David Couper

Last updated 12:31 p.m. EST, Jan. 8, 2016

By David Couper

When I joined the police over 50 years ago, I was a newly discharged Marine in search of a night job so I could attend college, get my degree and go back into the Marines as an officer. With few exceptions, the Marines wanted college graduates as their leaders. I soon found myself in the midst of the civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War. There was racism, violence on the streets and a great dislike of protesters. One might say that not much has changed.

I remember thinking, I needed to stay in law enforcement and carry out what I believed police should do in a free society: Guard and protect people and their rights.

I never went back into the Marines. When I received my bachelor’s degree, I was a newly promoted detective in Minneapolis in the wake of the Miranda decision in 1966. My senior colleagues were distraught about having to inform suspects of their rights, and some even gave up interviewing arrested individuals. I saw the change in procedure as an opportunity, and part of what policing in a democracy was all about.

And so I read suspects their rights and solved crimes by simply being respectful to those we arrested. Is policing rocket science? No, it’s simply common sense. In fact, Robert Peel and others had written about these principles of policing more than 100 years earlier while forming the London Metropolitan Police.

In 1967, the report of President Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice was released. It gave me a strong vision for the future. I knew then I wanted to be a leader who would try to improve policing. I continued my education while still working in the department by pursing a graduate degree in sociology.

With a master’s degree and nine years of street experience, in 1969, I was chosen to lead a newly formed police department in Burnsville, a suburb of Minneapolis. Burnsville was where I had the opportunity to...