Brown, Lee P. (1937-)

From humble origins as the son of farmers, Lee Patrick Brown, whose birth certificate read “Baby Brown,” rose to leadership positions in local, county, and federal law enforcement before becoming the first African American mayor of Houston, the fourth largest city in the United States, in 1998. Brown served three terms as mayor, until 2004, when term limits prohibited him from running a fourth time.

Born October 4, 1937, in Wewoka, Oklahoma, Brown was one of six sons and a daughter whose family moved to rural Fowler, California, when he was 5. He recalled living in a one-bedroom house and his family working the fields “like migrant workers,” but his mother valued education and encouraged her children to do the same. Brown, more than 6 feet tall and solidly built, won a football scholarship to Fresno State University, earning a bachelor's degree in criminology in 1960. Among the first group of highly educated African American police leaders, Brown went on to obtain two master's degrees (1964 and 1968) and a doctorate in criminology in 1970 from the University of California, Berkeley.

Brown's career has been unusual due to his career mobility, the number of departments he has led, and also, as one of few police executives to have earned a doctorate, his ability to shift seamlessly between law enforcement and academe. He began work as a police officer in San Jose, California, in 1960, but in 1968 moved to Portland, Oregon, to establish Portland State University's administration of justice department. In 1972 he became a professor of public administration and the associate director of the Institute for Urban Affairs and Research at Howard University, a historically Black institution in Washington, D.C.

In January 1975, he returned to law enforcement in Portland when he was appointed sheriff of Multnomah County; unlike most sheriffs' offices, the Multnomah office had in 1964 been named Division of Public Safety (Sheriff's Office) and was an appointed rather than elected position. Here, Brown instituted team policing and developed and put into practice early elements of community policing with which he would be closely associated throughout his career. He also directed publication of Neighborhood Team Policing: The Multnomah County Experience, articles by him and others on the implementation of his ideas, another indication of his ability to combine practitioner and academic careers. Eighteen months later, in June 1976, he was named the county's director of justice services, making him coordinator of all county criminal justice agencies.

Brown was in 1978 selected by Atlanta, Georgia, Mayor Maynard Jackson as commissioner of public safety, in charge of the city's police, fire, corrections, and civil defense departments. He managed the police department's arrest of Wayne B. Williams for the Atlanta child murders, in which nearly 30 mostly African American teenage boys were killed [Page 78]between 1979 and 1981. Williams was found guilty of two murders in February 1982, ending the investigation, but in 2006 the DeKalb County (in which Atlanta is located) Police Department reopened and then closed some of the cases; in 2007 Williams, maintaining his innocence, was still attempting to win a new trial. The case received worldwide attention for Brown and for the Atlanta Police Department's public information officer, Beverly Harvard, who would in 1994 be named chief, becoming the first African American woman to lead a major city police department and one of a number of law enforcement leaders—male and female, Black and White— whom Brown mentored.

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