The difference between guardian and warrior culture

Boston Globe

18 hours ago

In high school, McDonnell was a standout goaltender for the Don Bosco hockey team and played rugby in college. He wanted to be a cop, a Boston cop, specifically. But by the time he graduated from St. Anselm's with a degree in criminal justice, the budget cuts in the early 1980s forced by Proposition 2 1/2 made prospects of landing a police job anywhere in Massachusetts virtually impossible.
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He heard LAPD was hiring, so he headed out west, the first time he was anywhere west of New York. He prospered in the LAPD, hitting the streets, and hitting the books, rising through the ranks.
When Bill Bratton, the Dorchester native and former police commissioner in Boston and New York City, took over as chief of LAPD in 2002, he made McDonnell his top deputy. The community policing model implemented in LA during that era, which aimed to strike a balance between aggressive policing and better community relations, was
The partnership of Bratton and McDonnell, two Boston guys who grew up a few miles away from each other, did much to improve the performance, and the image, of LAPD, which had been mired in scandal, from the corruption of the Rampart Division's gang unit and the 1992 riots sparked by the acquittal of officers who beat Rodney King.
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Bratton eventually went back to New York, and McDonnell, after 29 years with LAPD, later went on to head the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
Last year, when Mayor Karen Bass appointed McDonnell LAPD chief, she
'Chief McDonnell will serve all communities of Los Angeles and work to make our city safer for all,' Bass said. 'He is a dedicated leader, an innovator, and a change maker.'
There is no one on earth who knows more about the capabilities, and vulnerabilities, of the two biggest law enforcement agencies that safeguard the 4 million people living in LA and the 11 million in the county than Jim McDonnell.
So when he says the LAPD and the Sheriff's Department, with nearly 20,000 sworn officers and deputies between them,
'We're nowhere near a level where we would be reaching out to the governor for National Guard at this stage,' McDonnell told CNN on Wednesday night.
Unfortunately, President Trump believes he knows more about policing than McDonnell, so the White House has unilaterally deployed 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to the city.
McDonnell's friend, Ed Davis, thinks that's a huge mistake.
Davis, the former Boston police commissioner, now runs a security consulting company that counts the Globe among its clients. He said McDonnell would ask for help if he needed it.
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'This has nothing to do with pride,' Davis said. 'Jim knows what he needs on the ground, and with assistance from the Sheriff's Department and other local police agencies, he does not need the military.'
Davis said there are cultural differences between police agencies that are under civilian control and military forces. The key difference is police have a guardian culture, while the military has a warrior culture.
'We are trained differently,' he said. 'The police are trained to de-escalate conflict. The military are trained to kill people, to bring overwhelming, lethal force. That's not what is needed right now in LA. You need to take air out of this balloon. And putting the military on the street is not helping to do that.'
A spokesperson for the military's Northern Command said that before they were deployed to LA's streets on Wednesday, the
Learning such techniques on the fly, over the course of a day or two, is a far cry from the months of training police receive in de-escalation in the academy, not to mention continuing in-service training.
Davis said McDonnell is right to be wary of Marines carrying M4 automatic rifles on the streets of Los Angeles. He said adding a military culture into a volatile situation inevitably creates a potential nightmare scenario like Kent State, where in 1970 Ohio National Guard troops opened fire during an antiwar protest, killing four students.
The lack of clearly understood and agreed upon rules of engagement, meanwhile, raises potential conflicts between the police and military, Davis said.
All of it, he adds, needlessly.
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'There's no compelling reason to activate a military force,' Davis said. '
'In every crisis I've been involved in, everybody has been in lockstep, from the president to the police commanders in the field about reducing tensions, de-escalation. This is different. Tough talk out of Washington is inflaming the situation. And it puts Jim McDonnell and people on the ground in a tough spot. Cooler heads need to prevail here.'
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at