The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (29 page)

The officer straightened up a little.

“What's your post?” I asked. I expected he would tell me something like “Forty-first to Forty-third streets between Madison and Lexington.”

“Right here, sir,” he said.

“Right here?” He was standing in front of an office building. “What are you doing here?”

“I'm guarding the token booth, sir. That's my responsibility.”

“Where's the token booth?”

He pointed down a marble corridor to an entrance forty feet away inside the building.

“If you're supposed to be guarding the token booth in there, what are you doing out here?”

“My radio doesn't work in there.”

In that one conversation, all the problems of the Transit Police officer were clear. Zero morale, the absolute hatred of his assignment, the feelings of being disrespected by his organization, the feelings of disrespect for his organization, the lousy equipment, the lousy uniforms. He put on his hat, pinned up his tie, tucked himself in, and went back to his post.

I made it a point to get out and around the system my first several weeks on the job, and as I talked to more cops, I started to see things for myself. I didn't like what I was seeing.

Imagine the sheer drudgery and boredom of being a police officer in uniform assigned to stand in one place eight hours a day, day after day, just so people don't jump the turnstile or rob the booth. Cops being cops, they wanted to focus on crime: robberies, assaults, muggings. They hated being assigned to prevent fare evasion because they saw that as protecting the Transit Authority's money—not their money, not the taxpayers’
money, or the city's money, but the Transit Authority's money. They felt they were being misused by the Transit Authority. The Transit Authority was the enemy.

On top of that, I only had four hundred cops working patrol at any one time, and there were over seven hundred entrances. How was I supposed to keep them all covered, let alone fight crime inside the system? Anyone who wanted to ride for free who saw a cop at one booth could walk down a block and jump the turnstile at the other entrance. The whole idea of planting a cop at each station wasn't going to work. And that's not even taking into account the deadening effect of the no-win job on cops who already felt they were in a loser's organization.

Two-thirds of what the Transit Authority wanted to make our main focus—fare evasion and disorder—cops didn't want to spend time on. They wanted to reduce crime. But absent getting my force inspired to deal with all three, we were never going to reduce any of them. I had to put together a transit team that was capable of setting goals, reorganizing and inspiring the department to meet those goals, and improving morale and confidence, while fighting the promerger stance of the union and the newly elected mayor, David Dinkins.

Kelling and Wasserman had given me the names of several talented people in the organization and I sought them out. The first was Dean Esserman, a young man in his early thirties who had gone to New York City private schools, graduated from Dartmouth, interned at PERF, gotten his law degree, become an assistant district attorney, and then general counsel to Transit Police Chief Vinny Del Castillo. Not your normal Transit Police career path. Esserman was a progressive thinker whom I could bounce ideas with, and I kept him on as both my chief counsel and policy adviser. He was very smart, well networked in the city, and extremely helpful. He had one of the most extensive police libraries I had ever seen, and his knowledge of New York City police history was nothing short of phenomenal.

Mike O'Connor, transit's chief of detectives, was also on Kelling and Wasserman's list. O'Connor had the reputation for being a real tough guy; they called him “Iron Mike.” O'Connor was outside the power circle that was running the department when I arrived. He was on vacation the week I took over and was not there for my initial meeting with the chiefs, but when he got back he knocked on my door. I was interested in meeting this guy whom Kelling and Wasserman had thought so highly of. Right away, he said something I responded to.

“If you want to get out into the system,” he told me, “I'd be more than happy to show you around. Night or day, I'd be available to you.”

That impressed me. In my dealings with all the other incumbent transit chiefs, I had come to realize that they never actually went out and rode the trains. They had desk jobs, they were never seen by the troops, and they liked it that way. I liked O'Connor's direct approach. In fact, we did tour the subways and as I put together a planning group to set goals and reorganize the department, O'Connor became a confidant and an indispensable part of the brain trust. He was very creative, very ambitious, loved the department, and, most important, felt he could do a much better job. The fact that he was one of the department's most highly decorated members also gave him great credibility.

Al O'Leary was my director of media services, and he gave me a quick and important education in how to deal with New York's vaunted press. “Don't play games with them,” he told me. “Don't deceive them. Tell it to them the way it is. Always tell them the truth.” I liked O'Leary. He was personable, widely respected by the press, and a straight shooter. Since the press was essential to my plans, it was important to start off on the right foot with them. With Al O'Leary, I was assured of that.

Phyllis McDonald was the director of planning. Phyllis had been a deputy chief in Dayton, Ohio, as well as an academic, moving through both worlds as a consultant. She had been hired by Del Castillo at Wasserman's recommendation about a year before I was approached for the job and had been very frustrated at the slow pace of change in the department.

I brought with me from Boston for the transition period a woman named Athena Yerganian, a computer whiz who had worked with me at the MDC. She produced a lot of the analytical data, organizational charts, and color diagrams that the brain trust found so helpful in reorganizing the department.

I commuted to Boston on weekends to see Cheryl, or occasionally she came down, so during the week I worked day and night. During the first several weeks of evaluation and transition, I frequently met in the evenings in my hotel room with Wasserman, Esserman, O'Connor, McDonald, Yerganian, and Kelling, and we'd cook up strategies. Wasserman and Kelling had been hired by the Transit Authority as consultants and were feeding me ideas and reading material. The more I thought about it, the more the place needed shaking up. “We're sloppy about everything,” I said one evening. “We're sloppy in our appearance, we're sloppy always thinking the
city cops are first-class and we're second-rate; we're not getting a handle on the violence or the robberies or even the graffiti. The place is a mess.”

The Transit Police organization I inherited was less than efficient. Vinny Del Castillo had been very impressed with computers and installed a number of computer systems to manage the organization. They generated a phenomenal amount of information but didn't bring about any significant change in the crime or disorder situations. Like most of his command staff, Del Castillo very seldom went out on the system.

Shortly before my arrival, Del Castillo had brought in a new deputy chief, George Latimer, as his number two. Latimer, a black man, had been a captain in transit for a number of years before retiring because he felt he couldn't crack the old-boy network. Wanting a minority on the command staff, Del Castillo asked Latimer to come out of retirement, and he jumped at the opportunity.

Latimer had quite a reputation as a tough guy when he was in the Transit Police. He immediately began building a coterie of chiefs around him who figured that when Del Castillo either stepped aside or was moved out, their guy as heir apparent would move up, and they would move up with him. Unfortunately, they weren't doing a particularly good job. The department had spent millions of dollars in overtime the year before, and robberies had gone
up
12 percent.

My first week on the job, I asked every commander above district level to prepare presentations, to come into my office after work and tell me about their command and what they did. In an organization that felt disenfranchised, I wanted to involve every level in its own turnaround. They gathered what facts they had and showed me. I got a quick but thorough overview of the people in positions of responsibility within the Transit Police as well as a better understanding of the organization.

Within two months of taking over, I proposed to Alan Kiepper a major organizational restructuring. He agreed. We reorganized the Transit Police into two bureaus: operations and administration. Instead of one chief presiding over everything, we now had two deputy chiefs. George Latimer became chief of administration. I made Mike O'Connor chief of operations and gave him full authority to run the department day to day. O'Connor had my trust, and I wasn't going to hang over his shoulder. The message was clear to the department and the rank and file: A new day was dawning for transit. With the department in good hands, I was free to concentrate on the big picture.

George Kelling had identified Captain Richie Gollinge as a creative and
assertive guy, someone who was willing to stick his neck out, one of the few white shirts who was out in the system working with his cops. (Captains and above wore white shirts with their uniforms, others wore powder blue.) Gollinge was in charge of the Transit Police district located at Columbus Circle, one of the city's busiest stations, in the heart of Manhattan. He was a big, robust guy, very outgoing. O'Connor was impressed with him, too, and so was I. I moved Gollinge up from a captain to a deputy chief working with Mike O'Connor, a triple leap, passing over all deputy inspectors and inspectors. It was an unheard-of promotion. Gollinge himself couldn't believe it. He came out of my office after I'd promoted him and told Esserman and O'Connor, “Chief Bratton made a mistake. He meant ‘deputy inspector,’ he said ‘deputy chief.’” They laughed. “No, he meant what he said.”

Most of the transit brass never went on the system—they commuted to work in their authorized take-home cars, and even when they moved around the city they'd take cars. They referred to riding the subways as “going into the rat hole,” or “going back into the hole.” I told them, “Look, I'm going to be riding the system—in plain clothes, in uniform, all hours of the day and night—and I expect you to get out there and show our people some support, see what's actually going on.” We called it Getting the White Shirts Out. Transit cops weren't used to seeing senior command staff at roll calls; they couldn't believe that in the middle of the night a call would go out and a white shirt was on the scene to assist. We weren't there to spy on them, we really wanted to see the conditions they were working under.

Each morning I was briefed by my administrative sergeant, Cal Mathis, who had recently returned from the FBI National Academy. Each morning it was his responsibility to give me an information snapshot of the previous evening's events: patrol strength, numbers of crimes, major incidents. Each week, I gathered the department's senior leadership in my office. After about a month, we began meeting daily so I could intensify my knowledge of the department and so the senior staff had more access to me and could really see the direction I wanted to take them. These meetings created a forum for commanders to talk to each other on a regular basis. Anecdotes, customs, methods of getting the job done, things that worked—I wanted to hear them. If they made sense and they were permissible within department guidelines, I began to institute them departmentwide.

Many leaders do not like meetings. I do. I find them a very useful means
of establishing personal two-way communication, and they've always been a part of my leadership style.

At the same time as I was trying to reinvigorate my troops, the MTA was trying to reinterest the public in the transit system. They were preparing a $3.5 million advertising campaign for the subway system under the supervision of their director of marketing and corporate communications, John Linder. George Kelling said Linder was very smart and highly skilled, and he suggested very strongly that I meet him. He felt we would hit it off.

I certainly did want to meet Linder. Here for the first time in my career someone had expertise and a multimillion-dollar budget to market what I was doing. We met for dinner at an old, dark wood–paneled restaurant off Sixth Avenue that had all these single malts and fifty-year-old whiskeys that Linder liked, and we talked.

Linder was in his early forties. His curly black hair was graying. He was slight, thin, and always looked worried. He all but wrung his hands when he spoke.

Linder was a great believer in focus groups, he was constantly testing people and products. His major frustration in promoting the Transit Police was how to market the organization when crime is going up 25 percent and when the officers are demoralized and look awful and have been consistently ineffective in dealing with very visible issues.

Linder's focus groups told him that despite the fact that the TA had virtually wiped out graffiti on the trains, about 20 percent of the respondents said it was still there. Things had gotten so bad, people didn't even believe what they saw. In one set of focus groups, Linder asked women what percentage of the city's crime they thought was committed on the subways. They said 30 to 40 percent. Homicides? Forty to 50 percent. When he asked men, crime came back at 20 to 30 percent, homicides 30 to 40. In fact, 3 percent of the city's felony crime and between 1 and 2 percent of its murders happened on the subways. “What would you think if I were to tell you that 3 percent of the city's crime happens on the subway?” he asked the women. “Would that change your level of fear toward the public-transportation system?”

They answered, “Absolutely not.”

The subways, he found, invited fear because, whatever happened, you couldn't escape. Anything could happen to you anywhere in the system. For the public and for us, it seemed there was nowhere to run.

Linder had also run focus groups with transit cops, and his findings
matched my anecdotal information: They were as demoralized and disheveled as any organization he had seen. They didn't want to deal with fare beating because they had no interest in protecting the Transit Authority's property; they didn't want to collar turnstile jumpers because that had nothing to do with real police work; and they didn't want to deal with the panhandlers and underground population because they didn't want to put their hands on people who might have AIDS. They were happy, however, to go after serious crime.