Redondo Beach’s new blue blood

Every weekend, Keith Kauffman hits the same coffee shop with his teenage kids, getting the same order: black coffee, no room for cream. At this point, they ask for his confirmation as a matter of courtesy. Everybody at the shop knows him and knows what he drinks.

“I go there all the time, ‘Hey, how’re you doing, how’re things going, it’s great to see you,’,” Kauffman said. “The same thing every time.”

But when Redondo Beach Police Chief Kauffman steps in during the week — wearing stripes on his sleeves, four stars on his collar — things change.

“When I go in in uniform, they have no idea who I am,” he said.

The uniform, the shield that officers wear on their chest, defines the way the public sees them: Not as other citizens, perhaps barely as people. But as cops.

“If everyone knew that we’re the exact same as they are, with the same issues, problems, successes and failures, we’d probably see things on the same playing field,” Kauffman said.

Kauffman is the new leader of Redondo’s police force. His ambition is to help change the face of policing and the relationship between the community and its peace officers. If his track record is any indication, the 44-year-old Kauffman is up to the challenge. The Coffee With a Cop program, which has become a national model since he co-created it as a member of the Hawthorne Police Department, is a prime example of the kind of approachability he seeks to foster between officers and those they serve.

But if it weren’t for a severe knee injury suffered in high school, Kauffman, a Redondo native, might not be sitting behind the big desk in his hometown. He might still be in the United States Air Force, his original post-high school destination.

The future chief’s goal growing up was to become a pilot. He was well on track. He had applied to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and had received a Congressional Nomination to do so. But during his senior year at West Torrance High School, not long before he was due to leave for boot camp, injury struck.

“I completely obliterated all of the ligaments in my knee in a wrestling match,” Kauffman said. “I tried a surgery, it didn’t work as well as we hoped, and, basically, I had put all of my eggs into one basket.”

His dream of taking to the skies was dashed. So he went to his fallback plan.

“I had always said that law enforcement was something I was interested in doing. Then this happened and I thought, ‘Well, that’s my calling.’”

Kauffman left the engineering track that he had set up to pursue piloting and shifted toward the arts, his natural inclination. A few years at El Camino College, and a summer in Chile with family friends led him to graduating from UCLA with a degree in Spanish Literature.

“I expected him to go into business…I thought he’d do well in business, because he had a good head for that world,” said Ken Kauffman, Keith’s father and a 25 year veteran of the Redondo Beach Police Department. But after college, Keith approached his father, showing up and saying that he was bored with what he was doing, and that he was going to go into the police academy.

“I wasn’t pushing him that direction…but in retrospect, I think he made the right move,” the elder Kauffman said.

Keith’s multilingual, multicultural studies, the son felt, would give him a leg-up during a time when affirmative action made the hiring process made stringent public safety hiring even more difficult.

Initially, he was met with disappointment. Despite high test scores with both the Los Angeles Police Department and RBPD, he was left on the sidelines. But a connection to the Hawthorne Police Department, fostered by his father, opened a door for him.

“I’d been on countless ride-alongs here in Redondo Beach growing up,” Kauffman said. “When I went on one Hawthorne, I knew I was in the right place — that was the spot I’d be able to put my degree and studies in Spanish to the best use, and I took the job.”

That first ride showed Kauffman a level of police activity he had never seen in Redondo Beach. Throughout the night, he and the officers he rode with rolled to multiple scenes of robberies and arrests of armed suspects. He was astonished. “I grew up here, and a lot of people do not realize that such a short distance away, things can be so different,” he said.

It was the energy of that first ride, he admits, that attracted him to the job.

“Absolutely, there’s no doubt. There’s a lot of adrenaline that goes with this job that people thrive on … it attracts a lot of people that come from different backgrounds, who like the rush of critical situations,” he said.

He got off to a fast start, earning two South Bay Medal of Valor awards within his first few years on the job, in 1995 and ’96.

The first, Kauffman said, took place in an underground parking garage, where he and his partner responded to a shots-fired call. A domestic dispute between a man and a woman had turned into a murder-suicide; the man had shot the woman and, soon after, turned the gun on himself.

“But in the midst of everything, the car was left running and her foot was on the gas,” Kauffman said, causing the tires to spin, smoke, and soon blow out — which the officers thought were additional gunshots — the car then caught fire in short order. Without fully grasping the situation, Kauffman and his partner swept in to pull the pair out of the path of the fire, putting themselves at great risk. Only later did they learn the true nature of the situation. “All of that stuff was put together after the fact,” he said.

The second incident saw Kauffman receive his medal along with a cadre of Hawthorne officers who responded to an armed robbery during the holidays.

According to a report from the L.A. Times, a thrice-convicted felon named Richard Price held up a restaurant and was spotted fleeing the scene by an undercover officer. Kauffman was one of the officers who gave chase in his patrol car, eventually leading Price to a frontage road near Crenshaw Boulevard and Imperial Highway. Price ditched the car and began firing at the officers with his .357 revolver, hitting their vehicles.

The police returned fire, killing Price. Kauffman was one of eight police officers to be given medals for that incident.

The thing is, he gets hates talking about those situations. “I don’t ever really talk about that,” he said, embarrassed. “I don’t think that police or firefighters, anyone who gets a Medal of Valor, thinks that they’re worthy of of getting a special reward for doing what they’re supposed to be doing,” he said.

To serve and protect

Police work, Kauffman believes, is an industry of service.

“To me, it’s a noble profession. I was interested in becoming a pilot and serving in the Air Force, and couldn’t do that, so this was another way for me to serve,” he said. “I think it’s the way I was brought up, to help people.”

During his two decades in Hawthorne, Kauffman rose to the rank of Captain, serving as the department’s SWAT Team Commander and overseeing the department’s of patrol, traffic, and police administrative functions.

“I was lucky enough to have good exposure to a lot of different parts of policing,” he said, crediting, in part, his work as HPD’s SWAT commander for his management and supervisory skills — particularly, the importance of tight team dynamics.

That’s why he hopes to implement a system of autonomy and empowerment for everyone in the department, from command levels to patrol. “It’s a difficult thing to do, especially in a structured organization as in law enforcement,” Kauffman said. “It’s one thing to tell someone that they’re responsible for a unit; it’s another to say that they’re responsible for that unit and that they have the authority to make the decisions and risks necessary to move forward, because it’s under their purview.”

To get there, a high level of trust needs to be established. That begins with identifying the department’s collective vision and the culture before trying to redefine it. And part of that, the chief feels, is changing the way the department interacts with the community.

That, he’s said, was the goal of the Coffee With a Cop program. It brings officers out of the streets and into local cafes, where they have an opportunity to connect with the people they’re protecting.

In a submission to the President’s Task Force for 21st Century Policing, Kauffman wrote that police “should devote more time to the community members we don’t know, who don’t break the law, and create an environment that will allow our line level officers to build relationships and trust.”

In that essay, he describes a situation from a Coffee With a Cop program in Hawthorne. He profiled a man walking into the shop by his walk, the “hardened gaze” at Kauffman’s uniform, noticing the faded tattoo on his neck. Kauffman then realized that the other man had done the same, judging him by his uniform, his bars, his haircut. But when all was said and done, the two didn’t confront each other. Kauffman took a picture with the man’s daughter, and the two shared a smile.

“It’s really easy for someone to hate what the uniform represents, and easy for them to do that when it’s behind a keyboard,” Kauffman said. “But when we’re face to face, dealing with an issue or some other barrier that’s there, guiding the relationship, we might reach common ground pretty quickly. That’s the power of these programs.”

The high-speed stuff — enforcement, working SWAT, or narcotics, or undercover — all of that’s important, but it’s only half of the equation, Kauffman said. “We need to build a relationship with the community, learn how it is and be a part of it all of the time.”

Those changes are already in the works; the first of Redondo’s Coffee With a Cop events are in the planning stages, with many officers volunteering to complete four-hour training sessions. The department has also worked closely in implementing and refreshing emergency scenario training with the Redondo Beach Unified School District in the wake of multiple threats, later determined to be empty, made against Redondo Union High School.

“My team and I could not have found a better partner in our relentless pursuit of school safety,” said RBUSD Superintendent Steven Keller. Since the first threat made against the school on Dec. 11, the department and the district have rolled out new training procedures throughout the district.

“Chief Kauffman brings a positive and proactive approach to his leadership style; he’s the person I want on my team if bad stuff happens,” Keller said. “He brings a wealth of information and knowhow on this important topic to our learning community.”

“I don’t believe, just because we get a threat, that we should lock everything down and move everybody out,” Kauffman said. “I would rather have the planning and tools to be able to deploy and make good, confident decision so our community is not uprooted by these threats.”

Among the tools Kauffman is looking to bring to the fold are an addition of three more police dogs to the canine unit, as well as additional body armor for the department’s SWAT unit.

Their availability is made possible by the city’s Supplemental Law Enforcement and Asset Forfeiture Funds, set up in the mid-‘90s by now-City Attorney Mike Webb.

“There are great relationships here; the City Attorney’s office is so involved, and that relationship benefits this community more than the community knows,” Kauffman said, crediting Webb with the initial research to obtain the new canine officers.

“I think, historically, some of our most successful efforts have grown out of our relationship with the police department, and I think Chief Kauffman, with his background, may take the benefits of that relationship to a whole new level,” Webb said. “That’s not the norm everywhere, and our office is lucky to have that; I think the relationship will continue to improve, given how decisive and committed he is to taking the steps needed to protect our community.”

Webb’s praise for Kauffman is wide-ranging, lauding everything from his rapid implementation of the emergency training within Redondo’s schools to his forward-thinking policies. He’s not alone in offering praise.

“I admire his style tremendously,” said Redondo Beach Mayor Steve Aspel. “His philosophies on dealing with the public are amazing and he was way ahead of the curve on protecting our schools; he was working on that way before the San Bernardino shooting happened, and he’s way ahead of what council was asking him to do.”

Aspel also appreciates the personal outreach Kauffman has made, visiting public commissions, citizens group meetings and Redondo schools to talk about the importance of the department.

“He’s a very talented man. When he asks for something, he’s going to get it, and when he gives advice, we’re going to take it.”

“Really, the only negative thing I have to say about him is he makes me feel old,” Webb said. “My first year working with the city, in 1994, was his dad’s last year with Redondo Beach.”

Kauffman’s hire was announced by the City of Redondo Beach in October 2015, a year after Chief Joe Leonardi retired from the position. He beat out 38 other candidates and was lauded by then-interim Chief John Neu for his “wealth of knowledge and experience” in law enforcement.

But for Kauffman, the decision to even apply was a difficult one. His ties to Hawthorne were strong, and his relationships with his colleagues were tight; Hawthorne Chief Robert Hager was even among those who received the Medal of Valor alongside Kauffman in ’96. “You have to understand, I loved Hawthorne — I bled that place,” Kauffman said. “But at the end of the day, I decided…this opportunity would only happen once. Thinking about doing this, at the end of my career, in my hometown…that’s what led to the decision.”

But that choice carried a lot of weight. Kauffman isn’t just accountable to the City, or its citizens. Unlike Hawthorne, he can’t leave that world completely behind at the end of the day.

“I have personal accountability to a lot of people; friends, neighbors, people I’ve known for a long, long time,” he said. “I’ve got to give it everything I’ve got; if there’s a bomb threat at the high school, you know, I’ve got a kid there.”

Kauffman still has his first patrol flashlight, weathered from 22 years of duty, in his office bureau. He also has his father’s old ticket book from his time at RBPD. It’s something, Kauffman said, he might want to pass down to his son or daughter, should either want to go into law enforcement.

He acknowledges that he’s in a high-stress job, one which affects lives daily. The key to retaining his sanity is balance, which can be seen in his friendly, measured demeanor.

“There are a lot of reasons why this job would consume a person…you can’t do this and have it not change your life,” he said. “What I’ve tried to do is to at least be as calm as I can, making sure that I don’t portray the hysteria that crops up around the issues.”

On Kauffman’s desk sits a copy of October Sky, the 1999 film starring Jake Gyllenhaal. The movie tells the story of a coal miner’s son who took up rocket engineering instead of a life in the mines, despite overwhelming resistance. The chief hasn’t seen it, and isn’t too familiar with it beyond what he’s heard second-hand.

“One of the lieutenants believed that there was a lot of carryover with what’s going on here,” Kauffman said. “About the fact that the main character is trying to do something that people don’t believe is possible, and he succeeds in the end. It’s supposed to be a feel-good story.”

His father certainly feels good about his son’s ascension to chief and the goals he has set for the department and community he also spent his life serving. “He’s fairly young to be a chief; that’s a big feather in his cap,” Ken Kauffman said from his Tennessee home. “He’s down-to-earth, and he’s done it all. It takes a special kind of policeman to be involved in some of the things he has and maintain a level head and positive attitude.”

“I think the city’s lucky to have him…he’s got a long future ahead of him, and hopefully he’ll stick with it for a while.”