The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (53 page)

Crime dropped simply because we had more cops.
The NYPD reached its staffing height in September 1994 and lost about 1,400 each year thereafter through attrition until the next recruit class replenished the previous year's losses. Overtime was slashed. We were losing people and crime was still going down in double digits.

The crack epidemic that fueled the crime wave had ebbed. Heroin, a depressant, was now the drug of choice.
This was the “all the criminals are nodding” defense. We spot-tested regularly in Central Booking and found that the percentage of people who had cocaine in their system when arrested remained the same or higher than it had been at crack's height. In Manhattan in February 1995, that number was 78 percent.

It was a particularly cold winter, which traditionally holds down crime.
Come on. All the criminals stayed indoors? It was cold up and down the Eastern seaboard and those cities’ crime figures didn't vary drastically. Were Boston's or Washington's criminal element more hardy than New York crooks?

Homicides were down because all the gangs had made peace with one another.
The DEA had listened in on over 400,000 wiretap conversations, and we had never heard a word about this supposed treaty. And if the gangs made an agreement not to kill each other over drugs, did they also agree not to rob anybody, or steal cars, or commit burglaries or shoot people?

Maple said, “They're the ones who tried to convince Columbus that the world was flat. Remember in
The Wizard of Oz
, when Toto pulls back the curtain and the wizard says, ‘Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain’?
And Dorothy says, ‘You're a terrible man.’ And he says, ‘No, Dorothy, I'm a good man. I'm just not a very good wizard.’ I think all of these experts are good people; they're just not very good wizards.”

But even though we had a real handle on crime and were seeing great success in many areas, we still had pockets of concern. One of the major criticisms we faced was that in our effort to provide more proactive policing, we had encouraged more aggressive police behavior, particularly in minority communities. I addressed this in my first roll-call speech at the 103, we addressed it in training at the academy, and we made it clear at all times that we would not be successful in policing New York if we were perceived by law-abiding New Yorkers as an occupying army. “Police brutality” is a phrase I do not use lightly, yet we were being accused of exactly that.

It is important to define “police brutality.” We defined brutality as unnecessary behavior that caused broken bones, stitches, and internal injuries. But those were not the figures that had gone up significantly. What had risen were reports of police inappropriately pushing, shoving, sometimes only touching citizens. We were taking back the streets, and it wasn't easy work. In the course of enforcing laws that had not been enforced for twenty-five years, we were being more proactive, we were engaging more people, and often they didn't like it. We were dealing with murderers, rapists, muggers, and felons, the most violent people in society, as well as more than the usual number of thieves, drug addicts, and drunks. A lot of the “brutality” was reported by those people engaged in illegal behavior and looking for a bargaining chit. In three years there had been over 15,000 complaints of all types: brutality, disrespect, etc. During that same period the department had made almost a million arrests.

But we were also coming into contact with law-abiding citizens, and it was those people we were also concerned with. A cop gets called in, you think he wants to get in a fight in which someone gets hurt? He'd rather not; he has been taught how to restrain himself and his suspects so that doesn't happen. Where some cops didn't restrain themselves was their mouth. They tried to be too tough, they were impatient instead of courteous, they intimidated instead of simply carrying out their business. Sometimes the attitude led to more pushing and shoving than was necessary. Was there lack of respect by some police officers toward the public? Yes. Was there abuse? Yes. Was there more abuse than in previous years or administrations? I don't believe so. The rise in complaints was commensurate with the rise in contact. It's an issue I was dealing with but which was by no means resolved. As I repeatedly told cops at roll calls, “We're
going to get crime down in this city and be applauded for it, but if you don't win the respect of the people you're policing, you are going to lose.”

In 1995 five thousand complaints were made against 38,000 New York City police officers in a city of 7.3 million people that expanded every day by 3.5 million additional people coming into the city. All five thousand complaints were investigated, and fewer than five hundred were actually substantiated. That's five hundred individual acts out of the literally millions of encounters each year between police officers and the public. There were also 389 fewer murders in the City of New York in 1995 than there were in 1994. Of course, no one knows who those murder nonvictims are; they're still alive. I'm sure if you ask the people who lived, plus their families and friends, whether the style of policing that saved their lives was worthwhile, they would say yes.

There has been continuing discussion of residency rules requiring cops to live in the city they police. I don't think they are necessary. I've lived outside the communities I've policed and that didn't stop me from developing an understanding and affection for those neighborhoods and giving 150 percent in protecting and serving them. Most people like to get away from work once the day is over; why deny cops that opportunity? In New York, there are the issues of taxes and schools and environment to consider. Many people know and love and contribute to New York and still commute to work. Cops can, too.

I don't think residency should be a requirement so long as we hire the right cops. One of the concerns we often heard was that the police department didn't look like the community it was policing. It didn't. In a minority-majority city split about evenly between male and female, the NYPD was between 25 and 30 percent black and Hispanic and 15 percent female. We lose about 1,400 cops of all races to attrition each year, and we hire the same number of officers to replace them. With 38,000 cops on the force, even if we hired
only
minorities, we would not catch up any time soon. I, of course, wanted the best cops, no matter what color. We recruited inside and outside New York, and about 50 percent of our recruits came from the suburbs and outside the city.

We began discussions to develop a career ladder for inner-city schoolchildren, beginning in seventh and eighth grades. During the summers, these kids would spend time with the police. For twelve weeks, they would work with our youth officers and get exposed to the NYPD: go to the police station, go to the firing range, do a ride-along with officers on patrol, see what police do. We would then encourage those kids to join our
Scout Explorer programs, which are run by every precinct in the city. During high school, these same kids would be encouraged to stay involved with our mentoring environment, which many do not have at home. We could provide them with an experience different from the one they might be getting in the streets. Since approximately 85 percent of New York City public-school kids are minorities, it stands to reason that 85 percent of our group would be minorities as well. Acknowledging that the minority population often has a lot of negative interactions with the police, we would now be working with kids who, since they were twelve, had interacted more positively.

At the end of high school and the Explorer program, we would encourage these young adults to go to a city college, preferably John Jay College of Criminal Justice. We would offer them internships during which they would work ten to fifteen hours a week for the NYPD as cadets, and we would find them paying jobs in the private sector, particularly in the private-security field. Now the recruits would have a salary, working as security guards; they would be required to continue their college education. Then, at age twenty-two, they would take the civil-service exam. As much as I was given credit for my college degree on the Boston sergeant's exam, they would be given preference in hiring as police officers because of their extensive previous training and education.

This plan would over time significantly change the makeup of the NYPD. The people in our program would all be city residents, 90 percent would be minorities. Forty percent of our recruit class usually lived outside the city, but under my plan that figure would fall dramatically because the inner-city residents would be moved to the top of the list.

I also wanted to involve the much-maligned three-thousand-person school police by putting them under the control of the NYPD, as we had successfully done with transit and housing. While the people in our program were waiting to turn twenty-two and come on the job, at twenty they could join that force. What better security personnel to interact with high-school kids than young men and women who have recently come through that same environment and chosen our road? With young inner-city kids causing so much of our crime problem, such a police force could really make a difference. Some of our new officers would stay in the communities in which they were raised, which would bring the cops home.

I was very enthusiastic about this proposal and still am. Despite my and City University of New York head Ann Reynolds's strong support, the Hall never embraced it, maybe because it didn't originate there.

The NYPD was extremely productive in 1995. The Transit and Housing Police were merged into the department, creating a force of 38,310, more than three times as large as any other in the country. As I had done at transit, we upgraded to nine-millimeter weapons for the entire force and garnered the same benefits. We policed Pope John Paul II's visit to New York and the convening of the world's leaders at the United Nations. We continued to roll out our strategies. And crime kept going down.

One of the priority initiatives that we aggressively pursued was the placement of women in significant command positions. When we created the new Queens patrol borough I promoted Gertrude Laforge to the rank of two-star borough chief, the highest uniformed rank ever attained by a woman in the NYPD. We also placed women in some of the toughest precincts in the city, where they excelled, frequently outperforming their male counterparts. It took women a long time to get into the police profession, but I enjoyed providing them the opportunity to advance up the promotion ladder and letting their outstanding performance silence their critics. During my two years with the department, I took the opportunity to promote more women to command ranks than had served in them at any time in the department's history.

The end of 1995 was a time of great excitement. Because of the intimacy of the crime-tracking methods we had developed, we knew we were going to surpass our goals. I had asked the department to produce crime reduction of 15 percent in 1995, and we had reached 17 percent. It was the first time since World War II that the city had recorded consecutive-year double-digit drops. Every precinct had experienced declines in total felonies, and in two years every precinct had seen double-digit declines in the overall crime rate. During the first two years of my commissionership, total felonies were down 27 percent to levels not seen in the city since the early 1970s. Murder was down by 39 percent, auto theft 35 percent. Robberies were off by a third, burglaries by a quarter. The crime drop had been relatively balanced in rich and poor neighborhoods across the city, if measured by percentage. But while a 60 percent decline in the murder rate on the middle-class Upper West Side meant four fewer deaths in 1995, a 51 percent decrease in the poorer East New York section of Brooklyn meant forty-four fewer people killed. For many years, minorities had been suffering way out of proportion to their numbers. Those communities were benefiting greatly from the decline in homicides and shootings.

We were even starting to win over some of the academics and criminologists. Harvard's Mark Moore told
The
New York Times
, “New York has enjoyed a significant drop in crime that can't be easily explained by sociological factors. Therefore, the claim this might be the result of police activity looks pretty good.”