The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (52 page)

Miller disappeared. The meeting continued. LaPorte came rushing in. “Miller just resigned.”

“What!”

“Yeah. Miller, he's downstairs resigning. He called Rudy a Nazi! It's on television.”

Miller had called the in-house press up from the second floor to his DCPI office and told them he had an announcement to make. We watched from my office, mesmerized. He spoke without a script. He was choked up and close to tears. It was going out live on New York One, a local news channel.

“[City Hall] said,” Miller told them, “because of what's been in the papers, that the people here couldn't be trusted and that therefore we shouldn't replace some of the cops but all of the cops. They were going to ask me to throw everybody out of here.

“Now, loyalty is important. Loyalty runs up. I'm loyal to the mayor, I'm loyal to the police commissioner … but there were loyal Nazis, too.

“Loyalty runs down. I'm loyal to my people, and I'm loyal to the reporters we're supposed to serve here, because we're all loyal to the public. Whether you're a cop or a reporter or a police commissioner or a mayor, we all serve the same public. I'm not going to let that stop. Not on my watch…. Very graciously, I have to say, people said they would do what they had to do. We said we'd find places for them to go. And we would have done it. But now they want to find places for everybody to go, [and] I thought it would be easier and more sensible if I was not the one to do this disloyal thing.

“So, what do they say, the captain is supposed to go down with the ship, right?” He had been crying, at times finding it hard to speak. He cried some more.

“I'm not crying 'cause it's the end of the world. It's not the end of the world. My world looks pretty rosy.” He sighed. “But I'm worried about you guys because, you know, I love you.

“So, I'm not moving the cops out to downsize the office. And I'm not moving the other cops out to go along with this ridiculous request based on somebody's idea of what loyalty's about. I'm not moving
anybody
out. I assume that they will come for my badge, and they can have it.

“I think that I work for the greatest police commissioner there ever was. I even think the mayor's going to do a good job. I think he's going to take on the budget, I think crime is going to continue to go down. But I also think that there are other ways to deal with human beings, and there are other ways to deal with the process of getting out information.

“Somebody in this administration said, trying to summarize the company line, ‘We want to have more control over the information.’ I have to suggest to you that the information that we put out here is not information that we are supposed to ‘control.’ It's not information City Hall is supposed to ‘control.’ In fact, it's not the mayor's information, it's the public's information. That's why they call this Public Information. The mayor has his own press office.

“I think having said that, I want to thank the police commissioner for giving me the greatest year, or fourteen months, of my life. And …” here he broke down, “I want to thank you guys for making it….” Miller walked aside, and the press room erupted in applause.

Timoney said, “They're going to be showing this in journalism schools for the next hundred years.”

Miller came back upstairs to my office. He had seen that we were heading toward resigning en masse, he understood that this was the Hall's intention, and he had made the decision to fall on his sword to save us. While we were furious and emotional and felt very deeply for John, he made it clear that it was more important for us to accomplish what we had set out to do than defy this particularly unpleasant mayor. “Look, guys,” he said, “don't you resign. That's exactly what they want.”

The mayor got right on the airwaves and tried to both spin the situation and demean Miller. He spent a significant part of the day being interviewed and ended up doing a sit-down on a local station. Give Giuliani credit, he and his crew came up with a masterful spin. Their explanation had little to do with the real reasons for the purge of the entire DCPI staff, but it sounded good: “NYC captains, NYC lieutenants, NYC sergeants shouldn't be public-relations spokespeople…. I need them to be New
York City police officers who will arrest people for crimes…. We can't have twenty-nine cops playing public relations person.” As I have explained, the importance of the media cannot be overstated in reducing crime and disorder in New York. Miller said, “I think that City Hall should understand that positive publicity for the police department reflects well on them.” But the mayor conveniently overlooked those facts in his haste to explain away his behavior.

Giuliani went after Miller personally. It was unseemly.

“It is not a tumultuous day in New York City when the deputy commissioner for public relations [
sic
] in the New York City Police Department resigns. Big deal….

“It seemed to me that John, uh, had difficulty accomplishing what is a very difficult management task. Uh, some people are very good at one thing, they're not very good at another…. Miller indicated that he was unwilling to complete that task, it almost seemed for emotional reasons…. He obviously was under a great deal of emotional stress.”

One local interviewer referred to the NYPD as my police department. “The fact is,” Giuliani insisted, “it isn't his police department, it's the mayor's police department. We have civilian control of the police department in New York City. The point is, under the law of the City of New York,” clearly someone had been sent to research the point, “the mayor of the City of New York is in control of the police department. So I have to make the final decisions about the police department, [and] I am fully capable of doing it.” That kind of talk cowed the interviewer.

The same day Miller took his fall, Giuliani purged the head press officers in four other departments and fired nearly three dozen press aides. One of them, housing's deputy commissioner Harry Rittenberg, said, “They want to control the information. This is like Rudy Giuliani's
Kristallnacht
.”

CBS News Vice President Jerry Nachman said, “It almost seems like this is some former East-bloc country that you're covering, in which the chairman's picture has to be in every story you do.”

I had to consider whether I wanted to stay. Could I maintain sufficient autonomy to complete the work I'd started? I felt very bad for John. He'd had his dream job, he had done it perfectly, and it had been taken out from under him. But he would remain my friend while our team continued to reduce crime and disorder in the city.

Rudy Giuliani, in his haste to sweep up every crumb of credit, had disregarded reason, personality, and honor. The mayor was a prosecutor, and
he used the same tone on Miller, a devoted employee who had given the city excellent and valuable service, as he did on his defendants. A more smug individual was hard to find on the news that night.

The attempt to discredit Miller and his “emotions” failed. Miller had been a respected reporter, and the emotions he showed came from his dedication to his job and the recognition that City Hall's interference would prevent him from doing it. Miller soon regained his position, renown, and salary at WNBC-TV. New York's government lost a valuable resource.

The Hall assumed control of press ride-alongs, demanding scrutiny and approval of each request, and refused to allow the department to hold any but the most cursory press briefings in our own house. All interagency press conferences and releases of police strategies came out of City Hall. We were permitted to be accessible to the press concerning the news or issues of the day, but all profile or policy stories, requests for my appearance on weekend TV news panels or radio shows, anything involving national media, had to be cleared with them.

They sent us an acting DCPI, Tom Kelly, who had headed up public information for the Corrections Department, no doubt thinking that his provisional appointment would make him beholden to them. Timoney said he was a good guy, which went a long way with me, and LaPorte was impressed with him. I was comfortable with Kelly and quickly recommended, to City Hall's surprise, that he permanently replace Miller.

The attacks didn't let up. Cristyne Lategano tried to demean our entire vision of public information. “Public relations was put before any kind of substance,” she told
New York Newsday.
“When you put glamour over fighting crime, it leads to serious problems. Now it is the time to get serious. This is a reality check. We're here to fight crime, not to be Hollywood stars. This is real-life cops, not
NYPD Blue.
”

The mayor backed her up. “I think she put it quite accurately,” he said. He called our press office “dangerous,” “out of control,” and too publicity conscious.

Of course, it was all self-serving bullshit. Crime was down 12.3 percent. Murders were down 18.8 percent. Perhaps it was the fact that I was profiled in
The New Yorker
the same week Miller was terminated. In her attempt to belittle our accomplishments, Lategano publicly embarrassed herself and further demeaned herself in the eyes of the press.

By clearing out the entire public-information office, the mayor decimated the department's institutional memory. Longtime press officers
knew exactly where to go for information because they had internalized NYPD history, while the new people placed by the mayor were at a loss. Reporters were obviously aware that the process had slowed down, and some of them took it out on Kelly. I thought that anger was misplaced.

But more than institutional memory was at stake. The thirty-nine individuals the mayor displaced, and whose work he so casually belittled, were people who had put many years into the public-information office and were widely respected by the press. He needlessly caused havoc in their lives. This is a mayor who consistently talks about how much he loves cops, yet in his desire to get at Miller and me, he crudely damaged the careers and lives of these hardworking police officers and civilians. How is he ever going to look anyone in the eye and say with a straight face that he loves and respects cops when he has treated them so callously?

As for putting cops in the field and not having them “playing public-relations person,” two years later, in Giuliani's police department the public-information office was staffed by twenty-four uniformed police—including one detective, four sergeants, two lieutenants, and one deputy inspector—and seven civilians.

The mayor met the press daily in the Blue Room at City Hall. I was surprised at how much deference they showed him. The vaunted New York press, who were supposed to be so tough in pursuit of news and dirt and scandal, rarely pursued a story vigorously in open session. Maybe they were concerned about the competition stealing their leads, but there was hardly ever an edge to their questioning, and even less follow-up. The mayor has notoriously thin skin, and when he got upset it always made for good TV and overheated headlines, so I was surprised the press didn't bait that bear more often. They also didn't get much more information out of him than he went in willing to give. Maple used to joke, “The press should do Compstat in the Blue Room.” The thought of Maple getting Giuliani dancing in the hot lights—“Tell the Jackster. Tell the Jackster!”—always gave us a laugh.

While the Hall was vitally concerned with local and national media, they didn't seem to focus on the international press. I met with about forty foreign correspondents and discussed the New York success story. Their articles and reports appeared in England, Japan, Norway, Italy, and Brazil. Correspondents from China, Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Israel all visited Compstat.
The Economist
profiled my management techniques under a headline that read, “NYPD, Inc.”
The
New Yorker
had called me “The CEO Cop.” An article in
The Times
of London said, “In a city famous for its murders, muggings, ghetto gunfights, subway anarchy, drug gangs, junkies, rapists, winos, pickpockets and every other form of seething urban desperado, Bratton is turning the tide.”

AS COMPSTAT BECAME MORE SOPHISTICATED AND COMPUTERIZED, WE PIN
pointed crime and attacked it immediately. In July 1995, Mayor Giuliani and I announced the semiannual crime figures:

• Murder down 31 percent over the same period in 1994
  

• Robberies down 21.9 percent
  

• Burglaries down 18.1 percent
  

• Motor-vehicle theft down 25.2 percent
  

• Felonious assault down 6 percent
  

• Overall crime down 18.4 percent
  

Criminologists apparently still had a hard time accepting the reality of our success. I made a conscious decision to take on the academics, to challenge conventional wisdom about crime in America and prove that effective policing can make a substantial impact on social change. They were delighted with our success, but many did not attribute it to the policy change at City Hall or the new direction, management, and operations techniques we instituted at the NYPD. “There's a miracle happening before our eyes,” said Jeffrey Fagan, director of the Center for Violence Research and Prevention at Columbia University. “Cops deserve credit,
but it would be a first in the history of social science for there to be a single reason for such a dramatic change in social behavior.”

We began to shape the message. We lined up their alternate reasons like ducks in a row and shot them all down.

The drop in New York's crime rate reflected a national trend.
We
were
the national trend. According to FBI figures, in the first six months of 1995, serious crime throughout the country went down by 1 percent, or about 67,000 crimes. In New York in that same period, there were 41,000 fewer crimes, a 16 percent drop. We were two-thirds of the national decline in reported crime.

New York's teenage population, which was responsible for a significant portion of the city's violent crime, was on its way down, and many of them were dead or in jail.
“Jail? Who put them there?” asked Maple. “Did all the sixteen-year-olds suddenly become fifty?” The number of sixteen-to-nineteen-year-olds in New York City was actually going up, not down.