Hi-​​Tech Cop Moves Up

I’m not expect­ing a box of candy or any­thing. Or even a thank you note. It’s just coin­ci­dence, of course, that a month after I pro­filed Ron Huberman the ex-​​cop behind many of Chicago’s high-​​tech crime fight­ing efforts he gets appointed as Mayor Richard Daley’s new chief of staff.
Huberman was brought in last Wednesday, “the same day that a cen­tral fig­ure in a City Hall con­tract­ing scam was sen­tenced in fed­eral court,” the Chicago Tribune reports. “Huberman said that ‘first and fore­most’ among Daley’s march­ing orders is to ‘help restore tax­pay­ers’ con­fi­dence in the integrity of city gov­ern­ment.’”
Later Wednesday, Daley intro­duced Huberman to more than three dozen city depart­ment heads at a meet­ing where, to “stunned silence,” the mayor “read them the riot act,” accord­ing to a city offi­cial who was present.
Daley told them that Huberman “is going to look at your depart­ment and your per­for­mance; if you have a prob­lem with that, you are out,’” the offi­cial recounted.
In his pre­vi­ous jobs in the police and emer­gency man­age­ment depart­ments, Huberman also looked for ways to shove the least pro­duc­tive through the door. CLEAR, Chicago’s mas­sive police data­base project, started out as a tool for fight­ing crime. Huberman wanted to turn it into pink-​​slip machine, accord­ing to Northwestern University pro­fes­sor Susan Hartnett, a long­time CPD watcher. By track­ing cops’ arrests and their hours, Huberman hoped to “get rid” of the Chicago police’s “bot­tom third” — the offi­cers for whom “there’s noth­ing you can do,” she observes.
Huberman put it to me more judi­ciously, say­ing, “We want to save offi­cers — ID them when they’re falling off the right course early in their career.“
CLEAR’s per­son­nel suite won’t be done for months, maybe years. The sys­tem may not even get built at all, with­out Huberman actively pro­mot­ing it.
If there’s a knock on Huberman, it’s that when he’s push­ing his projects, he gets too caught up in the hype. “He some­times sort of believes the future is the present,” one col­league says.
Anyway, here’s a bit more about Huberman — parts of last month’s Wired story that didn’t make it into the final draft:

Huberman doesn’t want to be here, peer­ing in on perps from 15,000 feet away, star­ing at the shim­mer­ing video wall and the PC mon­i­tor banks. “Too clin­i­cal,” Huberman says. He’d rather be out in the streets, where he spent four years as a beat cop and a gang spe­cial­ist in Rogers Park. Huberman fell in love with police work, “the plea­sure of lock­ing up the bad guy the jus­tice of it all,” from “day one” at the acad­emy. (The fact that his Israeli-​​immigrant par­ents were mugged when he was six years old wasn’t that much of an inspi­ra­tion, he insists.)
On the beat, he was known as an eager over-​​achiever. When he dis­cov­ered a dou­ble homi­cide, he did more than the front­line cop’s duty to fill out the ini­tial paper­work, and make the cus­tom­ary rounds; Huberman found the lead suspect’s mom, and per­suaded her to con­vince her son to turn him­self in.
Even now, work­ing seven-​​day weeks as the head of the city’s Office of Emergency Management, Huberman still likes to go out on patrol, just for fun, once a month, with his old part­ner, Sgt. Greg Hoffman an 11-​​year vet­eran who keeps a revolver on his hip and a can of chili in his desk drawer…
Ron Huberman has long been a believer in the trans­for­ma­tive power of secu­rity, in “using the police depart­ment not just for law enforce­ment, but to pro­mote social change,” as University of Chicago pro­fes­sor Pastora Cafferty puts it. Back when he was a beat cop, Huberman stud­ied under her, get­ting dual mas­ters degrees in social work and man­age­ment, while rid­ing a squad car at night.
During a stint with a Washington law enforce­ment think tank in the late 90’s, Huberman went home to his native Israel, and helped train West Bank cops. “For there to be peace, Palestinians had to learn to police them­selves,” he says.
For peace to break out on Chicago’s streets, law-​​abiding cit­i­zens had to be given a sense that the cops had their backs even when there wasn’t a Crown Vic on the cor­ner. That meant devel­op­ing a sys­tem, like CLEAR, that could help the police fig­ure out who the real crooks were. That meant putting silent, bul­let­proof sen­tries with flash­ing cobalt lights up on tele­phone poles, to let the bad guys know they weren’t wel­come any more. “This is about restor­ing a sense of order, about tak­ing streets from the gang­bangers,” Huberman says. 

May 26th, 2005 | Cops and Robbers | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.