Kooi’s New Book Asks What Makes a Good Police Chief

Brandon Kooi

For a lesson in what makes an effective police chief, Aurora University Professor Brandon Kooi scoured the lives of law enforcement leaders going back more than a century.

What he found were characters that made their marks, not by following old traditions, but by critically pushing for change.

Kooi, professor of criminal justice at AU, wants more people to understand America’s imperfect history of police leadership. His new book, “Seven Highly Effective Police Leaders: 1895–Modern Times,” ranks the top seven greatest police chiefs in U.S. history and takes a look at law enforcement as it relates to race.

AU spoke with Kooi about his book and what he sees as the future of policing.

Aurora University: How did you settle on these seven particular police leaders to profile?

Brandon Kooi: I chose each leader in the book to showcase important pieces of American history that tie into modern policing. All of these leaders — Teddy Roosevelt, August Vollmer, O.W. Wilson, Penny Harrington, Bill Bratton, Chuck Ramsey, and Chris Magnus — were trailblazers in police reform.

AU: Were you surprised by any of the themes that emerged as you wrote?

Kooi: Yes. When leaders govern by fear, it typically leads to chaos. Police leaders who were effective, I found, catered less toward being very disciplinary and restrictive with their patrol officers. Instead, they encouraged creativity and were transparent with the data in a collaborative way.

AU: Who was the most fascinating figure you wrote about?

Kooi: August Vollmer, the first police chief of Berkeley, California, was one of the most interesting. He is considered the father of police professionalism. He was there at the turn of the 20th century advocating for the job of policing to be more oriented to social work while also pushing for officers to earn their college degrees. He was one of the first to bring in fingerprinting and a polygraph, which later was shown to have flaws, but he was constantly experimenting.

AU: You profiled the first female police chief. Tell us about the role of women in changing policing.

Kooi: Penny Harrington was the first major-city female police chief in U.S. history. She sued the Portland Police Bureau 42 times, half in federal court, in an effort to allow women to be promoted the same way male officers were, and she suffered a great deal as a consequence of her courageous trailblazing efforts.

I got to personally know Penny as I researched this book. She helped teach some of my classes at AU during the pandemic and even did some mock interview questions with our students. She was very excited to speak with female students who desire careers in policing. She passed away last year, but she had done a lot of work over the past 20 years to really push an increase in women in policing. The research on what women police leaders do for the subculture and the rank and file is promising. They’re less likely to use force, less likely to receive civilian complaints, and tend to be more emotionally stable than male police officers.

AU: What do you hope people learn by reading this book?

Kooi: I hope that it gives the perspective that policing is a noble profession that isn’t as threatened as some believe. I hear a lot of police leaders saying things like, “I would never let my kid go into this profession.” Or, “It’s changing too much.” The defunding movement has rattled a lot of people, but we are now seeing more reasonable conversations.

The evidence on how to more effectively police our country has been around for decades through the lessons of these seven highly effective leaders. Taking the best strategies from each and entering their leadership lessons into the national consciousness would do wonders for the reform movement.