The high-school dropout who turned ‘Murder Capital USA’ into a model of how to police a city

As a life trajectory it takes some beating – even in the US, that land of eternal reinvention. At the age of 14 Cathy Lanier dropped out of high school. She was pregnant at 14, an unmarried mother at 15. Then at 23 she joined the police, starting as a beat patrolwoman. By the time she was 39, she had a couple of Masters degrees. More to the point, she was appointed chief of police of America’s capital, a white woman in charge of maintaining law and order in a city where blacks account for half the population.

These days success stories relating to public service in Washington are rare. Until she stunned the city last week by announcing her resignation after almost 10 years in the job, Lanier was its most popular official (with the possible exception of Barack Obama, who racked up 93 per cent of the DC vote here in 2012). All the more remarkable, the object of such esteem has been a police officer, at a time when America’s police have rarely been under such hostile scrutiny.

Amid the recent tumult, Washington has been the dog that didn’t bark. In some cities police/community relations have all but broken down. A string of police killings across the country of young and usually unarmed black men who posed no threat was followed in July by revenge murders of nine police officers in Baton Rouge, Dallas and San Diego.

In Baltimore, 40 miles up the road from the capital, the police have behaved like an occupying army, sparking riots in depressed black neighbourhoods. A blistering report by the federal Justice Department this month found “systemic deficiencies”, and accused the Baltimore police of racism and trampling on the civil rights of the city’s disadvantaged. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, often described as “the most segregated city in America,” two nights of arson and violent protest erupted last week after police shot dead an armed black man.

In times not so very far past, Washington would surely have been in the thick of this terrible action. Consider the mayhem when I first arrived here in 1991. That year – Lanier’s second on the force – there were a record 479 murders in a city of 600,000 people. For the media, Washington DC was “Murder Capital USA”. Lurid crime stories had the perfect lead, “just [insert a number] blocks from the White House…” Parts of the federal city were indeed virtual no-go areas.

But compare Washington right now with major US cities such as Chicago, plagued by a soaring murder rate and low police morale, its force’s image further stained by this week’s news that seven officers will be fired for falsifying reports over the 2014 death of an unarmed and unthreatening black teenager, shot 16 times by the police. By contrast Washington’s annual murder rate has fallen by three quarters – and no incident of brutal police over-reaction has made national headlines.

The US capital isn’t perfect, far from it. Overall crime rates are well down since Lanier took over in 2007, but murders in the city jumped 54 per cent last year (although the total has dropped back in the first eight months of 2016.)

The departing police chief can’t claim all the credit. Crime and murder rates in the capital were dropping well before she took over, and similar trends have been registered across the country, for reasons that still puzzle many criminologists. Some put the improvement down to tougher sentencing laws, others to smarter policing; some even to the removal of lead, often linked to crime and violent behaviour, from petrol, pipes and paint

The city’s collective psychology has surely played a part too. These days Washington is visibly booming, diversifying out of its staple industry of politics. DC still has big problems, but it feels better about itself than in decades.

That said however, Lanier has been a template for the modern US big city police chief. She was always data-driven, and technology has been a constant priority; she was one of the first advocates of body-worn cameras for police. In Washington, she has been a deft and dedicated practitioner of community policing, whereby officers build up trust from the ground level.

She’s no softie. Back in her beat days, Lanier won prizes for making the most arrests. As police chief she was criticised for imposing checkpoints around violent neighbourhoods, a move subsequently deemed unconstitutional. After the 2013 Navy Yards mass shooting here, in which 13 people were killed, she caused a stir by urging citizens caught up in a shooting rampage to fight back if they could, even before police arrived at the scene.

Nor has she ever been popular with the police unions, who have blamed her for presiding over a reduction in the 4,000-strong DC force, and scrapping its specialist drugs and vice squads. Last year, a ballot (albeit one in which only a third of DC union members took part) produced a 97 per cent no-confidence vote in Lanier.

The rest of Washington however, disagrees. Subordinates grumble Lanier is hard to reach but she gave her direct phone number to local community leaders, and expected cops on the beat to do the same – “to give their cellphone number to the old lady sitting on her porch drinking her beer at 9 o’clock in the morning, instead of making her dump her beer,” as she once put it. And often she would be at a crime scene, reassuring the public and consoling victims.

These of course are as much political skills as police ones and unsurprisingly there was talk of her running for DC mayor. Lanier’s next stop however, is head of security for the National Football League, and presumably a big jump in pay. The job ranges from making sure the Super Bowl is safe to keep NFL players out of the legal scrapes which have so discredited the league. Most importantly, she will provide PR skills which the organisation, never exactly female-friendly, so sorely lacks.

And after that who knows? Maybe, indeed, politics. Lanier is only 49. For the moment though, the big loser is Washington – not to mention a national police community that needs every poster-child it can get.