The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (42 page)

Effective Tactics.
In order to avoid merely displacing crime and quality-of-life problems, and in order to bring about permanent change, these tactics must be comprehensive, flexible, and adaptable to the shifting crime trends we identify and monitor.

Relentless Follow-up and Assessment.
As in any problem-solving endeavor, an ongoing process of rigorous follow-up and assessment is absolutely essential to ensure that the desired results are actually being achieved. This evaluation also permits us to assess particular tactical responses and to incorporate the knowledge we gain into our subsequent efforts. By knowing how well a particular tactic worked on a particular crime, and by knowing which specific elements worked most effectively, we are better able to construct and implement effective responses for similar problems in the future. The process also permits us to redeploy resources to meet newly identified challenges once a problem has abated.

Maple put it most succinctly. Think of the Battle of Britain: Germany was getting ready to invade the British Isles. The British had fled Dunkirk and had only 450 Spitfires to protect their cities, while the Germans had thousands of bombers able to attack anywhere in England. However, the British had one thing the Germans didn't: radar. Despite very few resources, the British knew where the enemy was. Using their radar information, they were able to mobilize the 450 Spitfires exactly against the German bombers. Timely, accurate intelligence; rapid response; effective tactics; relentless follow-up—that's what won the Battle of Britain and that's how we were going to win the battle of New York.

We rolled out crime strategies consistently for the next two years. The second was the Youth Violence Strategy. Juvenile crime was New York City's growth industry. Kids were attacking, robbing, and killing people, especially other kids, in epidemic proportions. Homicide was the leading cause of death for New Yorkers between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. One-third of all arrests involving firearms in the first ten months of 1993 were for crimes committed by children between the ages of seven and nineteen. Violence inside the city's public schools was skyrocketing. JoAnne de Jesus, the mother of a twelve-year-old who had been cornered in a Brooklyn public-school washroom, said, “The problem is that students aren't fighting with their fists anymore. They're fighting with guns.” I'm a great believer that all behavior is learned. Many New York kids were learning on the streets, which had become killing grounds.

We extended the four crime-reduction principles to this problem. We surveyed the statistics and found that fully 40 percent of crime committed during school hours was committed by kids under sixteen. We found that many of the daytime victims were kids, as well. But kids, by law,
must
attend school. If they're in school, they're not outside robbing people or being robbed. If muggers can't find a victim, there's no mugging. We made the public schools our focal point. We instituted a citywide truancy program in which we patrolled neighborhoods, swept school-age kids off the streets, and brought them to school where they belonged. We picked up so many, we had to set up “catchment” areas in school auditoriums and gymnasiums.

Timoney had worked on the truancy issue as a deputy chief in Manhattan South. He broke the truants into three groups. First there were the hard-core truants who would go out the door the next day no matter how many times we brought them back. No one knew the size of that group. Second were the kids who skipped school because there were no consequences for doing so. “Why not skip? Nobody's gonna bother us.” When cops were outside to bring them back and call their parents, they would get discouraged. Third was the group that bolted because of peer pressure, the kids who didn't have an answer to the schoolyard question, “What's the matter, nothing's gonna happen, you got no balls?” Timoney's sense was that 70 percent of the truants fell into this third group, and we gave them an out. “The damn cops are out there, they're gonna grab me and call my mother. I'd book in a minute, but I can't.” We created a situation that allowed that group to save face and stay in school.

As I had done in Boston, we created the position of youth officer and assigned three to each precinct to develop youth initiatives and to get to know the kids in the precincts and schools. We revised department policy by negotiating with the schools chancellor in an effort to ensure that all crimes in and around schools were reported to us so we could respond. We proposed creating a database cross-referencing juvenile reports, truancy, and gang information, for use by the precinct commander and Family Court. We expanded the training of our cops. We also used the media to deliver our message and presented Sergeant Helen Rossi, who had been doing this work for ten years, as the embodiment of our antitruancy efforts and paraded her before the press. Now, not only Sergeant Rossi but the entire NYPD was after these truants. We got great headlines and sent the right message.

The New York Civil Liberties Union expressed some consternation the
first few weeks we put the program into practice, but our strategy had an immediate and dramatic impact on juvenile crime, and the outcry subsided.

We systematically implemented and released the Drug, Domestic Violence, Quality of Life, Auto Crime, and Integrity (Anticorruption) strategies. All were filled with innovations, and all were operated on our four guiding principles.

Drugs.
Previously, Tactical Narcotics Teams (TNT) moved into drug-infested neighborhoods for specifically limited periods, worked intensively, encouraged those in the neighborhood to give them tips on illegal activity, and then moved on. Personnel came to work on weekdays, made relatively few arrests after six at night, and were basically not there on weekends.
Fact: These hours became known to drug traffickers working the streets, who could easily ply their trade accordingly.
The department held meetings with the neighborhood groups in the targeted precincts before, during, and after TNT operations. Drug dealers sometimes attended these meetings and were able to adjust the places and times of their own operations.

We targeted open-air drug activity, driving it off the streets and then closing and, where possible, seizing the inside locations. We confiscated and traced the guns we found on drug dealers, put cops in those areas we knew to be drug markets, more aggressively targeted low- and middle-level dealers and suppliers, and coordinated our efforts with federal and state forces to get local high-level suppliers. We trusted precinct cops to work in plain clothes, and empowered precinct commanders to authorize them to make arrests seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Working with the D.A.s, we also authorized the precincts to get their own narcotics-search warrants.

Narcotics and guns are inseparable—find one and you find the other. Before, they had been designated as separate and distinct investigations. We began to use the gun strategy on narcotics collars. Ask them, “Where'd you get the gun?” Track the guns back, get more, keep going.

The concept that conquered fare beating in the subways was put to use against the drug dealers. We were working in partnership with the Drug Enforcement Administration at the time, and Maple said, “Why don't we go after drug dealers with the quality-of-life violations?”

The feds spoke to him as if he were just a little slow. “Well, Commissioner, we don't do things like that.” Quality-of-life arrests were small potatoes to them.

“All right,” said Maple, “amuse me, okay? Every drug dealer in the world has a phony cloned beeper and phony cloned cell phone. They cannot help themselves. If they have millions, they don't want to pay. Just like all gangsters use bad credit cards—they can't help themselves. Let's lock them up for the phony cloned phones and see what happens. And you might even hear more drug traffic on the phones you're listening to. We'll see. The people we arrest for the phones, they're not going to know it's a joke. Amuse me.” So they grabbed a guy with a cloned cell phone, and he gave up a string of murders. It's the same concept as busting Al Capone for tax evasion.

Domestic violence.
The department had no system to identify and track repeat calls, so there was no way to alert police officers in the field to locations that had numerous calls for help in the past or a history of violence. In 1993, there had been 178,000 domestic-violence calls; the NYPD had filled out only 58,000 reports and made only 12,000 arrests. We developed a domestic-incident report and tracked and monitored all instances of domestic violence, including crimes other than those defined in the law as family offenses. We gave a higher-priority response to calls involving violations of protection orders—that was a must-arrest. We trained officers to identify patterns of abuse. Even when the abused party didn't press charges, if the officer thought differently, an arrest was made. We insisted the detectives follow up and make arrests in situations where the violator had already fled the scene. We made it department policy to emphasize problem-solving tactics to enforce the law and deter family violence and held detectives accountable for follow-up on these cases. John Timoney personally directed this initiative. He was one of the top experts in the state, if not the country, on this issue.

Quality of life.
Boom boxes, squeegee people, street prostitutes, public drunks, panhandlers, reckless bicyclists, illegal after-hours joints, graffiti—New York was overrun. We called Police Strategy Number 5 “Reclaiming the Public Spaces of New York.” It was the linchpin strategy. Many have come to attribute the rapid decline in crime in New York City to the quality-of-life enforcement efforts, but that's simplistic. It was one of a number of strategies that were deployed.

My experience in District 4 in Boston had shown me the importance of cleaning up the streets and improving the quality of life. We could solve all the murders we liked, but if the average citizen was running a gauntlet of panhandlers every day on his way to and from work, he would want that issue solved.

Previous police administrations had been handcuffed by restrictions. We took the handcuffs off. Department attorneys worked with precinct commanders to address the problems. We used civil law to enforce exis-ting regulations against harassment, assault, menacing, disorderly conduct, and damaging property. We stepped up enforcement of the laws against public drunkenness and public urination and arrested repeat violators, including those who threw empty bottles in the street or were involved in even relatively minor damage to property. No more D.A.T.s. If you peed in the street, you were going to jail. We were going to fix the broken windows and prevent anyone from breaking them again.

Time and time again, when cops interrupt someone drinking on the street or a gang of kids drinking on the corner, pat them down, and find a gun or a knife, they have prevented what would have happened two or three hours later when that same person, drunk, pulled out that gun or knife. We prevented the crime before it happened. New York City police would be about prevention, and we would do it lawfully.

“Your open beer lets me check your ID,” explained Maple. “Now I can radio the precinct for outstanding warrants or parole violations. Maybe I bump against that bulge in your belt; with probable cause, I can frisk you.” Again the word would get out, leave your weapons home.

Who was going to implement our new strategies? Our cultural diagnostic showed that most bosses stifled those under them. To shake up the old thinking that was preventing the organization from performing at top capacity, I flattened the organizational layer cake by eliminating an entire level of executive supervision.

For policing purposes, the NYPD had divided the city's five boroughs into seven patrol boroughs: Manhattan North, Manhattan South, Brooklyn North, Brooklyn South, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. We went further, dividing Queens and its eighteen precincts into Queens North and Queens South. The boroughs were divided into divisions, the divisions into precincts. A precinct commander sent his reports up to a division inspector, who had a deputy inspector working for him. The division inspector sent it up to the borough commander, who had an executive officer. I eliminated the entire level of divisions so that the precinct commander reported directly to the borough commander.

I cut staff at headquarters and in the special units, such as the Detective and Organized Crime Control Bureaus, and added it to the precincts. In New York City, that's where the rubber hits the road. And the people who run the precincts are the precinct commanders.

Each precinct commander was college-educated, averaged fifteen years on the job, had risen to a significant position of responsibility (I intended to find those who hadn't made it on merit and replace them), and had the whole field of vision. They knew how to command resources and get things done. Each precinct averaged almost 100,000 citizens; each commander was running the equivalent of a small-city police force with two hundred to four hundred officers in his or her command.

I encouraged the precinct commanders to use their own initiative, and I told them I would judge them on their results. The day-to-day operations were to be managed at the precinct level. I did not penalize them for taking actions that did not succeed, but I did not look kindly on those who took no action at all. The precinct commanders owned the successes, were responsible for the progress, and were accountable for the failures. No passing the buck here.

Previously, precinct commanders had not been allowed to work on vice conditions, to go after drug dens or houses of prostitution or automobile chop shops or any similar locations. All vice and drug-related crimes had to be handled by detectives in the OCCB or the Detective Bureau's specialized vice or narcotics squads. Precinct commanders went to community meetings and got their heads handed to them about all the crime locations in their precincts, but they didn't have the power to address those issues; they had to go up the borough chain of command and then over to the OCCB or Detective Bureau chain of command to get the resources.