The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (38 page)

We began to develop the NYPD team. I was being brought in to breathe some life into the organization, not to manage a holding action, and I wanted the best and the brightest. I knew I wanted to promote Dave Scott, an honorable man with whom I'd had a good relationship when I was at transit, to first deputy commissioner. The first deputy is the commissioner's right hand; he watches over discipline, he participates in the placement of personnel, he advises on policy, and he keeps an eye on the budget. The fact that Scott was black also helped. New York had lost a black mayor and a black police commissioner, and I felt it was important to show that minorities still had a significant role model and advocate within the department. He was also the right man for the job.

Wasserman and Maple directed me toward the up-and-comers. Maple did not have the political debts or vested interests of an NYPD insider; we would not be redeeming old political chits. He and Wasserman began
preliminary interviews. With Maple, pretty much any conversation is an interrogation, and he very soon targeted the stars and the duds. He presented me with his impressions.

“An obstructionist …”

“Good communication skills. Strong detective background as well as patrol.”

“No ideas. No creativity, leadership. Has integrity. Not good under pressure.”

“Leadership: None. Creativity: None. Commitment: None.”

The two people in the department widely considered the most brilliant, the most visionary, were one-star chiefs John Timoney and Michael Julian.

Mike Julian began as a plainclothes cop in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and had worked toward his law degree at night. As an attorney within the department, he had represented both police officers and the city, and he had prosecuted cops for misconduct. He was in his forties but looked younger, was articulate and argumentative, and didn't make concessions easily.

Julian spent a year in the Cadet Corps recruiting minority police officers, then, after riots broke out in the Ninth Precinct's Tompkins Square Park and police had used excessive force to put them down, was given that Lower East Side precinct with the mandate to calm the streets. At a time when three hundred men and women were living in Tompkins Square Park and anarchists were squatting in the surrounding buildings, the NYPD needed someone who could work with the neighborhood's active and very visible antipolice groups.

Perhaps because he was not knee-jerk in defending cops who went over the line, or because he was smart and good-looking and could talk up a storm, some cops thought he was an elitist, a glamour boy. Maple swore the anarchists liked Julian better than the cops did. That didn't concern me. Where many commanders get caught up in the daily details of policing, Julian had an understanding, an intellectual overview, and a real talent for creating problem-solving strategies. When Lee Brown came in with his focus on community policing, Julian was considered the man to run the program. His name was familiar because Wasserman, when he was consulting at transit, had once indicated to me that Julian was the brightest person in the NYPD.

Under Ray Kelly, Julian established policy advisory groups, analogous to John Linder's focus groups, to involve street cops in identifying department policies that interfered with high performance. Four cops from each
precinct, covering all tours, were made advisers to the police commissioner and began to detail what systemic and organizational alterations they felt had to be made in order for the department to perform at its best. Kelly had started to make some of these changes before Giuliani was elected, and Julian had had a large hand in the beginnings of this transformation.

John Timoney, forty-five, was the prototypical New York cop. He was born in Dublin and never totally lost the brogue. On first meeting, it takes serious concentration to understand him, and when he gets excited, his words run together in a blur. A craggy-faced guy with the appearance of a man who had acquitted himself well in a series of fights, he was a marathon runner and looked like a million bucks in uniform. He walked on his toes, like James Cagney in
Yankee Doodle Dandy
, like a hoofer or a fighter in the ring. He and Julian were good friends. Maple's assessment said, “He looks and sounds like a tough Irish cop, but his message and his programs are extremely progressive.”

He was also very smart. Timoney was the chief of the Office of Management, Analysis, and Planning (OMAP) under Ray Kelly. OMAP is responsible for reviewing department tactics and procedures, and making recommendations relative to new policies; it is effectively the commissioner's personal think tank. Timoney had been on the job for over twenty years, was thoroughly familiar with all the department's initiatives, and was respected throughout the department as a leader who always had its best interests, and those of his people, at heart. He also had a world of self-confidence. His career goal was to be commissioner, he knew his competition within the department, and he believed he was better than any person there. When I was appointed, he had expected a promotion.

“If they only bump me from one-star to two-star, there's no way I'm staying,” he told friends. “One-star to three-star, maybe. But I won't just hang out.” He let it be known within the department that “unless there's some super-duper offer, I'm going into business with Kelly.”

Working from Maple's and Wasserman's lists, John Linder brought together several leading candidates for the top jobs. In his practice, he uses the motivational technique of “strategic intent,” which calls for an organization's leader to create seemingly unreachable goals, what Bob Johnson in the business sector called “stretch goals,” and then challenges himself and his subordinates to invent ways to attain them. I had announced that we were going to take back the city “block by block.” Linder now told this group of NYPD chiefs, “Here's what we want to do. Over the next
two years we want a dramatic decrease in crime. That's our focus. Can we do it?”

“What do you mean by a ‘dramatic decrease’?”

“Ten percent the first year. Fifteen the next. Twenty-five percent in two years.” We had looked at the figures, and these were our goals. We thought they were within our grasp.

Several chiefs simply said, “Can't be done.” They thought they were already doing everything they could to bring down crime, and anything more was out of the question. “Dramatic? No. You can have decreases. Crime goes down 2 to 4 percent a year, and we can continue that trend. But 10 percent? No chance.”

Ray Kelly had told Linder, “You want to reduce crime? I can reduce crime. You give me fifty men and suspend the Constitution, I'll reduce crime.” That wasn't the way we were going to go about it.

Only Julian and Timoney thought the decrease was possible.

“Yeah, it can be done,” said Timoney, “but you're going to have to change everything about this place. If you really change the whole department, you can bring it down significantly.”

Julian told Linder, “This car is operating on two of eight cylinders. If you get it on
four
cylinders, you can reduce crime twenty-five percent.”

Those were the answers I was looking for.

When I checked Julian's background, one of his innovations was to put cops on bicycles. Teddy Roosevelt, my much-revered predecessor, had first put cops on bikes one hundred years earlier, but in modern times it had never been done in a major northeastern city; it was a California idea and was anathema to the rest of the chiefs. They'd said, “This can never happen and will never happen. It's dangerous, the bikes will be stolen, we'll look silly.” What Julian knew, and the rest of the chiefs either didn't understand or wouldn't consider, was that cops on foot disappear. Because of physical fatigue and boredom, a cop on foot does not do an eight-hour shift. Julian felt, as I did, that if you could make the job more interesting to a worker, he'd give you a better day's work. The chiefs couldn't understand this. Lee Brown challenged Julian, “If you can get the money yourself, you can do it.”

Julian tapped manufacturers, the Police Foundation, community and business groups, and finally he succeeded; the NYPD now has one thousand bikes on the streets of New York. The cops cover more territory more often and get around more quickly, largely due to his efforts. “You fought everybody on that,” I said when I interviewed him. “You went against the grain, you went against their direction.”

He said, “Yeah. They were wrong.”

“That's the kind of attitude I want. I want people who are not only going to think differently, but who'll be willing to go through walls to do it.”

I asked Julian who were the stars in the department. Most ambitious people in an organization will nominate themselves first. Julian impressed me again. “The guy you need is Timoney,” he told me. “Timoney has the leadership skills to get cops to enforce and obey the law.”

Maple told me, “Julian is brilliant, you need him around. But the cops hate him. Why don't you make him chief of personnel or something. This way you have him close to you, right? No one likes the chief of personnel, anyway.” So I did. It's a position in which he could deal with fundamental issues such as training, human resources, and support programs for the police (such as suicide prevention), as well as create ideas outside his immediate area and get them implemented. The issue of training was going to be critical to the direction I was intending to take the department. We were confident we could reduce crime and disorder, but if we did it by antagonizing the public, or in a disrespectful way, or in an abusive way, or in a way that alienated an already suspicious public—particularly the minority community—we would win the battle but lose the war.

Essentially, I made Mike Julian Chief of Big Ideas.

Then I met with Timoney.

The chief of department handles the day-to-day operations of the entire NYPD and coordinates the activities of everybody under him. The chiefs of investigations, patrol, and the Organized Crime Control Bureau all report to the chief of department. I was looking for innovation, but I needed someone who would engender fear and respect, a tough guy who would take charge, point us in the right direction, and have the troops do battle for him, as O'Connor had done for me at transit and Paul Evans had done in Boston.

After hearing from Wasserman, Linder, and Julian, I had been so predisposed to like Timoney that I was very surprised when sparks didn't fly. Timoney was tough, all right, but at our meeting he came off as cocky, which I didn't warm to at all. It is a function of how undistinguished that meeting was that I can't remember much more about it. Timoney walked into the room with a chance to make his career and walked out with nothing. Aside from the fact that we didn't click, his rapid-fire, closemouthed way of speaking was so thick I couldn't understand him. I told Linder, “The guy's from Ireland, I can't understand a word he says.” Timoney went back and told Julian, “The guy's from Boston, he talks funny.”

Timoney's strongest rival was a two-star chief from Staten Island, Tosano “Tony” Simonetti. He was an effusive, effective, take-charge guy, well respected in the department. I was leaning in his direction when we got wind of a small, unresolved cloud over his handling of an incident that the Mollen Commission was still investigating. I didn't know whether it would dissipate or turn into some thundering scandal. (It eventually proved to be without foundation.) I had good feelings about Simonetti's ability and honesty, but I couldn't afford even the whisper of a problem with my appointments, so I left Simonetti where he was. Which left Timoney. Two days later I brought him back, and this time I listened closely.

In the two intervening days, I had interviewed all the super chiefs, the five men at the top of the NYPD chain of command: chiefs of department, patrol, detectives, personnel, the Organized Crime Control Bureau, plus the deputy commissioner of internal affairs. I mentioned two who had impressed me.

“Well,” said Timoney, “that's where you and I differ. If I get the job they're the first two fuckin’ guys I'd get rid of.”

“Why?”

“There's only one person in the city that can do anything about narcotics, and that's Marty O'Boyle. O'Boyle's a one-star chief who's wasting away, getting ready to retire because he's fed up. He's the most talented guy in the police department. Everybody knows that. People who
know
know that.” Timoney's endorsement moved him far up the list. “He's kind of a laid-back guy, but he's the best.”

I looked at Timoney for a moment. He was clearly convinced and convincing. “Listen,” I said, “they're not
all
going to be Irish, are they?”

Two days later, I gave Timoney the job.

Timoney was a Bronx cop, a cop's cop. He was from the real world of policing, he knew what it was like out in those streets, and he brought that perspective to my inner circle. You had to understand the world cops were operating in to understand how they got themselves jammed up. He understood, as I did, that everything in the police world was not black and white. At a time when there was a great pressure from the district attorneys, the U.S. attorneys, the Mollen Commission, and Walter Mack at the NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau to be holier-than-thou and cleaner than clean, I needed balance. Timoney spoke for the cops about what it's really like out there. The prosecutors had never really experienced the streets. They espoused high morals and ethics but were lacking in the human
compassion they might have developed had they been there. I could not forgive truly dirty cops, but I could understand those others who found themselves jammed up for making a momentary mistake. What Timoney brought to the table was knowledge and compassion.

I told him, “I have things to do here, and I need people who will do them. I know the media and the press, I know how to change a large organization, but I don't know the nuts and bolts of the NYPD, and I don't have time to know it. You're the guy. I want you to run the department, the day-to-day operations. I'll do the other stuff.” If I was going to be the CEO of the NYPD, he would be my chief operating officer. Timoney's chest went out. That kind of trust will empower a good man.