Jacqueline Seabrooks: Alumna Takes the Helm as Inglewood Chief of Police

Alumna Jacqueline Seabrooks (Class of ’88, B.A. public administration) has in her office, among photos of loved ones and accolades from her 26-year career in law enforcement, a collection of giraffes.

“I really like them,” says the new Inglewood chief of police. “Have you ever heard a giraffe make noise? Do we eat them, are they chased for prey? Not really. They’re left alone. If they can get through their first few years, for the most part, they live a pretty good, long life. They have friends among the rhinoceroses. If you see them in the wild, they’re typically around rhinos and hippopotamuses. They have birds that help to keep them clean. And not too much bothers them.

“It’s sort of like my job: If you can get through the first few years and establish yourself, people leave you alone.”

Seabrooks took the reins of Inglewood’s police department in October, following 24 years at the Santa Monica Police Department, where she served as captain, acting chief of police and was in charge of the department’s Office of Criminal Investigations. Dateline had the opportunity to visit with the second woman in Los Angeles County to hold down a top law enforcement position, and the first African American female chief of police in Inglewood’s history, to talk about her career, marketing a police department, and walking the dog.

Dateline: How did you start out with a career in law enforcement?

Jacqueline Seabrooks: I was 18 years old and going to Pierce College. School was kind of easy. It was one of those things where you just kind of go, “There’s got to be something else in life,” but what are you going to do?

One of my teachers came to me and said, “I have something that you might be a good fit for, but it’s really difficult and I don’t know if you can do it.” And I said, “Really...” So he gave me application to be a state police officer. I thought, “This is kind of interesting.” We had all watched “Dragnet” and had our ideas about the police, good and bad. But I thought this might be something to do and the money looked good.

I applied and thought I needed to understand more about what the police do and what their role is, so I transferred to East L.A. College and got involved in administration of justice courses and found I really liked it. I was fascinated by the law and the way it worked, the intricacies. It really helped hone my thinking, talking to teachers who were police officers, and I got the job.

Dateline: Are there still special challenges to being a female officer as opposed to being a male officer? What is particularly challenging for you?

JS: I would say that it’s really less about gender these days. It used to be a lot about gender and a lot about race, quite frankly. But these days, it’s more about public perception of the police. It’s about imaging and the changing expectations people have. And that’s very challenging because we’re a service business and sometimes people don’t understand how that service translates. They always want something good, warm and fuzzy, and quite frankly, good, warm and fuzzy don’t necessarily go with the police. We have a job to do that can sometimes be very difficult under the best of circumstances.

What is a special challenge for me? I’ve come from a place where I was comfortable because I spent 24 years there. I’ve come into a new culture, a new environment and an entirely new role that is only remotely related to the role that I held before, where I was a police captain and I oversaw a bureau. Now, I’m a police chief and I’m responsible for a police department and the issues associated with public safety in a city of 112,000 people. When you look at a map, [Inglewood ] is not that big. But there is a lot that happens here. We have a lot of density and with that come the problems of an urban environment. We have gang overlay, we have staffing concerns and fiscal issues. We have lots of commuter traffic through town. We have the people who live here, the people who pass through and the people who work here. So when you wrap that up, that’s a challenge for me: making sure that people don’t have to deal with what is a challenge for me.

Dateline: Was this a good career move?

JS: It was the best choice I could have made. I realized after the third week how much I’d been cruising in the job I had before. I knew the people, I knew the culture, I knew what to do. I trusted implicitly the people I worked with to do what they needed to do. And I really didn’t have too much of a challenge. I’d worked in all the command areas available to the captain, so it was like, “Okay, I’ve got a fourth floor office where I can look out on the beach.” So I had to find the things to keep me busy and engaged.

Here, the things that keep me busy and engaged are everywhere. There are people in the community to go out and meet, people over in city hall to go over and introduce myself to and try to understand how what they do impacts us and vice versa. There is managing the paperwork, walking around to provide support to my troops and take a look at what we need to fix. There is reorienting the organization and putting it on a better path, or just sitting here and staring out the window thinking about what should this police department look like for the community of Inglewood in 2010. So there’s plenty to do.

Despite any image problems the organization may have, we have an outstanding police department. The men and women here have worked under some extraordinarily difficult situations. And throughout all of that, there was a core group who went to work everyday, did exactly what they were supposed to do and then some, spent their own money in cases where people needed assistance or something was needed around here and were just absolutely committed. Absolutely.

And that doesn’t get put out to the public. What gets put out is, “That group of cops did something stupid.” Fine. But find me an organization where people don’t do something stupid and I’ll tell you you’re living in a fantasy land. We have not done a good job of putting our positive image in the right place and we let other people define the negative, because quite frankly, it sells newspapers, it gets people’s attention, it captures their imagination and it speaks to everything that they’re afraid of when they hear the word, “Inglewood.” Unfortunately, the weight of that, in some respects, has damaged the fabric of the organization.

Dateline: What are you going to do about that?

JS: We’ve got a slow and strategic plan. The first thing we’ve been doing is looking at all the business processes. I walk around and talk to people consistently and I hear, “This is the first time the chief has ever done this.” I tell my supervisors and managers and executive staff, “I’m going to be talking to your people behind your back. Not because I don’t trust you to give me information, but I need to hear it unfiltered.” And I need to see with my own eyes.

It’s not to say we’re totally dysfunctional. We have some systems issues that haven’t kept pace with professional expectations that we should have of ourselves and that the community should have of us.

Dateline: How do you market something as basic as law enforcement?

JS: People laugh when I say that you have to market the image of a police department. I get these looks that say, “You’ve got to be kidding, this isn’t a Fortune 500 company.” I have to explain to them that this is a $43 million tax-funded operation. We are a business. We produce widgets of a different kind. Our widgets are service-based. People don’t always want to buy our widgets, they don’t always want to see our widgets. And that’s okay. That doesn’t mean that what we’re doing isn’t important and good work. That just means that we have to redefine ourselves in accordance with that and we have to show this.

It’s all about marketing. We tend to not want to say that, because it’s government, and tax money. But because it’s that, there’s a different level of accountability. So we have an obligation to show what we’re providing in the ways that are meaningful to people.

If you can walk in your neighborhood at 10 o’clock at night with a dog that fits in your purse and you’ve got a Walkman on, that’s when you know that you feel safe in that community. And that the police department is doing its job.

- Reported by Sheila Butts and Joanie Harmon