Police Chief William Lansdowne was sleeping when the phone rang. He's used to calls in the middle of the night, but this one shook him.
An officer had been killed in a wreck on his way home from work.
Within an hour, Lansdowne and Assistant Police Chief William Maheu were at a substation discussing how to notify the officer's family. Lansdowne would visit the wife, Maheu the parents. They would ring the doorbells at the same time.
Before they left, Lansdowne's cell phone rang. It was 3:45 a.m. Maheu figured it was another call about the wreck. He didn't know the chief's cell phone is set to wake him up.
“It's my alarm,” said the chief, who is usually at work before dawn.
When Lansdowne left San Jose for San Diego four years ago, he said he wanted a new challenge.
Although he nearly doubled his income – he collects retirement from San Jose and a six-figure salary in San Diego – he hasn't played the role of a fat-and-happy chief nearing the end of his career. He has made numerous changes, large and small, and he's not finished.
“I figure I've got 10 years left in me,” said Lansdowne, 63. “I think in another year or two I'll have the department in good shape, and if it's still challenging to me, I'll stay.
“But I get calls. There's only 45 big-city chiefs in the country. It's like the NFL.”
Lansdowne manages 1,900 officers who police 1.3 million residents in a city that stops at the world's busiest international border.
He was the first outsider to be named San Diego's chief in 50 years.
Within weeks of his arrival, Lansdowne told officers they could carry weapons of their choice, instead of having to choose from a list of approved guns. That was after the department's weapons inspector told Lansdowne his own .45-caliber Les Baer handgun wasn't on the list.
After noticing his officers wore different uniforms at a funeral, he found out that a committee was considering new dress uniforms. He looked over the options and picked a navy-blue one. A committee member said the group would consider his recommendation.
“No,” Lansdowne said. “You don't understand. That's what I like.”
He bought a fleet of motorcycles and started a replacement program for patrol cars, some of which already had been driven 100,000 miles. He invested in technology, adding new equipment that, in some cases, helps officers do more with less.
“You've got to have good equipment if you're working with a small force; otherwise, you're wasting a lot of time,” Lansdowne said.
Specially equipped helicopters purchased a year ago for about $10 million have drawn interest from departments as far away as New Zealand. Each has night-vision cameras that can scan a canyon in 10 minutes while sending live feeds to command centers.
“He's probably the most popular chief we've had, because he came in and things started changing,” Officer Blaine Ferguson, a 13-year department veteran, said as he piloted one of the new helicopters above Petco Park.
Lansdowne has plenty of experience managing a thin staff.
San Jose, with 950,000 residents, is one of the only big cities in the United States with an officer-to-resident ratio smaller than San Diego's. San Jose has 1.4 officers per 1,000 residents. San Diego has 1.5.
Despite the staffing shortage in San Diego, violent crime dropped 13 percent under Lansdowne, reflecting a national trend and his emphasis on street patrols and high-tech equipment.
Most days, the chief gets to work at 5:30 a.m., though sometimes he spends the night toiling in his corner office at the East Village headquarters, with views of downtown and the San Diego-Coronado Bridge.
He occasionally puts on his uniform and handles radio calls, and he works a graveyard patrol shift every Christmas Eve.
“When you talk to him, you get the feeling that he still likes being a cop,” Ferguson said.
