The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (43 page)

We changed that. We authorized the training of the precinct commander and his or her officers to handle such locations, and gave them attorney assistance to attack them on their own. To go after a drug den, a commander could use his own people to work with the D.A.'s office to get probable cause and search warrants. To go after prostitution, we trained his people in proper procedure as decoys. We did this on issues up and down the line. If the problem remained beyond their resources, they could then go to the specialized units for additional assistance. By the dual processes of decentralization and inclusion, we effectively made the precincts into mini–police departments.

One of the first and largest problems we ran up against was jurisdictional. The precinct commanders, who reported to the chief of patrol, had previously had no control over the detectives in their own precincts, who were run by the precinct detective squad commander, who reported ultimately to the chief of detectives. In fact, control of personnel was guarded
jealously. Rather than focus on the greater goal of reducing crime, commanders had traditionally refused to cooperate and instead concentrated on maintaining the importance of their own commands. Precinct commanders also had no ability to coordinate activities with other precincts without going through division and borough commands.

It was a turf war. All the movies ever made about New York City cops show the detectives in plain clothes on the station house's second floor and the uniformed officers on the first, with no intermingling. (How many uniformed cops do you see regularly in the squad room on
NYPD Blue
?) We were intent on breaking that barrier down. Initially, we didn't get much help from Chief of Detectives Borrelli on this issue. In Maple's initial senior-staff assessment Borrelli had been described as a potential obstructionist. Maple and Borrelli fought pitched battles over how best to coordinate precinct detectives and precinct patrol commanders, along with the specialist detective units in the OCCB. Ultimately, I opted to hold off on complete implementation of this change—for the time being. However, I quickly made it quite clear to the super chiefs that while I would not organizationally put detectives under the direct command of the uniformed precinct commanders, if they did not cooperate fully with those commanders, I would remove them. That threat worked.

Having given the precinct commanders increased power, I had to make sure they were handling it properly through accountability and relentless assessment. I assigned that responsibility to the borough commanders and then brought those chiefs in to give presentations on crime in their boroughs.

They each spoke for about ten minutes and then Anemone and Maple debriefed them. We all had the crime figures in front of us. Maple probably had them in his head. “You have two murders here,” he'd say to them.

“Yeah, we're actively investigating them.”

“What does that mean, ‘actively investigating’?”

“Do you really want to go into detail?”

“Yeah. Let's go into excruciating detail with this.”

The borough commanders said, “Crime is down.”

“How much?”

“We made a lot of arrests.”

“How many is a lot? Is it a million? Is it fifteen? Is it ten?” Maple was not a master of tact. “I see that robberies in the Fifth Precinct are up fifty percent, chief,” he said. “What's going on?”

“Uh, the word is there's a lot of heroin out there.”

“What does that mean? Tell me what that means, chief. Where is the heroin? Who's bringing it in? Why does that bring up robberies? What about burglaries? Who are the people we have identified who are doing them? Are the people who are doing the drug dealing doing the robberies? What's the robbers’ method of operation? What are the detectives doing? Who are the victims?” The borough commander didn't have any answers. This happened a couple of times, then Maple said, “These guys are full of shit. They're used to jerking people around.”

Maple understood, as I did, that the biggest secret in law enforcement is that many police departments do not address crime. They are dysfunctional. Chiefs don't ask follow-up questions because they haven't been on the street in about twenty years, they don't know the answers, and they're afraid that in the fencing back and forth, their underlings are going to embarrass them. Rather than be made to seem foolish, they let themselves be given fantasy briefings.

Maple wanted answers. “The bulk of your robberies are in the evenings. When are your people working?” Not evenings. “Why aren't they working nights? Why aren't you putting them there?”

The strategies were in play but weren't being uniformly adhered to. From borough to borough, division to division, precinct to precinct, some commanders took the strategies as gospel while others thought, “Ah, this will go away, it's extra work; we'll do it my way.” When it became obvious that the borough commanders couldn't answer follow-up questions, I directed they meet every two weeks with their precinct commanders for a briefing. Maple said to Anemone, “Let's make sure they're doing this. We'll have one of the meetings down here at headquarters. We've got to get these mugs in here across the table, and they've got to go over, day by day, crime by crime, what's happening. What are you doing about it? Are you following the strategies?”

We quickly went from one meeting a week to two. Timoney, as chief of department, remarked to Maple that these meetings were running very long, sometimes for as much as three hours. Maple said, “John, what I want to do is have two three-hour meetings a week. That's six hours. Do you think that's too much, to talk about crime for six hours? We stand like potted plants behind the mayor and the police commissioner at press conferences at least six hours a week. Do you think we could talk about crime for six hours?”

The sessions started at eight-thirty in the morning. It didn't take long for the commanders to start complaining. “The traffic is bad…. I've got a community-council meeting…. I've got to go to City Hall….”

“Louie,” said Maple, “let's make it easy for everybody. The meetings are at seven o'clock in the morning. Now, if they've got any conflicts we'll make them at five o'clock in the morning. Seven o'clock, okay? Do we have your attention now, gentlemen?”

As the months went by, our sophistication grew. Week by week, we gathered more data, and rather than report only to their immediate superiors, the precinct commanders were instructed to also report to my command staff. We expected every precinct commander to be present and prepared to participate. We started with a book of numbers and ultimately fed them into computers that spat out an updated set of weekly statistics. What we began referring to as “the crime meetings” evolved into computer-statistics meetings, or Compstat.

It started as the simple monitoring of a briefing. It became an extravaganza. We had started panning for gold and had struck the mother lode.

We held Compstat twice a week in the second-floor press room. We soon moved to the operations room—or the command center, as it was more commonly known—on the eighth floor of headquarters, a space large enough to hold a borough's ten precinct commanders, plus each precinct's detective-squad commander and key personnel, as well as my command staff. With only 115 seats, we often had as many as two hundred people packed in there, including people from the offices of the district attorney and the U.S. attorney, parole, schools, and the Port Authority police. This was an occasion to dress. Most of the people strode into that room in uniform, with brass polished, looking like they'd just walked out of West Point.

Until this time, a precinct commander would never in his or her career expect to talk consistently and directly to the chief of department, the first deputy, or the police commissioner, but there we were, sitting at the command table. As chief of patrol, Anemone chaired the meeting. Each commander was called upon to report on his precinct about once a month, and we had his precinct's numbers in front of us. So did everyone else in the room. Notable statistics were listed—murders, robberies, felonious assaults, cases cleared (listed by year and crime), integrity monitoring, domestic violence—and significant increases or decreases were printed in red. As time went by, we incorporated color photographs of the commander and his or her executive officer on the profile sheets. When it was their turn to report, each precinct's leaders came loaded with information, statistics, and ideas, ready to fire. We called that being “in the barrel.”

Maple still wanted pin maps: murder maps, shooting maps, robbery, burglary, narcotics, car-theft, gun maps. He wanted precinct commanders
up and down the chain to know when and where the crime was happening. He told John Yohe in the Compstat office to keep a map of the 75 Precinct in Brooklyn, the busiest in the city, updated daily for a month. Yohe reported back that the work took eighteen minutes a day. Then Maple told the meeting that he wanted each precinct to keep updated maps. There was a groan. “Do you know how long it takes to do these maps?” they complained.

“Yeah,” said Maple. “Eighteen minutes.”

The first maps were handheld, with acetate overlays for each type of crime. (Mayor Giuliani, in a bit of self-serving smoke and mirrors, had led the media and the public to believe he was not making significant cuts in the Police Department's budget while other agencies were being decimated. In reality, our budget for other than personnel was being cut by almost 35 percent at a time when our activity was simultaneously expanding. As a reflection of how tight our budget actually was, we could not afford to buy the acetate these maps were printed on. We had to get a grant of $10,000 from the Police Foundation.) Within a year, we had three huge eight-foot-by-eight-foot computer monitors mounted on the walls and could call up each map, each crime, by computer.

The maps made crime clusters visual. It was like computerized fishing; you'd go where the blues were running. The First Precinct had a car-theft problem, the Fifth was having robberies around the subway stations at Canal and Grand streets, the Seventh had problems on Delancey Street, the Ninth had robberies around the clubs at night, the Tenth had hookers, Manhattan South had robberies from Thirty-eighth to Forty-second Street on Eighth Avenue, Manhattan North on the corner of Forty-seventh Street in the diamond district. Maple, in particular, could visualize the maps and remember all the facts from one meeting to the next. At every Compstat meeting, we would develop and analyze more information.

The mapping progressed, and the intelligence progressed, and the questioning got harder and harder. As we used to say, we raised the level of Nintendo. Some commanders enjoyed it, others were intimidated, others annoyed. Some were good performers who enjoyed the spotlight, others were solid on substance but no good onstage, still others couldn't get it right. It was a process that quickly identified who the real stars were. If a commander wanted to get noticed, he did it at Compstat. On the other hand, one good way to bring your career to a screeching halt was to bomb there consistently. Compstat was police Darwinism; the fittest survived and thrived.

Sometimes the grilling got tough. You've heard of the good cop/bad cop routine; Maple and Anemone were bad cop/bad cop. You didn't want to lie or bluff at Compstat—you'd get caught and hung out to dry. The people who did best had given thought to solving their precinct's problems; the people who did worst tried to fudge them. “The two biggest lies in law enforcement,” says Maple, “are ‘We worked very closely together on this investigation,’ which means they don't work at all together, and ‘We're doing this as we speak,’ which means, ‘We haven't done it yet.’ They're holding actions.” Maple and Anemone sliced through whatever crap they faced.

For example, the maps showed a large number of narcotics complaints coming from the housing projects in upper Manhattan. They also showed that the narcotics arrests weren't anywhere near the projects. The NYPD was not consistently giving the Housing Police the narcotics complaints made to 911, and as a result no one was addressing the drug problem up there systematically. In effect, if you lived in a housing development and called in a drug complaint, nobody would come. Housing didn't have the funds or manpower to run buy-and-bust operations, and the NYPD wasn't going into the projects. One NYPD narcotics commander said, “Do you know how hard it is for our undercovers to buy drugs in those projects?”

Maple answered, “If you think it's hard buying drugs, how hard do you think it is to live there and raise your children?” He asked the room, “Does anybody have any thoughts on this?” They then devised a means of cooperation to deal with the problem.

Sometimes the meetings got abrasive. But it was our business to try to save lives, and if a few egos were bruised, so be it. Maple said it best: Reasonable people didn't change the world; the world was changed by unreasonable people, because when you were unreasonable you got reasonable results. Situations got most contentious when we asked people to do things and they didn't do them. Maple made it a point to get to the bottom of that. “Captain,” he would ask, “what are we going to do about the shootings in those housing projects? How are we doing with the buy-and-busts? Are we debriefing the prisoners? When you have CIs, are you bringing them in to look at photos so they can give you the organizational structure of the criminal element in and about the housing projects?”

“Well, the buy-and-bust hasn't worked,” the commander answered.

“What else have you done? Are we doing any quality-of-life enforcement? Are we doing warrant checks? Have you done the overlays from the
computer with the people with active bench warrants and parole warrants and systematically gone through them, arrested them for warrants, and debriefed them to find out who was engaged in this activity? Have we done that, and if not, why not?”

There was a case in Queens in which a man was going around beating a number of senior citizens halfway to death. He was found in a store using stolen credit cards, with the victims’ blood still on his boots. “Now,” Maple asked, “do we systematically check the credit-card companies when victims’ credit cards are being used and see whether or not they can ID?”