and spent most of his 42-year career with the San Jose Police Department during the rise of Silicon Valley, leaving in 1994 to become chief of the Richmond Police Department. He returned to San Jose four years later to serve as chief, a position he held for five years before taking the job in San Diego.
Crime dropped in all three cities under Lansdowne. In San Diego, overall crime rose slightly in 2005 because of an increase in property crime, but it was back down last year. Violent crime dropped every year.
The decreases occurred as crime rates dipped nationally, but they also can be traced to Lansdowne's emphasis on street patrols and high-tech equipment.
Since taking over in San Diego, Lansdowne persuaded city leaders to add a total of nearly $120 million, or 43 percent, to the department's budget, even though the city has few dollars to spare. The budget is $390 million for the coming fiscal year, which begins July 1.
He promised that the money would help keep crime down. He made similar pitches in Richmond and San Jose.
“He's a relationship person, almost a politician in his own right,” San Jose Vice Mayor David Cortese said.
Cortese said Lansdowne knew how to squeeze the most out of a $1 billion city budget.
“He does a very good job of building alliances, making friends,” Cortese said. “He's absolutely charming when it comes to acknowledging the efforts of elected officials.”
Lansdowne said that just about everything he does – from marching in a gay-pride parade, to denying a liquor license, to speaking at a luncheon on gang violence – is seen as political.
Adjusting to San Diego politics was tricky after a lifetime in the San Francisco Bay Area. There, he didn't think twice about supporting medical-marijuana and needle-exchange programs, topics heavily debated in San Diego.
“Here, you have to be more careful with what you say and who you say it to, and what the connections are,” said Lansdowne, who is registered to vote as a nonpartisan but says he is “pretty liberal for San Diego.”
“I try as much as I can to stay out of politics, but you really can't do that here. So I try and make the right choices.”
Lansdowne has made mistakes, and says so.
The police union accused him of painting a rosier picture of crime statistics and emergency response times during the latest round of contract talks.
Lansdowne said he occasionally misspeaks. He also said he has never tried to fudge the numbers, not even when he told the City Council that crime in 2005 was at a 10-year low. Overall, crime actually had increased by 1 percent from the year before.
“I thought that came out of a report I had,” Lansdowne said. “But what I'm usually talking about is violent crime. But I mix the words up every now and then. I give them the best information I have. Sometimes it's not right on, but it's close.”
Officer Jeff Jordan is a union board member who has been critical of Lansdowne.
“I don't think the chief intentionally lies. But sometimes, he's vague,” Jordan said. “He has to keep the mayor, the officers and the taxpayers happy. If he loses the support of two of those groups, he'll be fired.”
A rocky relationship
It was clear from Lansdowne's first run-in with Aguirre that these two weren't going to be pals.
Ten days after Aguirre took office in December 2004, the city attorney asked Lansdowne to provide him with full-time police protection. Lansdowne denied the request as unwarranted.
Four months later, Lansdowne joined District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis in an attempt to take away the power of the City Attorney's Office to prosecute misdemeanors.
Dumanis showed up in the council chambers with Lansdowne, Sheriff Bill Kolender and San Diego County Public Defender Steve Carroll.
Aguirre felt ambushed and called the proposal a “political assassination attempt.”
The council later rejected shifting misdemeanor prosecutions to the District Attorney's Office, an idea Lansdowne still supports. He said it would save the city $2 million to $6 million a year – money the Police Department could use.
Later in 2005, the chief riled Aguirre and Sanders, a former San Diego police chief running for mayor at the time, when he voluntarily testified in federal court as a character witness for then-Councilman Michael Zucchet.
Zucchet and former Councilman Ralph Inzunza eventually were convicted of fraud, conspiracy and extortion for accepting money from Las Vegas strip-club associates in exchange for efforts to repeal a San Diego law banning touching between nude dancers and patrons. Inzunza was sentenced to 21 months in prison and is free on bond pending appeal. The judge acquitted Zucchet, but the government is appealing.
Indictments in the case were issued in 2003, a few weeks after Lansdowne became chief. He describes Zucchet as an acquaintance, someone he didn't think was guilty. He testified Zucchet was “professional,” “aboveboard” and “very competent.”
“You can't let politics interfere with what you believe in,” Lansdowne said.
At the time, Sanders said the testimony would have a lasting effect on the Police Department because detectives assisted federal investigators in the strip-club case. Aguirre said Lansdowne
should consider resigning.
Sanders says now that even when he doesn't agree with Lansdowne, he respects him.
“Bill considers what he's going to do and then he does it,” Sanders said. “Sometimes I agree and sometimes I disagree. The important thing is he thinks things through and takes a position.”
The mayor said he couldn't be happier with Lansdowne, who was worried about working for Sanders, the city's police chief from 1993 to 1999.
His worries were unfounded.
“He wants to know what's going on, but he lets me run the department,” Lansdowne said.
Recruiting and retaining police officers became the chief's greatest struggle within the department – and with Sanders.
Two years ago, Lansdowne started publicly saying that salary increases were essential. Sanders
facing a mountain of debt and other fiscal problems, opposed pay raises.
Roughly 100 officers have left for jobs with other departments since Sanders became mayor in December 2005. The agency is about 200 officers short of the 2,108 it would employ if fully staffed.
“He stuck up for his people, and I admire that,” Sanders said recently.
Last month, the mayor agreed to a 9 percent increase for most officers, beginning July 1.
Lansdowne said the increase has helped boost morale, but that it came too late.
“If I was in charge, I would have fixed it sooner,” the chief said, adding that closing the gap will take two years and more pay raises.
The shortage forced Lansdowne to get creative. In order to fully staff patrols, he has pulled officers out of regional task forces and reassigned detectives.
Some officers resent those decisions, but he believes street patrols are the best way to control crime.
“The core of the department – the most important part – is patrol,” Lansdowne said.
One of the other ways Lansdowne responded to the shortage of police officers involved liquor licenses.
Faced with an abundance of drunk-and-disorderly calls and not enough officers to handle them, the chief started blocking liquor-license applications last fall. The move affected dozens of businesses, some with hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake.
Two weeks after The San Diego Union-Tribune published a story about the issue, Sanders met with Lansdowne, who agreed to start processing the applications again if owners met certain conditions.
Sunroad squabble
In the latest battle between Lansdowne and the city attorney, the mayor took the chief's side.
In March, Aguirre asked Lansdowne to serve a search warrant on Sunroad Enterprises, which the City Attorney's Office is investigating.
Criminal misdemeanor charges later were filed against a Sunroad executive and former city employee, Tom Story, accusing him of illegally lobbying city workers for decisions favorable to an office tower Sunroad is building.
Lansdowne decided not to serve the warrant, saying it was too broad and lacked probable cause. He arranged a meeting to review the warrant with Dumanis, two lawyers from her office and the senior lawyer for the state Attorney General's Office in San Diego.
The day before that meeting, he called Sanders and told him about the warrant, a decision Aguirre has criticized because some of the people who could be a target of the investigation work for the mayor.
Lansdowne said the only time he wouldn't call the mayor would be if his office were investigating Sanders himself.
“Otherwise, there is no fire wall,” Lansdowne said. “He's my boss. I'm an at-will employee, and he's entitled to the information.”
Sanders said he set up a meeting between the chief and the city attorney to address Lansdowne's concerns.
By then, word of the warrant had leaked to Sunroad executives, who agreed to voluntarily turn over documents, Aguirre said. He canceled the meeting and accused Lansdowne of obstructing justice, a claim that infuriated the chief.
Aguirre said Lansdowne should have called him, not the mayor, or that the chief should have taken his concerns to the judge who authorized the warrant.
By calling Sanders, it's possible to conclude that the mayor told the chief what to do, Aguirre said.
But the city attorney says he has moved on.
“If I could persuade the chief to walk across the line and come to the other side, that would be the single biggest reform we could bring to San Diego,” Aguirre said.
Lansdowne brushes off the squabble.
“You have two very strong personalities,” he said. “We both believe passionately about what we do, and neither one of us would walk away from a fight if we believe it's in the best interest of our organization.
“But I've put it behind me – until the next time,” the chief added, laughing.
Tony Manolatos: (619) 542-4559; tony.manolatos@uniontrib.com
