Lee Patrick Brown 1937–

Mayor of Houston

Lee Patrick Brown was one of the leading law-enforcement executives in the United States before Houston voters elected him as the first African American mayor in that city’s history. During a long and distinguished career as head of police departments in Atlanta, New York, and Houston, Brown helped to reshape the strategies by which urban communities battled crime. He even served as America’s “Drug Czar” in the Clinton administration before becoming mayor of the fourth-largest city in the nation.

Brown was born in 1937, in Wewoka, Oklahoma, a small community his parents, Andrew and Zelma, had departed by the early 1940s for the fertile San Joaquin Valley in California. There they found work in the fields as migrant workers, an enterprise in which Brown himself often participated, helping to pick grapes, cotton, or watermelon. At times the family lived in a barn, but the hardship of his early life fortified in Brown a desire to improve his lot. Enrolling at Fresno State University, he studied criminology, and before even finishing his degree had found a job with the San Jose Police Department. He spent eight years on the force, beginning as a patrol officer in 1960, and went on to work in its narcotics and vice squads as an undercover cop. In 1959 he married Yvonne Carolyn Streets, with whom he would have four children.

Snubbed Over Technicality

Brown had earned his undergraduate degree in 1961, and began taking classes toward a master’s degree in sociology at San Jose State University, which he achieved in 1964. In 1968, after earning his second master’s degree—this one in criminology, from the University of California at Berkeley—he applied for and was granted a leave of absence when Oregon’s Portland State University hired him to create a new faculty department, the Department of Administration of Justice, in 1968. Brown returned to San Jose in 1969, and planned to run for a seat on its city council. His residency was called into question, however—during his stint in Portland, Brown had let his voter’s registration expire, and because of this the San Jose city clerk disbarred him from seeking candidacy.

In 1970, Brown was awarded a Ph.D. in criminology from Berkeley, making him one of the most academically

At a Glance…

Born October 4, 1937, in Wewoka, OK; son of Andrew and Zelma (Edwards) Brown; married Yvonne Carolyn Streets, July 14,1959 (died, December, 1992); married Frances M. Young (a teacher), December 29, 1996; children: (first marriage) Robyn, Torri, Jenna, Patrick; (second marriage) one stepdaughter. Education: Fresno State University, B.S., 1961; San Jose State University, M.A. (sociology), 1964; University of California—Berkeley, M.S. (criminology), 1968, Ph.D., 1970. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Methodist.

Career: San Jose Police Department, San Jose, CA, began as patrol officer, 1960, left force, 1968; established the Department of Administration of Justice at Portland State University, Portland, OR, 1968; Howard University, Washington, D.C., professor of criminal justice, 1972-75; Multnomah County sheriff, Portland, 1975-76, director of Justice Services, 1975-78; public safety commissioner, Atlanta, GA, 1978-82; Houston Police Department, chief of police, 1982-90; New York City police commissioner, 1990-92; Texas Southern University, Houston, faculty member, 1992-93; appointed by President Bill Clinton as director of the Office of DrugControl Policy, 1993; Rice University, Houston, professor of sociology, 1996; elected mayor of Houston, 1997, re-elected to second two-year term, 1999-.

Selected memberships: National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives; Police Executive Research Forum; Narcotic Enforcement Officers Association; National Forum for Black Public Administrators; National Police Athletic League.

Addresses: Office—City Hall, 901 Bagby St., Floor 3, Houston, TX 77002.

astute young African Americans in law enforcement. This was also a time when the majority of urban police departments were still overwhelmingly unintegrated. The very idea that the racial makeup of a police department should reflect the community in which it serves was considered quite radical at the time.

A New Era Begins

In 1972, Brown began teaching at Washington’s D.C.’s Howard University, and spent three years there. He returned to the West Coast when he was hired as sheriff of the Portland area’s Multnomah County in 1975, a post in which he served one year. He continued to act as director of the county’s Justice Services until 1978, when he was named public safety commissioner of Atlanta, Georgia. His four years there as head of the city’s police department was a period that coincided with one of the most frightening series of unsolved murders in recent American history, the Atlanta Child Murders.

As a result of this high-profile post, Houston Mayor Kathy Whitmire hired Brown as her city’s first African American chief of police in 1982. He was asked to take over a force that many African American and Hispanic community leaders had long accused of unnecessary brutality. Racism was also rampant within its ranks. During his seven years in Houston, Brown made vast improvements in the reputation, performance, morale, and crime-fighting effectiveness of the police force. A minority recruitment drive was implemented, and classes in cultural sensitivity became mandatory. Although Brown publicly supported his police force, he also ordered that “repeat offenders” in brutality complaints be dealt with harshly.

Community Policing Controversy

Brown’s programs created a new era for the Houston police force. “There was an embrace by poor and moderate-income communities—that the police force was there for them,” County Commissioner El Franco Lee told the Houston Chronicle about Brown’s leadership. “It was unprecedented.” One of Brown’s most ambitious attempts to initiate change, a strategy called “community policing,” was met with tremendous opposition. Although Brown championed community policing as a revolutionary new way for the police and the community to join forces, it was essentially a return to an earlier era when most people knew the names of the officers who “walked the beat” in their neighborhood. The Houston plan, known as Neighborhood Oriented Policing (NOP), called for employing more police officers and assigning officers to particular neighborhoods. The officers were encouraged to acquaint themselves with people in their neighborhoods through various outreach methods.

Houston was one of the first cities to implement what would eventually become a standard urban crime-fighting strategy. Many of Brown’s officers, however, opposed community policing from the start. Some claimed that NOP detracted from the focus of their job, which was to apprehend criminals, and derisively called the program “Nobody on Patrol.” The plan failed to achieve a significant reduction in Houston’s crime statistics, but gained currency with law-enforcement executives on a national level. By this point in his career, Brown had become increasingly active in a number of professional organizations and coalitions of other top law-enforcement executives, including the National Minority Advisory Council on Criminal Justice, the National Black Police Officers Association, and the National Association of Blacks in Criminal Justice.

As one of the leading advocates of community policing, Brown’s reputation and academic credentials lent a certain credibility to the idea, and replications of Houston’s NOP were soon being implemented in a number of major cities by the early 1990s. Yet his critics in Houston sometimes referred to the chief as “Out of Town Brown,” since he received so many speaking and conference invitations. Moreover, his natural shyness, reserve, and tendency to deliberate on hot-button issues before speaking were sometimes misconstrued as aloofness.

Moved to Manhattan

Brown resigned from the Houston job in 1989 when New York City Mayor David Dinkins appointed him to head that city’s police force. It was a department seven times as large as Houston’s, with 26,000 officers, and a long history of internal troubles. While in New York, Brown was able to successfully implement a community policing program known as “Safe Streets, Safe City” program. With the support of Dinkins, Brown added a significant number of new officers to the force, recruited more women and Hispanic officers, increased street patrols, and even forced all headquarters personnel to take one day of patrol duty each week. The borough precincts also instituted “management teams” made up of officers and community leaders. Within just a few months, Brown’s radical changes had resulted in the first drop in New York City crime in 36 years.

Brown’s two-year tenure in New York was marked by other problems, however. After years of notorious racial incidents across the city, primarily in the rough borough sections where neighborhoods were both impoverished and uneasily integrated, tensions erupted in the Crown Heights area of Brooklyn in 1991. Members of the African American and Orthodox Jewish communities clashed violently for several days, and New York Police Department brass were criticized for their handling of the situation; much of the blame fell to Brown and Dinkins.

Became Drug Czar

Brown resigned from the New York job when his wife fell ill with lung cancer in 1992. The couple returned to Texas, where she passed away later that year. After teaching for a time at Texas Southern University in Houston, Brown was appointed by President Bill Clinton as the nation’s “Drug Czar,” otherwise known as the Director of the Office of Drug Control Policy. Brown took over this post, which became a cabinet-level appointment during the Clinton administration, in 1993. He worked to increase federal funds for drug-treatment and drug-prevention programs, which had been Clinton’s aim as well, but found opposition in Congress to such goals. Many conservative legislators chastised the programs as handouts of tax money to drug addicts. Brown was able to pressure the Justice Department to pursue investigations into an infamous Colombian drug trafficking group, known as the Cali cartel, which resulted in several indictments. He resigned from the post in 1996, partly out of frustration with staunch Congressional opposition to his policies. “At a time when we see a rise in the use of illegal drugs by our adolescents, the proposed budget cuts in drug-fighting are wrong-headed and must be reversed,” Brown stated at a news conference announcing his resignation.

Rumors began to circulate that Brown would make a bid for the Houston mayor’s office. In the meantime, he took a job as a professor of sociology at Rice University. By 1997’, Brown had won endorsements for his mayoral campaign from Houston’s outgoing mayor as well as those of President Clinton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. His Republican opponent was Robert Mosbacher Jr., a prominent business leader in the city as well as the son of a onetime commerce secretary in the Bush administration. After both Brown and Mosbacher failed to win a majority of votes in the November balloting, they competed in a run-off election the following month. Brown won by 16,000 votes, becoming Houston’s first African American mayor.

Won Re-Election

Brown was sworn in on January 2,1998 for a two-year term. He won re-election and was sworn in for a second term as Houston’s mayor in early 2000. In his first term, Brown had instituted a number of progressive programs and new initiatives to maintain the city’s record prosperity. One of his programs was based on the community policing strategy. “Super Neighborhoods” were created, which divided Houston into 88 separate districts. Each district contained a local council that worked with representatives from City Hall to address issues specific to the area. Brown also gained the confidence of Houston citizens with his frequent Town Hall meetings across the city, and his regular “Mayor’s Night In,” in which people were invited to City Hall to meet with the mayor and present particular grievances. He discovered funding for after-school programs, set in motion a plan to renovate the city’s three airports, and won voter and state legislative approval for a new baseball stadium for the Houston Astros. “Out of Town Brown” also made it his mission to make the city a winning contender in the race to host the 2012 Olympic Games.

Brown married Frances Young, a teacher, in 1996. He has four adult children from his first marriage, and nine grandchildren. Among Brown’s numerous professional awards, he has been named both Politician of the Year by Library Journal in 1999, as well as Father of the Year by the National Father’s Day Commission eight years earlier.