The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (13 page)

We were a good class. Jack Gifford, Al Sweeney, Paul Evans, Joe Saia, Tom Maloney, Bob Dunford, and I had started in the department together, and now we were breaking out of the cocoon together.

And college was not only classroom study. I had been away in the military for three years and then in uniform at the department for one more. Probably the most beneficial aspect of going to college was the opportunity to talk to other students who had had, and were having, different experiences.

This was 1971. Richard Nixon was president. The war in Vietnam was going strong, and so was the antiwar movement at home. Between classes, we police students hung around the cafeteria and talked with our classmates. Boston State was a more conservative school than Harvard or Yale or Berkeley, its students mostly came from blue-collar families like mine, but even these working-class kids were beginning to question the war. Most of the students didn't see things my way. At twenty-four, I was older and more experienced than most of my classmates and very
patriotic, a firm believer in answering when your country called. We faced off against whole tables full of longhaired college kids, book bags draped over the plastic stacking chairs like sacks of ammunition, and we discussed politics and society. There was no shunning, no spitting, no one called me a pig, and I didn't clap them in cuffs. The more we were exposed to each other and interacted, the more we began to understand each other.

Some fellow students felt the war was dead wrong, and we spent long hours over coffee hashing out the state and direction of America. These kids couldn't understand why I had gone off to war and why I felt it was the right thing to do. To them, this was clearly an inappropriate war: How could I defend it? I tried to make them understand the concept of obligation to your country. Even the protests they were engaged in were protected by the First Amendment: How could they not love the country that allowed them to protest? I had no problem with the protests as long as they were done legally.

There were major demonstrations pretty regularly in Boston, antiwar activists either blocking inductees from leaving the army base where I had been inducted or disrupting business at the JFK Federal Building to prevent people from registering for the draft. The radicals were growling, the crowd carrying signs and chanting antiwar slogans. Some days, thousands of people were in the street.

I was right in the middle. I'd be in the cafeteria during the morning, talking with my classmates, and in the afternoon I'd put on my uniform, strap on my funny-looking riot helmet, grab my nightstick, and go to work to maintain order at these rallies. I saw kids across the picket lines with whom I had been talking politics a couple of hours before. Without my college experience, I might have been tempted to see the demonstrators as one solid bunch of longhaired, hippie-looking pot smokers. But college taught me to think differently.

The demonstrators saw the police as parallel to the armed forces: The army was out there fighting this unjustified war, we were back here protecting the Establishment. What I found important about college was my ability to put a face on the police. I was very proud to be in uniform. I tried to make it clear that the police were not the enemy. All these faceless demonstrators suddenly had faces for me; I understood their motivations. Now the police had a face, too: mine. I had relationships in both worlds.

The kids learned about the cops, the cops learned about the kids. We become humanized in each other's eyes.

In the summer of 1972, Linda and I found out we were going to have a baby in February. At the time, we were having trouble making ends meet, and when the baby arrived we would lose Linda's income as well. With very little opportunity to make money outside my salary, I was considering leaving the Boston police. My frustration with the job at District 3 certainly played a part in my considerations. I was getting crummy assignments, I wasn't making enough money, and the organization that I had spent my entire youth dreaming about had turned out to be less than I'd imagined. I wanted out. The suburban Quincy Police Department was closer to home and had more paid details on which I could make some side money. It didn't have the size or traditions of Boston, but it had a good reputation, and it was my intention when my name was called from their list to leave the Boston police and join the Quincy force.

In February 1973 we were overjoyed to have a son, David. Unfortu-nately, Linda and I had begun to grow apart. The job had changed me. Linda and I separated about six months after David was born, and we were later divorced.

In the spring of 1973, Robert di Grazia was named Boston's police commissioner.

Mayor Kevin White, like John Lindsay in New York, was a progressive in liberal times. In 1972, White was talked up as a potential vicepresidential running mate for George McGovern. Like so many others, he had heard rumors of corruption within the Boston Police Department; it was widely believed that a large number of the old guard was on the take. While the rumored corruption predated White, a police scandal on his watch could obliterate his political aspirations. So when police commissioner Ed McNamara's term expired in late 1972, White organized a national search for his replacement. Bob Kiley, White's deputy mayor for public safety, was instrumental in locating reform police candidates.

Bob di Grazia had begun in a ten-person police department in California and rapidly moved up the ladder. He had been a protégé of future FBI Director Clarence Kelly when Kelly was chief of police in Kansas City. He was police chief of Saint Louis County when he was hired to turn Boston around.

Di Grazia was brought in very specifically as an outsider, with no
allegiances to the old-boy network that had been running the department. He was there to break up that network and replace it with fresh management ideas and fresh faces. An insider's strengths and weaknesses are known throughout an organization, and often, because of the relationships he has formed over time, he does not have the wherewithal to make drastic changes, something clearly needed in the BPD. This is particularly true in the small world of police organizations, where broad experience outside the department is discouraged, and parochialism and in-breeding prevent old allegiances from being challenged. The office is, by law, a civilian position, so while the commissioner might not have come from within the police department, he was at least from the Boston area. For the past thirty years all police commissioners had been Boston products.

Di Grazia was one of the new breed of police leaders that was beginning to evolve in the early 1970s. He was a progressive police thinker, full of new ideas. He came in with the mandate from the mayor to reform the police department, and he went right to it, a million directions at once. He pumped up the excitement level. The BPD, which had been sputtering in idle, was kicked into gear and gunned.

Probably the most important change that di Grazia made was in personnel. He understood the potential corruption problems and administrative inefficiencies in the Boston department and that he couldn't go after everybody—the most he could hope for was to reform the system so that those who had sinned in the past would sin no more. He went after the most significant players, the meat eaters, and he went after them all at once.

The corruption appeared to be concentrated among the detectives. Very shortly after he came on the job, di Grazia wiped out the detective sergeants. It was called the Saturday Massacre. These legendary powers—the men who actually ran the department, the rumored bagmen—one Saturday morning found themselves without commands or transferred to assignments so far out of the way that they could have no influence. The message went through the department like a shock wave: It's over. This is a new day.

The senior commanders had been active in the department way of life since they had come on the force. People have a tendency to go along with whatever is in place, and cops are no different from anybody else; there are only so many Frank Serpicos in the world. Di Grazia's dilemma was that he was aware of the allegations of widespread corruption but probably
couldn't prove them. He was also under time pressure; he didn't have the luxury of instituting months-long investigations. So di Grazia tried to eradicate the department's most abusive members by taking them out of positions of power and hoped to reform the rest. He created a Special Investigation Unit to investigate past corruption and, as important, to prevent new abuses from occurring in the future.

Now everyone in the department was faced with a choice. Some who were honorable responded to the new era and became successful in it. Some immediately went into retirement. Others waited out their pensions. For young officers like me, frustrated by what we saw around us, di Grazia was a godsend.

The sudden overhaul and its rash of retirements left a lot of openings for promotions. But di Grazia didn't want to fill positions with newer versions of the same old gang; he quickly changed the system for selecting sergeants. In the old system, seniority counted for around 75 percent of the mark, with the written exam counting only about 15 percent. What that meant in real terms was that you couldn't get promoted to sergeant unless you had between fifteen and twenty years on the job. By the time you had twenty years on the job, you weren't going to buck the system, which made for one class after another of old sergeants steeped in the old-boy practices. When I entered the force, the average age of a sergeant was approximately fifty-five, and the average age of a police officer was forty-three. (In New York City, most cops are retired by their early forties.)

The sergeant's exam itself hadn't changed much in twenty years. It was one-hundred-question straight civil-service memorization out of the Blue Book of police procedures. Word was that 85 percent of the questions never changed. Under di Grazia, everything changed. Seniority now counted for only 10 or 15 percent of your grade, the written test was another portion, and he added two new criteria: performance in the Assessment Center and before the Oral Board. The Assessment Center was a series of written exercises taken under time pressure; the Oral Board consisted of people from outside the department.

The written test was redeveloped and now involved information and concepts that could be found in seven or eight new books on police management, practice, and theory. Some of the works we studied were the Kerner Report on police handling of the riots of the 1960s, the American Bar Association report on police practices, and police management books by N. F. Iannone and Paul Whisenand. Instead of straight memorization, the new test evaluated your oral skills, your ability to perform under
pressure, and your knowledge. You also received extra points if you had a college degree. The exam leveled the playing field and opened the sergeants’ ranks to younger officers.

Di Grazia recognized the need for both the department and the public to be aware of this new approach to policing. He set goals. Among his innovations, the new commissioner began improving the department's training practices. He upgraded the department's rules and regulations for the first time in many years. He completely reorganized the department and significantly improved the Police Academy, both in terms of training recruits and in-service training for police officers. He demanded accountability from his district commanders. Di Grazia developed many programs to reach out to Boston's communities. He understood the importance of public relations, and to give the BPD a new image he changed the department's logo. In a system that was working on shoe leather he began designing new patrol cars. He brought in advanced technology, including computers.

Di Grazia hired civilian experts to introduce these new advanced policing ideas to an organization that was extremely comfortable doing exactly what it had been doing for the last fifty years. This was a topic of great controversy. His “whiz kids” were mostly academics in their twenties and thirties. They included Bob Wasserman, Gary Hayes, Mark Furstenberg, and Phil Marks. Some had full beards and mustaches and hair down over their ears. In some respects, they looked like the radical element we faced at those antiwar demonstrations, and both the city council and the police union were up in arms, thinking, Who are all these strangers—these outsiders, these
civilians!
—coming in to run one of the greatest police departments in the world? We don't need these people with their newfangled ideas. What do they know about policing?