Standing Tall : San Francisco Police Chief Fred Lau

	In 1970, Fred Lau was measured at 5-foot-7 inches tall. Exactly. To get into the San Francisco Police Department, you had to be 5-foot-8. The 21-year-old San Francisco State University student had dreamed of becoming a cop while growing up in Chinatown and had already passed the tough written exam, yet he was rejected outright. Like most other Chinese Americans of his generation, he didn’t measure up. The competitive young man with a compact and powerful body took to hanging by his legs at the gym, strapped into stirrups and weighted down with a 50-pound barbell, hoping against hope to stretch himself into the police department. He reasoned that even after a night’s sleep, some people are a half to three-quarters of an inch taller, so maybe, just maybe . . .
	Today, at 48-still eager, still athletic-Fred Lau is San Francisco’s police chief, believed to be the first Asian American to head a major city’s police force on the U.S. mainland. Ever since the San Francisco Civil Service Commission reduced its height requirements in late 1970 to let in the idealistic and superbly qualified young recruit, Lau has been a proud crusader for affirmative action and a diversified police force. “We’ve got to be realistic,” he says. “The playing field is not level yet, and the opportunities are not equal.” Affirmative action, he says, has been “the kick in the ass that people needed” to equalize opportunities for all segments of the population. The grandson of an immigrant, Chief Lau has seen the necessity for affirmative action from the bottom looking up. Now he is making sure that the same philosophy shapes the department, from the top down. He views it as part of his commitment to the many ethnic and other minority communities in San Francisco, an extension of the support that Chinese for Affirmative Action and other community groups gave him when he was first rejected as a cop despite a high ranking on the written entrance exam. What the young would-be cop and his allies had to battle was historical practice that had hardened into stereotypes, some of them overtly racist, others simply ignorant. They were told that a 5-foot-7¬ man couldn’t be a police officer because his baton would drag on the ground. They heard that short Chinese officers wouldn’t be able to protect themselves or their partners, although Lau’s supporters suggested that they seemed to be able to keep the peace in Hong Kong and China. Other opponents said that “because we were Asians we had relatives that were criminals or illegal immigrants,” Lau recalls, continuing the litany of stereotypes. “That we have relatives that were involved in gambling. We didn’t speak English properly.” And, Lau says, there was the familiar old chestnut, “Where were our loyalties? Was it to the United States? Or was it to our mother country?” He interrupts himself to exclaim, “I was born and raised here! Third generation here.”
	The head of the Police Officers Association at the time opposed any reduction of standards or qualifications for the department. “Why not just do away with height requirements altogether,” he testified, “and allow midgets in the department?” The then-police chief and the Police Commission urged in late 1970, soon after Lau’s initial rejection, that the Civil Service Commission bend its rules in special cases but put a “quota” of 5 percent on officers under 5-foot-8. The irony will not be lost on those who are accused of establishing “quotas” when they try to break down discriminatory barriers such as those that Lau and other Asian Americans faced at the time. Underlying the highly charged debate, says Lau, was an unspoken image of the ideal cop: “The six-foot white male. You had to be strong, you had to be tough, and you had to look the part.” He gives an analogy, which he says may sound “goofy” but is nevertheless appropriate: “You don’t use poodles as police dogs, although poodles are probably the smartest, the most agile dogs. It doesn’t fit the image.…Think about it. If you’re walking down the street and you see a poodle and a German shepherd, what’s a police dog? If you see me or somebody my size walking next to a six-foot white male police officer who had prior military experience, maybe belonged to an athletic team, what is your image of a police officer? But if you’re walking down a street in Hong Kong, what is your image of a police officer? If you’re in Vietnam, what is your image of a police officer? If you’re in Tuscaloosa, Ala. . . ?” After passing his physical exam with flying colors and joining the department, Lau became a vigorous advocate for opening the doors to other unrepresented and underrepresented groups, including women. “They found other ways to dissuade or reject other people of color and women,” he says, but his personal experience helped him to recognize the fallacy of standards applied to others that did not reflect a person’s ability to perform effectively as a police officer. Since 1979, the San Francisco Police Department has been diversifying under a federal court-supervised consent decree. For the city’s chief of two years, the program has been a source of great pride and not a grudging obligation. He follows the department’s monthly personnel “stat report” with intense interest, simultaneously recruiting aggressively in minority communities and devising new programs like physical conditioning regimens to help young women meet the department’s physical requirements-all in the interests of assuring that the department will look like the city it polices. The stat report, which charts his 2100 officers by race and gender, is a tool for effective affirmative action. The first step, he says, is to be aware of the problem. “Just keeping track. Just like domestic violence. You know, we never used to track domestic violence cases, but all it took was creating a little box in the incident report, and if it was a domestic violence case, you track it. You don’t get resources and grants and attention unless you are able to count the number of incidents.”
	Lau now can foresee the time when the department’s consent decree will be dissolved, with its objectives met. “Our goal is 50 percent minorities and 20 percent women,” he says, reaching into his desk drawer for the ever-handy stat report. As of September 1997, the department was 9.62 percent African American, 13.71 percent Hispanic, 11.42 percent Asian, 2.74 percent Filipino and .6 percent Native American-38 percent total, 12 points shy of the goal. Women constitute 15.1 percent of the force, 5 points below the goal. The Asian American figure translates to 229 officers. There were five when Lau applied to join the department-one-third of one percent of the force at that time. The chief’s commitment to a diversified police force started even before his initial rejection as a recruit. He was interested in social work and had been working with Youth for Service, an organization that focused on black gangs but also worked with some Asian gang members. Lau got to know two Chinese police officers. He was impressed with their dedication. But they were two of only four Chinese police officers, in a department that at the time numbered 1900-all of them men. After he joined the force, his special value became apparent to his superiors. As an intermediary between the department and demonstrators supporting Taiwan and others supporting mainland China, he helped avert a potential riot. “I was like a United Nations ambassador talking to three different countries.” Because of his cultural awareness, he could dispel the misunderstandings that each faction had of the others’ intentions and prevent violence. After a 1977 gangland-style assassination of five people at Chinatown’s Golden Dragon restaurant, Lau was on a task force that identified and successfully prosecuted the murderers. He served as a liaison with residents. “We developed such a good relationship with the community, we were able to break the case. We couldn’t have broken the case without the community.” On one occasion, Lau had to arrest some of the people that he had had roamed the streets with as a youth. “But we did it right. We didn’t beat them up, we didn’t abuse them, we didn’t abuse the powers. That’s the difference. That’s what affirmative action brings too. It brings a tremendous amount of understanding, of history. It brings a tremendous amount of compassion and patience, because we’ve been there. We know, we feel, and we exist with those people that we’re serving. It gives us that opportunity to really provide better service.” He is also very aware of his and other minority officers’ effect, as role models, on young people marginalized by their lack of self-esteem.
	He believes deeply that better service through a diversified police force does not entail any lowering of legitimate standards, nor does it bring any diminution of the rights of the majority. At every step of his rapid rise up the departmental ladder-from recruit to officer to inspector/sergeant and lieutenant, captain, commander, deputy chief, chief of inspectors and finally chief-Lau got there on ability…once the door was pried open. Even with equal opportunity, there are no gifts, he says. “You gotta earn it.” The chief believes with an almost palpable passion that his department’s outreach to women and minorities will allow others to earn it as he has, on their own merits. And he is convinced that the ultimate beneficiaries will not be individual members of previously underrepresented minorities but the public: “Call it a dream, call it a philosophy, call it principle, but the people deserve the best law enforcement and public safety that they can get. And the best is public safety that looks like, acts like and comes from them. Otherwise you might as well bring in the army.”