The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (4 page)

Bratton elevated Maple to the status of deputy commissioner. By then, Maple had adapted his crayon-on-paper method of tracking crimes to computer spreadsheets and electronic maps. And he developed a four-part theory of crime fighting: “accurate, timely information, effective tactics for specific problems, rapid deployment of police to those areas, and relentless follow-up to make sure the problem was solved.” Bratton ordered the NYPD to adopt the strategy.

In other words, this computer “pin mapping” would quickly identify hot spots. Commanders would flood those hot spots with police officers ordered to address the specific problem and make sure the problem didn’t return.

At around the same time, an obscure 1982 essay published in the
Atlantic Monthly
by two social scientists, George Kelling and James Q. Wilson, had grabbed the attention of Giuliani, Bratton, and Maple. The essay was called “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety.”

The operative quote was this: “If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)”

By this, Kelling and Wilson meant that unless one repairs the broken window, the house will soon suffer other indignities. The other windows will be shattered. Pests and water will get inside. The pipes will freeze. The timbers will rot. Folks will steal the fixtures. Eventually, the house will collapse.

They cited a fascinating 1969 study by Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo. Zimbardo left one car each in the Bronx and in a higher income section of Palo Alto, California. Neither car had license plates, and
both were parked with their hoods up. Within ten minutes, the car in the Bronx was targeted, amazingly, by a father, mother, and young child who stole the radiator and battery. In less than a day, the car in the Bronx had been stripped of everything of value. In subsequent days, Kelling and Wilson wrote, the “windows were smashed, parts torn off, upholstery ripped.” Most of the vandals, the authors noted, were white.

Meanwhile, for a whole week no one damaged the Palo Alto car. But after Zimbardo himself smashed the windshield with a sledgehammer, people started attacking that car, too. “Within a few hours, the car had been turned upside down and utterly destroyed,” they wrote.

As it relates to crime fighting, the Kelling/Wilson concept suggested to the new leaders of the NYPD that if you leave minor crimes like panhandling, public urination, and public drinking unpunished, major crimes will follow because the failure to enforce law prohibiting the minor crimes creates an atmosphere of lawlessness that people will act on.

“The key is to identify neighborhoods at the tipping point—where the public order is deteriorating but not unreclaimable, where the streets are used frequently but by apprehensive people, where a window is likely to be broken at any time, and must quickly be fixed if all are not to be shattered,” they wrote.

Indirectly presaging the Maple approach, they add that police departments should come up with a new way to assign officers. “To allocate patrol wisely, the department must look at the neighborhoods and decide, from first-hand evidence, where an additional officer will make the greatest difference in promoting a sense of safety,” according to Kelling and Wilson.

Under Bratton, the “broken windows theory” became a mantra, leading to a strategy called “quality of life enforcement,” which meant enforcing small violations of the law, like pot smoking, graffiti vandalism, and public drinking. Kelling and Wilson became icons. When Wilson died in March 2012, Ray Kelly, who had returned as police commissioner, called the article “a defining contribution to law enforcement philosophy.”

A fact about this essay that would be forgotten in the Giuliani years was that it actually lauded the benefits of the old-fashioned strategy of police officers walking a beat and getting to know folks in the neighborhood—the very community policing model adopted by Dinkins and Kelly. Kelling and
Wilson spent many hours with police officers in Newark and learned that police foot patrols may not directly drive down the crime rate, but they made residents feel safer, and that led to safer neighborhoods. Giuliani and Bratton and his successors viewed foot patrols as ineffective and soft. One high-ranking NYPD official compared them to the plastic owls placed above the entrance to 1 Police Plaza that failed to scare away the pigeons pooping on the bricks.

As if he and his aides had reinvented the wheel, Bratton also brought to his administration something he called “accountability.” In addition to cracking down on low-level crimes and tracking crime trends obsessively, police commanders would be held accountable for the crime rate in their precincts. That accountability would be examined in monthly meetings, in which top chiefs would grill precinct commanders on their numbers and their strategies.

When these elements—computer crime tracking and mapping, the broken windows theory, quality of life enforcement, and accountability—were put together, the strategy came to be known as CompStat, shorthand for “Compare Stats,” according to criminologist Eli Silverman, author of
NYPD Battles Crime
.

With the implementation of computers, the strategy born in crayon became far more sophisticated. Using spreadsheet programs, clerks entered names, locations, times, victim information, suspect information, and a dozen other items into a giant database. At first it was just the major crimes and shooting incidents, but lesser crimes followed: marijuana busts, petit larcenies, trespassing cases, vandalism.

The lesser cases were crucial because of the underlying lesson of the broken windows theory. An intersection prone to minor drug dealing and public drunkenness was likely to generate a shooting or a homicide. The smaller cases amounted to red flags that serious crimes would follow. Commanders could then rapidly target their resources to a specific problem, rather than vaguely reacting to crime. Tracking of crimes over time allowed commanders to assess the success or failure of their tactics and allowed their bosses to assess the commanders’ competence.

How did Bratton and Maple get their commanders to go along with the strategy? In the interview with Dussault, Maple repeated a maxim written by
the Chinese leader Sun Tzu: “Sun Tzu says forward march. His troops giggle at him. So he beheads the squad leaders and puts new ones in charge. When he says ‘forward march,’ again, they do it.”

Every four weeks, precinct commanders donned their best white shirts, picked up their clipboards, and made the miserable journey to 1 Police Plaza, where they were excoriated over the crime numbers in their districts by Maple, Chief of Department Louis Anemone, once dubbed the department’s “dark prince,” and other bosses at 7.a.m.
What are you doing about those push-in robberies? Why hasn’t this homicide been solved? What about these shootings?
The stories filtered out slowly. Some careers bloomed in those meetings. Others rotted. In one infamous exchange, Anemone caricatured one of the chiefs as Pinocchio.

In his 1999 book
NYPD Battles Crime
, Silverman recounts one CompStat meeting from July 1995, chaired by a bellowing Anemone. “Is anyone going to take ownership of this case?” he asked loudly, referring to a string of robberies.

“We are getting on top of it,” replied the precinct commander, whose name Silverman mercifully leaves out of his book.

Then, Maple asked, “What is the plan to go after this?”

The commander said his robbery unit was looking into it.

“Let’s hear from RIP,” Anemone said.

Now it was the robbery unit sergeant’s turn on the griddle. “We are aware of this, chief,” he said.

“Then why are we down in narc arrests in those areas?” Maple asked. “And who provides information to narcotics?”

Back to Anemone: “Where is the anti-crime unit? There’s slippage between robbery squads and precinct teams. We all have ownership of good and bad things. We go to a lot of trouble tracking crime. I want you all to get together and have a plan by tomorrow.”

For context, before Bratton came along, it would have been unthinkable for a top chief like Anemone in the largest police department in the country to question a precinct commander about one little robbery pattern, but that kind of thing became standard under the CompStat model. And though these ideas might seem fairly obvious management tools, they were foreign to the NYPD. When Bratton was appointed, he was shocked to learn that
there was a three- to six-month lag in the reporting of crime statistics, and up-to-date reports were next to impossible to produce, Silverman wrote.

In 1995, the year of Silverman’s CompStat meeting, the number of murders dropped 50 percent, to 1,181, compared to 2,262 in 1990. The six other major crime categories dropped significantly as well, and they continued to drop with each passing year. The press was full of laudatory accounts of the effectiveness of the strategy. Bratton, in a trench coat, graced the cover of
Time
magazine. In the limelight now, he wrote an entire book about himself, with CompStat as the second most important character. Maple’s strategy made Bratton into a figure of national importance.

“We began to run the NYPD as a private, profit-oriented business,” Bratton wrote in his book
Turnaround
. “What was the profit I wanted? Crime reduction. I wanted to beat my competitors—the criminals—who were out there seven days a week, 24 hours a day. I wanted to serve my customers, the public, better, and the profit I wanted to deliver to them was reduced crime.”

In hindsight, Bratton’s view of CompStat as a business foreshadowed the future focus on gimmicks and an inflated bottom line that would distort precinct reporting. It was like the auto industry in Detroit—bound to ultimately go bust because the cars they produced weren’t really what the public wanted. The role of a police officer, after all, involves human interaction in a broad spectrum of community affairs, not the mindless building of widgets on an assembly line.

And quietly, there were senior bosses who thought CompStat was nothing new. Chiefs had been holding their subordinates accountable and focusing on trouble spots for decades.

But at the time, no one was publicly questioning the effectiveness of the program. In 1996, three years into New York’s CompStat experiment, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government selected the program for a coveted innovation award.

By then Bratton was gone. Angry that his police commissioner had become too famous, Giuliani first gutted the press office at 1 Police Plaza, then forced Bratton out. Howard Safir, the prickly former U.S. Marshal who had overseen the Witness Protection Program, followed, and became known as the man who turned over control of the police department to the mayor.
He was more or less at war with the rapacious crowd of full-time tabloid police reporters for most of his three-year tenure.

Following Safir as police commissioner was the gregarious, charming, and corrupt Bernard Kerik, a former Giuliani driver who saw his career die in scandal and ultimately landed in federal prison. Riding on his post-9/11 popularity, Rudy tried to convince the city council to let him run for a third term, but that effort failed, mostly because folks in New York had tired of his domineering ways.

Through it all, though, CompStat thrived, and the crime rate continued to plunge. By 2001, Giuliani’s final year in office, it was still the signature strategy of the previous decade in law enforcement. An entire generation of police commanders rose in the so-called CompStat era: men and a few women who bought into the drumbeat from 1 Police Plaza that said getting the right numbers was the key to promotion in the NYPD.

“Broken Windows” author George Kelling wrote that CompStat was “perhaps the single most important organizational/administrative innovation in policing during the latter half of the 20th century.”

After eight years of Giuliani, the conventional wisdom said the city would be ready for a Democrat. Mark Green, a former environmental lawyer and the city’s public advocate, was the front-runner. Bloomberg, another Republican, however, outwitted and outspent Green and squeaked into office.

In January 2002, billionaire Michael Bloomberg was sworn in as New York City’s new mayor. Promising a new era of openness and transparency in the NYPD, Bloomberg appointed none other than Raymond Kelly as his police commissioner. It was the first time in the history of the police department that the same man served twice in the post.

For Kelly, his appointment was a satisfying outcome. Ever since Giuliani had snubbed him, Kelly had been serving a kind of high-profile exile. He had done a stint overseeing a multinational police force in Haiti. He had gone the route of many ex-cops by taking a high-end job with Bear Stearns. He had worked in the Department of the Treasury. He had been commissioner of the U.S. Customs Service. Sure, these were big jobs, but they weren’t the NYPD, the place that had nurtured Kelly from patrolman, up through the ranks, through the Crown Heights riots, and the first World Trade Center terrorist attack. Kelly wanted that job, the only cop job there was. He wanted
to sit again at Teddy Roosevelt’s desk on the fourteenth floor of 1 Police Plaza.

Kelly’s face had the look of a pit bull, or of “Popeye,” in less flattering assessments on the cop bulletin boards. But he dressed like a CEO, with Charvet ties, gold watches, and tailored suits. For Kelly, the key to management was being involved, and so he acquired for himself the reputation of a micromanager. Eventually, no one got transferred unless Kelly himself signed off on it.

Over the next eight years, Kelly would vastly expand the NYPD intelligence division and anti-terror units and hire an ex-CIA official to run them. He would send detectives overseas to man offices in foreign cities—even though they had no jurisdiction outside the city. He would order heavily armed squads of cops to patrol high-profile areas, like Times Square and lower Manhattan. He would send out lines of patrol cars, lights flashing, to remind the public of his fight against terrorism. He would create a high-tech crime and terrorism command center complete with big-screen televisions and rows of shiny new computers.