Joseph McNamara, the former San Jose, California, police chief whose outspoken criticism of the gun lobby and Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates gave him a national profile as a progressive leader in law enforcement, died Friday at his home in Carmel, California. He was 79.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, his family said.

McNamara led the police force in Kansas City, Missouri, before becoming chief of San Jose’s police department in 1976. Over the next 15 years, until his retirement in 1991, he introduced broad reforms, including putting computers into patrol cars, hiring more women and minorities and emphasizing community policing.

He took high-profile stands against the National Rifle Association, posing for gun control ads that portrayed the group as indifferent to the dangers that lax laws created for the average street cop. He also was a vocal opponent of the so-called war on drugs, arguing that strict “lock ’em up” approaches were failing.

At the same time, he demonstrated his effectiveness as a crime fighter. During his tenure as chief, San Jose’s population grew by 40 percent, but major crimes – including homicide, rape, robbery, assault and burglary – dropped by 9 percent.

“He was clearly looked upon as a leader … within the field of progressive police executive leadership,” retired Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper said Tuesday. “He was particularly committed to his police officers being effective crime fighters but also honoring the civil liberties of the citizens they were hired to serve.”

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Shortly before he retired, McNamara became one of the most prominent law enforcement figures to publicly criticize Gates after his officers’ beating of Rodney G. King on March 3, 1991.

Gates had described the incident as an “aberration,” but McNamara suggested that a history of “Rambo-like” conduct painted a different picture of the Los Angeles Police Department and demanded a drastic remedy.

“The brutal videotaped beating of Rodney G. King by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department and subsequent opinion polls indicate that Police Chief Daryl F. Gates has failed both to maintain the integrity of his force and the confidence of the public,” McNamara wrote in an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times two weeks later. “He should retire from office. It is difficult to see the LAPD regaining its credibility with him remaining as its chief.”

McNamara’s disparagement prompted a quick retort. “I think he’s a damned oddball,” Gates said of his San Jose counterpart. But the LAPD chief ultimately resigned.

McNamara was himself no stranger to controversy. He was articulate and so frequently in the media limelight that critics accused him of being a self-promoter and grandstander. According to a 1991 profile in the Times, “some cops quipped that ‘he’d sell his mother on Mother’s Day for seven column inches and a photograph.’ ”

But McNamara, a Harlem beat cop who wound up with a doctorate from Harvard and wrote crime novels in his spare time, regarded speaking out on the issues of the day part of his job. “If you just sit on your hands because someone is going to attack you as grandstanding,” he said, “then you’ve sold out.”


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