The Miami Herald from Miami, Florida • 31

Sun Nov 17 1968 THE MIAMI HERALD 31-A Headley Dies at 63 -C fS the system Recruitment fell drastically 50 men short right Headley said recently like to fill every vacancy with a Negro man if I ould find AS CHIEF HE deftly out-maneuvered all manner of critics Once when instructed to chop his budget he announced publicly he would fire 30 policemen The threat worked His labor here attacted national attention years ago In 1955 he was elected president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police Only last month at a meeting in Hawaii the chiefs association awarded Headley for his use of video tapes in supplanting the traditional lineup For MPD it was another first in the nation HEADLEY twice-divorced lived for 10 years as a bachelor raising three sons with the help of housekeepers and military school Joseph and Jack Headley became Miami po-icemen then both returned to school and became lawyers A third son Thomas is now in law school at the University of Florida Just seven months ago he married his secretary the former Mary Barnes She was with him in August in his mountain hideaway camp in North Carolina when he missed both the Republican National Convention and the Liberty City riots first severe racial trouble in history August was always vacation month for Headley He wanted to come back but he felt it would show a lack of faith in his men if he did And his final illnes was upon him He was never really worried about being fired or even retiring have no definite plans except that I wear a piece of mistletoe between my shoulder IT WAS THE RESPONSE of a tough cop a man who believed himself right not in he would say again and again a professional police For 20 years three months and eight days he was indeed: Chief of Police Miami Police Department Headley the Horseman Was a US here he shows Cavalry Veteran saddle style in late 1930s tJ would be Five years ago at the urging of Negroes he abolished Chief ride-To-Ie Leave Courthouse he married secretary seven months ago to be conducted by Circuit Court Judge Fitz Gordon is set for 3 pm Tuesday in the Bayfront Park Auditorium From 1 to 9 pm today and Monday his body will lie in state at the Ben Lanier Funeral Home at 5350 West Flagler SL Burial will be in Woodlawn Cemetery EVER SINCE he returned from North Carolina in August his health had not been good' In Gainesville visiting a son he fell over a stepping stone he said recently boy did I hit the Ever since pleurisy had bothered him PRAISED denounced cursed and lauded Headley found himself the focus of more national attention in the last year of his life than the 62 before As the tough cop he set out last Christmas to start epidemic of law and order After a seemingly senseless outbreak of armed robbery killings Headley established a policy vowing Miami would never have riots like those in Watts and Detroit is only orie way to handle looters and arsonists during a he said that is to shoot them on sight let the word filter down when the looting starts the shooting AND THE PHRASE rico-chetted across the nation He armed his men with shotguns and dogs and decided to get against crime in the so-called Negro ghetto Five months later he was claiming armed robbery had dropped 62 per cent Edgar Hoover director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was among his advocates: policy is proof of the fact that a strict policy in the enforcement of law works whereas some of the theoretical sociological policies that are advanced and urged just WHEN RIOTS erupted in August during the Republican Convention a restrained Miami Police Department exactly follow the edict A single looter one of hundreds was wounded Police killed three men only after they were fired upon they said After a flap over police brutality city and state officials as well as grand jury generally agreed the police handled the situation admirably Headley was on vacation at the time Headley perhaps most of all could be categorized as a very shrewd infighter No one beat him With his doctrine he struck a powerful chord He knew it Besides 12000 letters he received bundles of telegrams a dozen roses a potted poinsettia and a dollar from a man in Ohio with instructions buy some slugs with HAS BEEN a policy of appeasement all over the Headley said job of the police is to protect life and property preserve the peace and enforce the law bond a felon out of the he would fondly repeat Predictably i i l-rights groups were aghast at the language if not his intentions Some civil libertarians accused him of racial demagoguery Not surprisingly though certain elements of the Negro population supported him criticize Headley for using shotguns and one Negro minister told the National Observer with a lot of my people it would be okay to use tanks and make up 15 per cent of Headley would say commit 85 per cent of the crime- That is their fault not mine" he would argue with a matter-of-fact simplicity that infuriated some Negroes since where the crime is that is where the enforcement has to he said AFTER THE CRACKDOWN came some of the natural uneasiness in the Negro community turned to rage when two white officers stripped a 17-year-old boy to his undershorts and dangled him by his heels from an expressway overpass Headley suspended the two men and turned the case over to the FBI A federal court judge convicted them and a few weeks ago Head-ley said that was fine with him At 63 the six-foot-three chief was a large man with his bulk settling around his middle on a diet all the 1- he has said for years I have to do to gain weight is push a cart down the aisle of a He parted his graying hair down the middle in the style of the 1930s stuck a diamond Masonic pin in the lapel of his dark suit and spoke in a rumbling voice from underneath an Oliver Hardy moustache By appearance alone he might have qualified as someone from central casting in a grade-B movie made in the 1940s Like so much else about the man the appearance was totally deceptive ALWAYS HE MOVED slowly deliberately his mind racing ahead was one of the shrewdest men ever said one of his officers thought fast on his feet I saw them go after him time and time again loaded for bear when they met him face to face he ran circles around them He eloquent He have to be He had all those facts and figures stored up in his head and when he needed them out they came He always made his opponents seem sort of Some of his critics felt that the bark was often worse than the bite of any of his 20 dogs His two fiercest political opponents were the mayors Abe Aronovitz and Robert King High both of whom he outlived Beginning as a patrolman Headley spent 11 years on the force quiet he called them before he was named chief on August 11 1949 The High-Headley combat a sort of running and verbal battle began in earnest 10 years ago with the towering Headley bristling every time the diminutive name was mentioned MAYOR HIGH constantly sniped at the chief over the bolita bookies and Headley enforce the law with 600 High said are men who Repeatedly he tried to have him fired the mayor wants to get rid of Headley shot back go along on the same thing I would like to get rid of Once before the B-girls vanished from downtown Miami along with practically all nightlife Headley devised an expensive cure Supplying more than 20 off-duty officers with a total of $500 a night Headley ordered his men into the honkytonks as Three days later the campaign died for of At one point Headley went to the Florida Supreme Court for a ruling on how he could be fired The court ruled his way No one could fire the chief of police specifically the Miami City Commission unless formal charges were brought against and proved the court said No mayor ever came close Despite his pronounced opinions Headley almost never lost his temper publicly Nearly always he remained calm controlled PERHAPS HE CAME the closest to outrage when Melvin Reese city manager reshuffled the detective division once at direction while Headley was on vacation little exploded Headley who soon got things back in the way he wanted them As he sat behind his polished mahogany desk in a room decorated with plaques citations and photographs of celebrities he usually talked in military terms He would discuss of crime and how he his against "the enemy" He generally scorned such things as civilian review boards community police relations get me he would say believe completely in community relations But I believe we should have to fraternize with hoodlums in order to bring it about thing that a lot of people realize is that 95 per cent of our Negro population is made up of good law-abiding citizens We are dealing with five per cent or less a bunch of Walter Everett Headley Jr was born in Philadelphia Penn on May 11 1905 As a high school dropout at 15 in a much different era he fibbed about his age and joined the US Cavalry and toured Hawaii Mexico and Texas In the Army he acquired a second commission and his high school diploma was promoted because I could ride a horse and play he said a few months ago He had learned to ride as a toddler on his farm in New Jersey Indirectly his love for horses made him a policeman His family moved to Florida in 1923 and he bounced around to several jobs for awhile as a sausage salesman for a meat packer in Tampa then a riding master for Bernard health resort in the mountains of New York In 1932 he moved back as he said Briefly he worked for the Miami tax assessor Because of the horses though he transferred to the police department in February 1937 to organize the horseback patrol But the idea was dropped He began as a patrolman one of 120 men IN 1944 he took a competitive examination and won one of the first fellowships to Northwestern then and not by chance the Miami Police Department 20 years later had more graduates of famed police school than any other department in the nation During the war Headley had been to the FBI for three years In 1946 he succeeded in starting his mounted patrol which exists today even after a fire two years ago destroyed the nine horses first police work was just a Headley reminisced late last year had to I got was a new kind of a longtime police station observer said not long ago was the department intellectual because in those days the police were recruited from the corn fields of south Georgia and north On Aug 11 1948 City Manager Hart appointed him chief Hart a college professor found Headley the only man to whom he could really talk FOR YEARS BEFORE Miami had been pretty much wide open Brothels helped defray city expenses The bookies operated from the sidewalks This was the When Headley took over he announced sternly will be no liberal There As chief he inaugurated a drunkometer system which was the first in the state He established a polygraph section a harbor patrol and a crime laboratory And in a day when elsewhere in the South a chief would have ruined a career by such an action Headley started hiring Negro officers In 10 years he had 63 black officers working for him To get them he said Miami watered down an entrance examination for the police academy a part of the University of Miami He established two categories of officers: Whites would be called Negroes t' 0 Jo A SPECTACULAR SALE! 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