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Dr. James Hardt and Three of California’s Police Chiefs
In his years pioneering Alpha brainwave feedback at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. James Hardt trained more than students and seekers. He trained leaders, including three of the most prominent law-enforcement figures in California: the chiefs of police of Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Francisco. It is a quiet measure of how far this work reached, that the men responsible for policing millions of Californians sat down with Dr. Hardt to learn to change their own brainwaves.
The three cities and their forces
Among these three, the order by population is not the order by police strength, a contrast that turns out to carry a story worth telling.
Nationally, the Los Angeles Police Department is the third-largest municipal force in the United States, behind only New York City and Chicago. San Francisco’s department ranks around eighteenth. San Jose, remarkably, does not appear among the country’s twenty-five largest police forces at all, even though San Jose is a larger city than San Francisco and among the dozen largest in the nation.
That is the striking fact: San Jose is the bigger city, yet it fields roughly half the officers of San Francisco, and by population it runs at about 0.95 officers per thousand residents, against a national average near 2.4. It polices a million people with about a third of the per-capita force of Los Angeles or San Francisco.
The three chiefs
What the record shows about each
One number sits underneath all three of these stories. When NIOSH counted which single factor connected to the most problems across more than 2,200 officers, Anxiety came first with 27 significant relationships at the .01 level, against 14 for the next highest. These three Chiefs did not need the table to know it. They had watched it in their own departments for decades.
Chief Thomas J. Cahill led the San Francisco Police Department from 1958 to 1970, the longest-serving police chief in the city’s history. He trained with me at UCSF after his years as Chief. By about 1992 we were far enough along together that we were planning to launch a company to deliver brain wave feedback training to police officers, for stress reduction and peak performance. The recession then at its worst stalled it. I asked him for a letter of support for the 1995 grant; the record does not show that one was filed, and I would rather say so than imply otherwise.
Chief Daryl F. Gates of Los Angeles trained with me at the Drake Institute in Southern California. I had no permanent equipment there, no sound-proof chamber and no polygraph, so I ran his sessions on my own four-channel portable unit. He arrived in his official police limousine with a driver and a bodyguard, both of whom waited the driver outside and the bodyguard inside the Drake Institute while he trained with me.
One of his own enthusiastic reports of what changed was about physical fitness that had extreme relevance to policing. He ran daily, a long and difficult route ending in a climb up a steep hill. After only a few days of Alpha training he said he now came to that hill not with dread but with enthusiasm, and he had the energy, the stamina and the breath to breeze up what had been a painful endurance test before his Alpha training.
Dr. Joseph D. McNamara of San Jose took the seven-day training in 1992 and said at the end of it that every police officer in the country should do it. He is the one who then opened the San Jose Police department's door.
Thomas J. Cahill (San Francisco). Chief of the SFPD from 1958 to 1970, the longest-serving police chief in San Francisco’s history.
Daryl F. Gates (Los Angeles). Chief of the LAPD from 1978 to 1992, who built one of the most influential police organizations in the world. He originated the modern police SWAT concept and co-founded the D.A.R.E. drug-education program adopted by thousands of schools across the country.
Joseph D. McNamara (San Jose). Chief of the San Jose Police Department from 1976 to 1991. A former Harlem beat officer who rose through the NYPD, led the Kansas City police, and earned a doctorate from Harvard’s Kennedy School, McNamara was as much scholar as cop. After San Jose he became a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
The lean force: credit where it is due, to Chief Joseph McNamara
San Jose’s remarkably small police force, relative to its size, is no accident of neglect. It is, in large part, the legacy of Chief Joseph McNamara. He was an early and aggressive champion of police technology and efficient management: he put computers in patrol cars and pioneered data-driven, computerized policing long before it was common, and he ran a cost-conscious, community-oriented department built to do more with less.
The results made his name. Under McNamara, San Jose became known as one of the safest large cities in America while carrying the fewest police officers per capita of any big city in the country, a model the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held up as an example for the nation. The efficiency that lets San Jose police a million residents with under a thousand officers is widely and rightly credited to Chief McNamara’s cost-cutting and his embrace of automation. It is a legacy of doing the hard thing well, with less. Dr. McNamara was invited to be a Fellow at the prestigious Hoover Institute at Stanford University.
The through-line
These were not soft men in soft jobs. They carried the stress of command over the safety of millions. That Dr. Hardt trained leaders at this level speaks to the same thread of mastery that runs through his five decades of work and through the detailed first-responder case histories in this collection of Case Studies: the conviction that even those under the heaviest pressure can learn to master their own inner states, and that the tool for it is the trainable human brain itself, and that Dr. Hardt has developed, refined and proven a technology and a method for effectively training the human brain.