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Delsa Bush became the first African American and the first female chief of police for the City of West Palm Beach in January of 2004 when Mayor Lois Frankel appointed her to the office. Her career has been full of groundbreaking firsts: In law enforcement for twenty-four years, Delsa Bush was the first African American female officer for the City of West Palm Beach in 1983; the first African American sergeant in 1989; the first African American female lieutenant in 1995; the first female captain and assistant chief in the city’s history. The chief is responsible for the safety and well being of approximately one hundred seven thousand residents. She oversees a department of about five hundred people, including three hundred ten officers. PAL ILLUSTRATED was happy for the opportunity to interview her. We begin: PAL: When you became chief, what were your goals? Chief Bush: There were several goals I established prior to becoming chief that I believe we have fulfilled. The first is that I believe an organization has to be as professional as possible. We should have a certain level of training. Each officer should have a certain level of education. I’m a great proponent of education. I just finished my PhD. I’ve tried to make sure that each of our officers takes advantage of education. I believe that a well-educated, well-rounded police officer makes for a better police officer on the street. The other goal, as far as what I call professionalizing the organization, was to become an accredited organization. That was my number one priority. Two days after I was appointed chief, I was putting together an accreditation team. Right now, we’re probably one of the only agencies in South Florida that has dual accreditation. We are nationally accredited by CALEA, the Commission on Accreditation of Law Enforcement Agencies. We hold a Florida accreditation, too. So those things were very important to me. Accreditation means that we abide by the four hundred premier standards of law enforcement organizations in the country that are established by CALEA. We stick to those things. They’re sort of like our Bible and our guide as we to how we will run this organization. From the way we talk to people, to the way we train, from the way we capture data to our technology—everything is guided by those standards. So I think it helps us to stay in the vanguard of law enforcement. It also reduces the level of complaints that we get because we abide by a certain set of principles. That was my main priority, my number one goal, to let the people know this is the City of West Palm Beach, and this is one of the most professional organizations in the country. PAL: Are there other changes you’ve implemented? Chief Bush: Basically, we’ve reorganized the organization. Structurally, we have moved people around, changed responsibilities, and deleted some positions. We’ve tried to become more efficient and effective at the same time. We’ve also tried to think outside of the box in this organization. Like, I travel quite a bit. I just got back from Denver and I took advantage of those liaisons and those networking opportunities that I have with some of the big city chiefs. In Denver, I got to speak to Director Mueller, who’s the director of the FBI, Chief Bratton, from Los Angeles, and Chief Timoney, out of Miami. They’re all people I know on a first name basis. I listen to them quite a bit and I try to implement things that they do. Some of the changes that we’ve done have to do with technology. We went from writing reports by hand to having a paperless report-writing system and computer-aided dispatch system, and a records’ management system. So we’ve instituted all those changes, and it frees up the officer’s time to be more proactive on the street. We have computer ticket writing now where we used to sit and it would take [many] minutes to write a ticket out by hand. Now we just swipe the card through the ticket processor and it populates the fields that need to be populated, the ticket prints out and the guy’s on his way. We’ve tried to deal with crime in a different light. We’re like the first organization in the state to bring in what they call Civil Gang Injunction Ordinance. I copied that from Los Angeles. What it does is just keep gang members from congregating in what we call a safe place. There are certain areas they’re banned from. We don’t care if they’re related by blood, if they’re gang members, and we’ve documented it through the courts, then we just go back and say, “Hey, you’re in a safe zone, you’re not supposed to be here,” and we can arrest them on the spot. We’ve made quite a few changes: a few related to technology and a few crime-fighting strategies. PAL: The technology would have been different from when you were first starting as a patrol officer. Chief Bush: Oh, absolutely. Everything is so different—especially all the technology. It’s kind of hard for me to keep up with it. Sometimes I think I’m overwhelming the organization, trying to change everything at one time. A lot of officers were afraid of a lot of the technological changes, especially when it related to report writing. A lot of the old timers were accustomed to still documenting it by hand. We had to get people to know, “Hey, you can type this stuff.” Now everybody’s just so proficient. Everybody’s got a laptop computer in their car, like most agencies have now, or are getting. These officers have now learned how to process words and type really fast, and they have spell check. It makes for a more professional reporting process, especially when those reports have to be read in court. There’s not all that, “I can’t read the officer’s hand writing,” and “That word is misspelled.” It just makes for a more professional way of doing business. A lot of people didn’t want to go to the training and learn how to use the computer, but now everybody’s all happy. It took about a year for it to sink in and to get everyone trained. Now it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to the department. PAL: What are some of your most pressing problems and how do you deal with them? Chief Bush: I think it’s the universal problem right now—budgetary issues and distributing resources. I speak of equity instead of equality. It would be easy to say I’m going to distribute the resources equally throughout the city and different districts, but that’s not the way it should be and that’s not the way I do business. I’ve seen that it has to be an equitable distribution, not an equal distribution. So where the most crime is, that’s where I put the most resources, regardless of who’s yelling the loudest. When I have one hundred people complaining about auto burglaries in an affluent neighborhood, I have to say, okay, I’m going to give you resources, but the majority of my resources have to go over to the less advantaged socio economic community where the killings are. That’s where young men and women are being shot and killed on the street, and that’s more important than your car being broken into. PAL: It would be hard to argue with that logic. Chief Bush: But people do. They think that people who show up at commission chambers and the commission meetings and complain, are the people who should get the resources. I have to say that there are a lot of people who can’t afford to come to the commission meetings to complain and demand items. You learn over the years to do your job. I’m a police officer at heart. When you’re in this position [where I am now] you have to do all dances, you have to make everybody happy like a politician, even though you’re appointed, not elected. I’m just known for really speaking my mind and I never compromise my principles about anything, no matter what the consequences are. PAL: That might be part of the answer to the next question: What is an important thing for a police chief to remember every day? Chief Bush: Absolutely, that would be one of them. It’s about this big old thing called integrity, and trustworthiness. Everything hinges on that. Sometimes I go and say things that I know are probably detrimental to a career, but this is my twenty-seventh year, and I’ve always stood up for what is right, and more so now in the twilight of my career. So I tell people all the time, I hate dishonesty. I see a lot of people in high positions compromise their principles. That really bothers me. Once someone tells me something and goes back on their word, it’s like the end of our relationship. I hate someone who’s self-serving and will do anything to maintain a career, and right now you see that so much in the higher echelons of departments because everybody needs a job and the economy is bad and you want to go with the flow and not make waves, but that’s just not the way to go. I had a wonderful professor when I was finishing my master’s degree, and he had a little book with common sense ethos that told how to relate to being a chief. He wrote that there comes a time when you must be willing to be fired for taking a principled stand. I abide by that wholeheartedly. Some things happen in these positions when you have to say I’m going to stand up for what is right, and if you want to fire me, you fire me. The other thing that keeps me going, and it’s very important to me, is regardless of your religion, you must believe in a higher power. In order to get through in these positions, because it’s lonely at the top, you have to have some higher deity to talk to and put your problems to. I’m really beholden to my religious advisors in my church and I think it helps you through all these issues. PAL: There is probably no such thing, but what is an average day like for you? Chief Bush: There truly is no average day. There are so many things that can happen in a day. I used to come in and expect to abide by my schedule. You have to have a great person, an assistant, who takes care of you, and I do. I rely on this woman whole-heartedly. I put my schedule in her hands. If she fails, I fail. So you have to have that person of trust that’s in your organization. But nothing ever goes as that schedule says. This is what law enforcement is all about: there are always surprises, unexpected happenings, and that’s what makes the job so exciting. There’s never a normal day. There are always fires to be put out and it changes by the hour, by the minute. I wasn’t quite accustomed to sitting in the office all day, just taking care of issues, but thanks to the evolution of technology, I can basically work from anywhere, so I’m all over the place with my Blackberry. I can read emails, and I can respond back. Basically, what we do is serve as the advisor for everyone else, so I can pick up the phone and help to resolve an issue. So there’s no average day, and that’s what the excitement is all about. Now, it can get too hectic and I must prioritize and slow down every once in a while. Say, “Hey, you’ve got to finish one issue before you jump into the next issue.” I had a difficult time in doing that because I’m a Type A personality, so I was all over the place when I first started. “I gotta do this; I gotta do that.” I had to learn to prioritize some things, to learn to trust and to delegate. It’s all about having those trustworthy, second in command people, not just trustworthy, but competent. My two commanders, my assistant chiefs, are two of the most competent men I know. They have graduate degrees and are very well respected by everybody in the organization. It took me awhile to get these two men in the positions I needed them to be in, to actually help me run the organization, because most of the time, they are the ones who truly run the organization for me. PAL: What personal qualities does a chief need to be effective? Chief Bush: Trustworthiness, first of all, and secondly, competence. You’ve got to know what you’re doing. You must be a learned and read person. I don’t have difficulty being a learned person or a read person in this profession because I like to read mundane stuff. I don’t read for leisure. I get so many publications about everything dealing with law enforcement, psychological issues, labor issues, new Supreme Court decisions, and I also get the Harvard Business Review, because there’s a lot of similarities in running a business and running an organization. I think every chief should be competent. I tell people they can do anything with me, but they can’t match wits with me, because I don’t talk about stuff I don’t know about. If it comes out of my mouth, you can be assured it’s going to be factual. But you have to be competent; you can only fake it so long. You have to be a genuinely concerned individual. I am. I’m very compassionate about the almost five hundred people who work with me. I try to get to know a little bit of something about each of them. They know that I have an authoritative side, but I have more of a compassionate side. I try to be fair with each individual. I laugh and talk with people when I walk the hallways. I believe in management by walking. I speak to the cleaners who clean my office and the crime scene techs and I laugh with the dispatchers. I try to treat everybody the same. I don’t hang out with my people on the weekends. I’m a very family oriented person. But when I’m here at this job, I treat them like everybody’s my best friend. PAL: What is your connection with the Police Athletic League in West Palm Beach? Chief Bush: As a matter of fact, the second day after I started as chief, my first priority was to start accreditation, and my second priority, though maybe not in that order, was to get our PAL League started. We had gotten a brand new building. A commissioner felt that we should have a new PAL building right in the heart of one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods. So we had this new building, but we only had PAL in theory. We had only one officer who was trying to run PAL. So after I got the accreditation group together, I was walking through the building and saw the lone PAL officer sitting in her office, not in the new building. She was discouraged because she didn’t have any support. “We’re not doing anything,” she said. “We have no money. I don’t know if I want to do this anymore.” I go, “Wait a minute. When I get to work tomorrow, all I want is for this office to be empty and for you to be in the office of the brand new PAL facility.” The new PAL building is not a large facility, as a matter of fact, the property [site] used to be one of the most dangerous bars we ever had. There were shootings there every night. So we tore that building down and put the new PAL building there with CRA funding. (The CRA is the Community Redevelopment Authority. They have certain tax dollars to get rid of blighted properties, but try to retain the historic value if possible.) So the officer goes to the new building the next day, and she calls and says she still doesn’t know whether she wants to continue. I told her if she’d just stay, I’d get some money. So I got $20,000 from our forfeiture funds, and we started out with a karate instructor, some after school programs, and opened the doors during the summer to feed the kids. It started to grow. One day the mayor called me and said that Wayne Hysienga of Rybovich said they’d donate $250,000—$50,000 every year for five years if we’d put together a program of what you’re going to do. We threw together a program and more children came. Then by the end of summer, the building was overflowing. I thought we’d better find some more venues to get these kids in, and I assigned an additional officer to the program. I told them I want to be part of a football team, so get us a football team. Now we have a football team so huge we can’t handle the number of requests and the number of people. We’re doing after school programs, tutoring, and mentoring. We’re still using forfeiture funds to support PAL, we have two additional staff people in addition to the two PAL officers, and we have a plethora of volunteers. I’m going to ensure that the program continues through whatever means are necessary. We started out with $20,000, and now it’s one of the hugest success stories we have in the city. It’s been great. We have a bigger goal in trying to expand that particular PAL building. It’s right in the heart of a CRA district. There was a house in the back of our PAL building, which they say is an historic building of significance and they don’t want to tear it down. But I need the green space for the kids who come to PAL in the summer. The building is literally right on the street. You walk out to the sidewalk and two feet away is the street. The kids can’t really go outside. So I petitioned the CRA, and after a year and a half, we finally got to the point where we can tear the building down. Then we’ll have some green space so the kids can come out the back door and have a little park and have a water fountain. We have an architect donating his time to develop the plans for the green space. Now we’re all happy about expanding. We’re getting some other properties from CRA to do some other programs, like a boxing program. So we’re trying to expand. It’s all happening right now. More about Delsa Bush Delsa Bush is a native of Clarksdale, MS, and is the proud mother of two daughters, Bristol and Yasmine Her education includes an Associate of Science degree at Palm Beach Junior College, Bachelor of Arts degree from Florida Atlantic University and a Master of Science degree from Lynn University. In May of 2009, she received her PhD from Lynn University. She is also a graduate of the FBI Academy. Chief Bush continues to receive numerous awards and is a pioneer in her accomplishments: one of South Florida’s Twenty-five Most Prominent and Influential Black Women of 2006 by Success South Florida Magazine; one of South Florida’s Most Powerful and Influential Black Professionals in 2007 by Success South Florida Magazine; the Distinguished Alumna Award from FAU in 2005; the Ruby Award from the Greater Palm Beach’s Chapter of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women in 1997; the Public Sector Women in Leadership Award from the Executive Women of the Palm Beaches in 1999, and is a member of the prestigious educational honor society of Kappa Delta Pi, which is dedicated to ideals of fidelity to humanity, service, science and toil. Her civic activities include: YWCA, Girl Scouts, board of directors of Columbia Hospital, executive board of Palm Beach County Criminal Justice Commission, and numerous professional organizations such as NFBPA, IACP, NOBLE, and FCPA.
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