The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (37 page)

Giuliani said he very much wanted me to put my name up for consideration and strongly implied that I was the candidate he wanted. However, he did say it would be imperative for me to meet with the selection committee. They were important supporters who had already met with several candidates, and he said he would be uncomfortable going outside that process; it would be a significant slight to them and the work they had already put in if I did not at least meet with them. Although he was not offering me the job outright, his intentions were clear, and he felt the best-case scenario would be if the committee supported his selection and recommended me as well.

I was still concerned about maintaining the confidentiality of our talks. The mayor said he could not guarantee silence; many people were involved in the selection process, and speculation about previous candidates was already getting out.

It was time to make a decision. I told the mayor I was interested but that I would have to talk it over with my wife.

What followed was a couple of days of shuttle diplomacy, as the committee decided whether they would recommend me, and I decided, if they did, whether I would take the job.

How could I not take it? My whole career had been about making it to the top, and New York was the largest, best-known police department in the United States. We decided to go for it.

Cheryl and I had many conversations about the changes this job would bring about in our lives. I told her I would not take it unless she was
willing to come to New York. Cheryl knew I was facing the premier career opportunity, that her practice was also going well, and she was continuing to pursue a judgeship. She told me she was willing to put her career goals on hold to accompany me. She said it would be like the president nominating her for a seat on the Supreme Court and my saying Ididn't want to move to Washington. I could not have taken the job without her support.

Word got out in a hurry. When I flew from Boston to New York to meet with the committee, the New York press was at the gate. I arrived back in Boston around eleven and was met by another set of cameras and microphones. I was the lead story on the Boston TV news.

It was exciting, and for a few days it was almost nonstop. This media circus was not without its tumbling acts, however. During the time, I went to Washington with a group from the U.S. Conference of Mayors and Police Chiefs to meet with the president about the crime bill, and at a stand-up interview on the front lawn of the White House, a local Boston reporter asked me, “Commissioner, what if you don't get the New York City job?”

I smiled. “Well, you know, Boston's a pretty good consolation prize.”

It was an attempt at humor that failed miserably. I was just being glib. I prized the Boston commissionership so highly I had spent my entire professional life trying to obtain it; it was anything but a consolation prize. But that's what I said and, naturally, the quote made headlines in Boston. Boston has a competitive relationship with New York in the best of times, from the Red Sox–Yankees and Celtics-Knicks rivalries to the cities’ clashing cultures, and for me, a hometown boy, to consider leaving Boston and then call staying there a “consolation prize” was truly foolish.

Of course, they went running to Mayor Menino, who justifiably failed to see the humor. The
Boston Herald
ran a great cartoon showing the mayor slamming the door on my butt as I was leaving, saying, “I want to wish you … ah, the hell with it!” My ill-advised attempt at a joke still haunts me.

I arrived at Giuliani's committee interview with solutions. I had prepared talking points dealing with both crime in the city and the state of the police department itself. I began by telling them, “We will win the war on crime. We
can
carry out the mayor's determination to dramatically reduce crime, disorder, and fear throughout New York. We will successfully move against street-level drug dealing within twelve months. We will reduce crime by 40 percent within three years. We will reduce public fear measurably within four years and let people feel that they can walk the city's streets.

“We will win by transforming the systems and practices of
all
the departments. We will empower and make precinct commanders accountable for all police activity in their areas. We will reward success, not merely the absence of public failure.”

We would empower anticrime units to make drug/decoy arrests, encourage every uniformed officer to make drug arrests, keep cops on the streets by reducing their time in court. We would treat guns like drugs by interrupting their flow at every point of supply, sale, and use. We would pursue
everybody
involved in the commission of a crime with a gun. We would identify the source of the weapons in the city and use stings to attack dealers.

We would fundamentally change the way the NYPD ran its investigations. As we had done at transit when we hunted down the wolfpacks, we would stop clearing violent crimes with one arrest—we would get
every
perpetrator. We would look for connections between crimes and try to make three cases per perp instead of one. We would bring the innovations that had made the transit warrant unit such a success to the NYPD.

The entire culture of the New York Police Department needed to be transformed. We would concentrate on rooting out corruption by recruiting investigators from leaders within the ranks, by training supervisors to see signs of trouble and rewarding commanders for finding it. “The cops must know their mission and have the skills to carry it out,” I said. We would train all officers rapidly and systematically so they would be committed to the new strategies and the new ways to do their jobs, then we would organize a full-press campaign for public support. But, I stressed, the change must come from inside the department first.

On December 1, I flew down to New York with Cheryl, Jack Maple, and Bob and Sandy Johnson. Cheryl and I met at Giuliani's law offices with his inner circle. Then Larry Levy, an attorney in the city corporation counsel's office, took down information for the necessary background checks. Finally, at around one in the morning, Mayor Giuliani offered me the job. They were going to announce my appointment the next morning.

I had won the big one: police commissioner of the City of New York.

NEW YORK DEMANDS IMMEDIATE ACTION. I SPENT THIRTY DAYS PUTTING
together an organization that would be working at high speed and efficiency the day I took office. Mayors and governors have transition teams, why not a police commissioner? The New York City Police Foundation funded the transition process. I assembled a team from all areas of my professional life to analyze the NYPD from top to bottom and formulate a plan for success.

Bob Wasserman was the leader of my transition team, which included Bob Johnson, Jack Maple, John Linder, Dean Esserman, Al Sweeney, Peter LaPorte, Joan Brody, and Bob O'Toole. Wasserman had an intimate understanding of the personnel and practices of the NYPD, having worked with Lee Brown and David Dinkins on the Safe Streets community-policing program. He had developed a thousand-page analysis of the department to support the need for six thousand new cops.

Wasserman offered several recommendations: Janet Lennon, a former special counsel under Lee Brown, and Mike Farrell, a special assistant to Ray Kelly. Wasserman also suggested I bring in Judy Laffey as my executive assistant. Judy had served in the same capacity under Brown and Ben Ward, and she ran a tight ship. She knew the commissioner's office inside out and knew how the department really worked, and she was known and
respected within it. The police were her family; her husband John was commanding officer of the Operations Division. I had met her when I'd visited Commissioner Brown, and she was efficient and personable. People would tell me, “That woman who works with you is delightful to deal with.” The ones who couldn't get around her were less complimentary. The more I worked with her the more I liked and respected her.

Wasserman focused on producing a comprehensive Who's Who of the NYPD and an outline of the key current and ongoing issues. He wanted to know what the priorities were and where things were going. I had a relatively limited knowledge of the personalities involved and, outside of my good relationship with Lee Brown, had not been particularly welcomed into the inner offices of the department when I had been at transit. Wasserman asked the fifty most powerful people in the department—the deputy commissioners, the bureau chiefs, the assistant chiefs, and the deputy chiefs—to provide us with their personnel files and a detailed report on the operation of their units. I intended to interview many people before making my command staff decisions, but I could tell, by the documents they produced, what they were like.

Wasserman also organized discussions of my entrance strategy. Clearly, the most controversial idea was to ask for the resignations of all the significant people in the NYPD, and it was hotly debated. On one hand, such a potential bloodletting could clearly destabilize the department. I would be throwing a hand grenade into a roomful of police careers. On the other hand, it was easier to start off with a clean slate and not have to worry about excising people later. Everyone would be on notice that we meant to change things drastically.

I had gotten the sense when I was at transit that the NYPD was a culture of its own, very resistant to creativity. It certainly did not take the crime issue seriously. At transit, when I had thought through the dynamics of crime and acted to bring it down, the NYPD had taken little or no notice of our accomplishments. They had not been interested in investigating new ways of considering the profession, even though we were in the same city and essentially sharing the same base of criminals. Despite our resurgence, we had remained tunnel rats to them.

Under Dinkins, Brown, and Kelly, the NYPD was committed to the concept of community policing. The 1991 Safe Streets law, championed by the Citizens Crime Commission and pushed through by Dinkins, established a city income-tax surcharge dedicated to hiring six thousand more police officers, and the community-policing program was based on the
idea that this infusion of new cops on the beat would have a significant effect in bringing down the crime rate.

Mayor Dinkins made a major mistake, one that probably cost him the election, by spending two years’ worth of Safe Streets money on social-service initiatives rather than immediately hiring cops. Those initiatives were important, but the public wanted to feel protected, they wanted to see more cops on the beat. If he had hired 2,000 cops in January 1993, they would have been through the academy and on the streets that summer, just in time to be a positive issue in the campaign. The streets would have been swimming with cops. To all those who felt Dinkins was soft on crime, he could have shown pictures of himself and 2,000 cops being sworn in at Madison Square Garden. The photos would have shown him doing something and might well have produced the small boost he needed to be reelected. Instead, press coverage of the police focused, to his detriment, on corruption scandals, which ironically, in a courageous political act, he had effectively addressed by appointing a mayoral commission under the direction of his highly regarded deputy mayor for criminal justice, Judge Milton Mollen. Dinkins got no credit; most of the cops for whom he won funding didn't come on the job until after the election. This was very poor political planning. In the first six months of Giuliani's term, the new mayor attended two graduation ceremonies and implicitly took credit for 4,200 additional police officers.

The community-policing plan that had been put into practice when I arrived focused on the beat cop. Capital improvements were being planned that would have set up community-policing offices in each precinct. “Officer Friendly” would respectfully resume contact with the community, courteously listen to people's problems, and immediately find appropriate solutions.

In theory, that's fine; beat cops are important in maintaining contact with the public and offering them a sense of security. They can identify the community's concerns and sometimes prevent crime simply by their visibility. Giving cops more individual power to make decisions is a good idea. But the community-policing plan as it was originally focused was not going to work because there was no focus on crime. The connection between having more cops on the street and the crime rate falling was implicit. There was no plan to deploy these officers in specifically hard-hit areas (to win political support for Safe Streets, Dinkins had had to commit to deploying cops throughout the city, in both low- and high-crime areas), and there were no concrete means by which they were supposed
to address crime when they got there. They were simply supposed to go out on their beats and somehow improve their communities.

The new beat cop was a kid. No twenty-two-year-old kid from Long Island was going to come to Harlem, Hollis, the Upper East Side, or East New York and solve that neighborhood's problems. The city's problems were complex and difficult for the most experienced police and social service experts; these kids were unprepared and ill equipped to handle them, and it was unrealistic to expect that they could. And even on the odd chance that some of the new cops were capable of getting significant results, they were never going to be empowered to follow through. The NYPD was a centralized bureaucracy that didn't give out power even to its precinct commanders, let alone the cop on the beat. So these kids were getting sent out to be the problem solvers, and the neighborhood was beating up on them. “Why didn't you prevent that break-in? Why did my car get stolen? Why am I getting panhandled and mugged? Why aren't we safe?” They had no answers, and pretty soon they would be as callous and demoralized as the rest of the force.

Everyone on the transition team had a specific task. Maple was primarily responsible for investigating personnel. He also focused on crime. Esserman reviewed corruption issues, LaPorte began to concentrate on the administrative details that would be his responsibility as my chief of staff, and Sweeney synthesized the information. We met two or three times a week in a corner of the Giuliani transition offices at 40 Church Street, and again at Bob Johnson's First Security Services offices at Logan Airport in Boston.