The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (27 page)

I got the call. Bill Geary asked whether I would come onboard. I jumped at the chance. The MBTA was in good shape: Crime was down, the force had been doubled in size and was well supplied and accredited. I had turned it around, could accept a thank you, and leave. In June 1986, I resigned as chief of the MBTA Police to become superintendent of the Mets.

I was going to another state agency, still working for Dukakis, whose stock was high, and who was gearing up for a run at the presidency. My promotion was well received by the media, I was the guy coming in to straighten out another troubled police department. Turnarounds had become my specialty.

I had thought the MBTA was a tough department. The Mets were head and shoulders the worst police department in America. They lacked everything: systems, equipment, accountability, procedures, protocol, discipline. Their headquarters were on the ground floor of an old stone building on Beacon Hill. It must have been the last building in the continental United States still running on DC current. And my immediate predecessor was going to jail. It was an ideal department for me. Everywhere you looked there was something to do.

Bill Geary supported my decision to make key personnel changes at the command staff level. I designated Chief of Detectives Tommy White as my number two. I reassigned the deputy superintendents of patrol and administration and brought Kathy O'Toole from the Boston Police as deputy superintendent of administrative services. O'Toole had been a sergeant in the Boston Police Department and on the career fast track but had been bypassed. I was glad to get her. She was an extremely capable woman and really knew the legislative process; that strength was crucial in getting us our equipment. I promoted Al Seghezzi, who for some reason had been demoted by Keough to the rank of captain, to chief of patrol. He was another Mickey MacDonald for me; he was widely respected and truly welcomed the opportunity to be born again. Several years earlier, I had met a young Northeastern University student named Peter LaPorte, who had worked under me as an intern on a state criminal-justice subcommittee. He was a real go-getter, and Peter shaved off his beard and signed on as my staff assistant. These personnel moves were far-reaching, and my
working relationship with Bill Geary was so good he completely supported them all.

My personal life was also moving. Cheryl and I were married in a wonderful ceremony at the Four Seasons Hotel, overlooking the Boston Public Garden. Geary, in his capacity as a justice of the peace, officiated. Al Sweeney was my best man. My life was really coming together.

For the first ten months of my administration, we extensively analyzed the entire department. It was worse than I'd thought. Some of the physical facilities were so poor—including leaking roofs, buckling walls, and falling plaster—that one squad room was actually heated by a fireplace. Our radio system hadn't been updated in several decades, leaving Met officers less able than cabdrivers to communicate with their dispatchers. Our walkie-talkies were so old and beat-up that walking and mounted officers couldn't receive calls for service and had to rely on cops in cars to look in on them once in a while to see if they were all right. Prisoners’ short-term detention, processing, and housing areas did not meet proper safety standards. There was a severe shortage of locker rooms and showers for female personnel, while the men's facilities were in deplorable condition.

One of the lingering effects of the examination scandal was that many of the bosses were believed to have obtained their promotions by buying them. At the very least, most of the rank and file thought the brass was not supervising them closely and that they could get away with just about anything. The Mets knew their careers were going nowhere, and that dead-end attitude was reflected in their work. They had always been something of an invisible department, and many of them preferred to keep it that way.

Though one of their primary responsibilities was the control of traffic and the investigation of traffic accidents, the Mets never really investigated accidents involving their own vehicles. One of the reasons the fleet looked so bad was that no one was held accountable, and few officers were ever disciplined when they were at fault. As a result, we were suffering a chronic shortage of equipment because they were smacking up the cars left and right. The traditional July Fourth concert, with a half million people watching the Boston Pops play the
1812 Overture
on the Charles River Esplanade, capped by a fireworks extravaganza, was going to be my first big event as Mets superintendent. I had seen the old cars, some with trunk lids held down by rope, and I mandated that we would police the event only in cars with the new markings and without body damage. We were on display, and we were going to look good.

It was a measure of how bad things were that, out of the Mets’ 113 marked cruisers, we could not come up with 25 that fit that description. Twenty-four of our cars had been totaled, another 35 were out due to breakdowns, the rest were overused and beat to hell. We were supposed to keep order on the roads; this was an embarrassment.

Working with Bill Geary, we immediately put a major effort into getting state money to upgrade our fleet, but I didn't want the cops to wreck the new cars. I installed a system of discipline. If an officer was found at fault in an automobile accident, he or she got at a minimum what was called an oral reprimand. I was going to get the cops’ attention. Oral reprimands were given for a wide variety of infractions, from involvement in a car accident to an officer's not having his patrol guide up-to-date. I meant to instill accountability.

Oral reprimands were controversial with the union because they went into a cop's personnel file. We had big debates, their point being, “How can it be an oral reprimand when it's in writing?” It was just wordplay. A written reprimand, I told them, was given when an officer was found to be at egregious fault and was much more serious. I demanded all personnel orders and discipline be read at roll call, including oral reprimands. I installed Billy Boards in all station houses and posted the reprimands there as well.

We gave out more oral reprimands in one year than had been probably given in the hundred-year history of the organization, but not long after they were instituted the auto accident rate began to drop significantly, and the injured-officer rate took a nosedive. You know you've been accepted when the good-natured jokes start to appear. The Mets gave me a T-shirt that read: “I Survived the Reprimands of 1987.”

When I arrived, the Mets were a dispirited, reactive, day-to-day operation with no direction, goals, or vision of its future. I was living in Revere at the time, and I arranged to be picked up and driven to work by different Met officers from the local district each morning. On our way in, I asked each of them for their ideas and their sense of the organization. This was a department that was lying down dying, and I needed to know why and how. We wanted our officers to participate in the life of the Mets, not just mark time there; we wanted them to believe in the Mets, because they were the Mets.

In order to jump-start this rusty machine, my staff and I came up with a forty-six-page plan of action. We identified the department's major strengths and weaknesses, defined its role within its parent agency, identified
the changes needed to bring the organization into the modern world, and, most important, developed a written statement of its values.

• The Metropolitan Police Department exists to protect and serve the public.
  

• The Department and its members will maintain the highest ethical standards of conduct.
  

• We will treat all citizens with dignity, respect, and courtesy.
  

• We will safeguard each citizen's rights to free expression, movement, and constitutional liberty while within the Metropolitan District Commission jurisdiction.
  

• We will use only minimum necessary force when performing our lawful duties.
  

• In applying the law, we will exercise discretion with consistency and equitableness.
  

• We are committed to giving each employee the authority to make decisions and to hold them accountable for their actions.
  

• The Department is committed to creating an environment that is productive and satisfying and of which its members can be proud.
  

We focused quickly on the department's vehicles and received $800,000 in state funding for thirty-nine cruisers, eight Suburbans with pushbar bumper plates to push disabled vehicles off the highways, five patrol wagons, and a dozen motorcycles. A hundred more vehicles and a $700,000 helicopter arrived within the year. After heavy lobbying, we got $2.5 million for a new state-of-the-art radio system including computer-aided dispatching and data processing and a citizen emergency call-box network, plus mobile data terminals in our cruisers. As a gesture of partnership and cooperation, we offered to share this with the state police. My team and I explained the virtues of this new technology to their representatives. They said they didn't have a need for it.

I established a uniform committee and instructed the department to get input from all levels of the organization. Promotion ceremonies, which had become tedious affairs, were reinvigorated and infused with pomp, circumstance, and significance.

I was learning how to inspire and motivate the rank and file by instilling discipline, by dealing with corruption, and by giving them better
equipment with which to do their jobs and more satisfaction when the job was done well. For the men and women of the Mets, all of a sudden good work got rewarded and was more enjoyable.

In 1987, I received the second annual Gary Hayes Award from the Police Executive Research Forum, in recognition of my turning around two different police forces and actually having an effect on crime. The award was a tremendous honor. In the late 1980s, very few people in- or outside the policing profession thought such a thing was possible.

PERF convened its members several times a year for seminars and discussions. It was a unique professional organization. The notable names in the business attended as guest speakers and presenters: Ben Ward, police commissioner of New York; Lee Brown of Houston; Daryl Gates of Los Angeles; New York's former commissioner Pat Murphy; academics such as James Q. Wilson, George Kelling, Bob Wasserman, and Herman Goldstein; public officials such as Bob Kiley, then of New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority; President Reagan's attorney general, Ed Meese. Members had to have a college degree, and they had to believe in, create, and host research in the field of policing.

There were other advanced centers of police thinking. The Police Foundation was the godfather of the field, and the Executive Session on Policing at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government was developing the community-policing concept. I stayed involved with them all.

This was an interesting period in policing because the big-city chiefs opened up their doors to the research community. PERF and the Police Foundation let these social scientists, who ten years earlier they would have locked up for demonstrating outside the Chicago convention, into their station houses to interview prisoners and riffle their files. As a result, the field of policing included a generation of social scientists many of whom probably never thought they would get involved in this world. And, in an extremely conservative and intentionally isolated profession, the idea of the professionally informed and educated police chief began to emerge.

James Q. Wilson and George Kelling had written an important article entitled “Broken Windows” in the March 1982 issue of
The Atlantic
Monthly
in which they'd said, “If police are to deal with disorder to reduce fear and crime, they must rely on citizens for legitimacy and assistance.” In 1988, Kelling had delivered a paper to the Harvard Executive Session called “Police and Communities: The Quiet Revolution” that advocated a return to what he called “community problem-solving” policing. Kelling
articulated and put into beautiful words what I had found from experience. I supported what he wrote because I had already lived it. The Boston-Fenway Program had convinced me of the absolute wisdom of that approach.

Meanwhile, between 1986 and 1989, the Mets turnaround was so successful that the state police wanted to take us over. They were the larger, more traditional, old-line organization of troopers, and they had become very jealous of our increasing visibility and success. Three years earlier, they had been the established power, and we'd been less than nothing. Now we were modernized and retrained and reinvigorated. We had better technology than the state police, better equipment, better cars, better uniforms. We had worked very hard to use the media to advance our image, and we were getting better press than they were. We had computers in our cars; they were still back at headquarters doing things with pen and paper. The state police was a good old-line organization, but in three years we had surpassed them in many ways, changing the Metropolitan Police from a dispirited, do-nothing, reactive organization with a poor self-image and an even worse public one to a very proud and proactive department. We were the Cinderella department.

What the state police did have, however, was a union with phenomenal political clout. Connected to Governor Dukakis and his Secretary for Public Safety Charles Barry, as well as the Massachusetts legislature, the union waged an aggressive political campaign to do away with us. The state police plan, in effect a hostile takeover, was to merge all six hundred Metropolitan police, plus four hundred Registry of Motor Vehicles police and a hundred Capitol police, into their own organization. They would have preferred to get rid of the personnel from all three organizations, but politically, the best they could do was a merger.

I fought that battle for an entire year. I didn't feel my agency was being treated fairly, and I didn't think the state police were in any position to run our operation as well as we did. It was a bitter fight in which we were outmaneuvered and ultimately beaten. Despite my good relations with Dukakis, he sided with the state police, a decision, I believe, he subsequently came to regret. Legislation was passed in 1990 to merge the four organizations into one.