The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (15 page)

This was all wrong. When you've got a dozen cops in one police action, you need leadership. Without someone clearly in charge, you have no ability to organize the scene, and it can fall apart. But these guys just refused. That one incident typified what was wrong with the department: lack of leadership and supervision.

I liked being in uniform and getting out into the neighborhood; it was fun to patrol business districts, to interact with people. Most cops dream of becoming detectives and investigating crimes. The best of them have what I can only describe as a sixth sense about when something is wrong and can get to the heart of it right away. While interrogating suspects, they have an inquisitiveness and a special ability to find out what they need to know. It's hard to explain but easy to recognize. I knew very early that I didn't have that ability, and I never would. I was pretty good at picking up when something was amiss in the street, but the really good detectives went beyond that to something I couldn't even touch. I wanted very much to move up in the organization, but it became clear to me that I wouldn't do it in plainclothes. If I was going to have a good career in the police department, it would be in the supervision-management field. In the spring of 1974, I began to study for the sergeant's exam.

I had four years on the job; normally, I would have had to wait another ten years or more before I was even eligible. But di Grazia had changed the line of succession, and I was determined to take advantage of the opportunity. I was still going to college at night, and eight or nine of us put together a study group. I was going to outstudy the bastards and get ahead of the Sergeant Joneses of the world. I read all the textbooks, underlined the important passages, and transcribed them onto three-by-five flash
cards. Whenever I had a spare moment, I would pull out my three-inch-thick stack of cards and quiz myself.

Captain Hanley at District 14 was a tough-talking old-timer who didn't have much use for di Grazia or this new policing. During a lull at one police action, when twenty officers were assigned to guard a high school as a result of a series of disturbances, and everyone else was hanging out, hats off, smoking cigarettes, I began going through my flash cards. The captain zeroed in on me.

“What are you doing, Bratton?”

“There's a sergeant's exam coming up, Captain; I'm just keeping myself fresh.”

“Put 'em away,” he barked. “You're on duty here.” You'd think the department would encourage a constructive use of an officer's time, but no one had told this guy there was a new day coming.

I studied for almost a year. It was a particularly good year because not only was I pursuing a significant goal but I remarried. Her name was Mary Doran, and I had met her several years earlier while walking my beat in Mattapan. She was working as a secretary in a local bank. We were married in May 1975.

Mickey Roache wasn't going to take the exam. His priority was getting his college degree, and he just didn't feel he had the time to study. He wasn't even going to sign up, but I talked him into it. We were riding around in the sector car all the time, and I kept after him till he agreed.

My good friend Al Sweeney, whom I had known since kindergarten, had already graduated from college. I joked with him that while I was in Vietnam, he was getting his college degree and serving his country as a park ranger, patrolling Boston Common during the height of hippiedom. Sweeney was one of the few of us who was not a veteran, and he was sweating the promotion exam because he wasn't going to get the two-point veteran's preference; he would have to do two points better than all of us just to stay even.

I aced the exam. I came in first on the written test and placed second overall. I remember very clearly coming home after work and finding a letter on very beautiful new stationery from the Office of the Police Com-missioner, Boston Police Department, congratulating me. I was very impressed that Commissioner di Grazia sent this letter to my home rather than handling it through department sources and having news of my promotion handed to me by a sergeant at the station. I thought that was a terrific personal touch. I still have the letter.

Even the promotion exercise was special. It was held in John Hancock Hall, July 3, 1975, and Mary pinned my badge on my uniform. The involvement of an officer's family in the police world was another significant di Grazia innovation. My father took the official family photographs, but he wasn't familiar with the camera, and when we got the photos back there were no heads—all we got were shots of us from the neck down.

We were the largest class of sergeants ever promoted in the history of the Boston police. Eighty of us, including a large number of young officers with only three or four years on the job—I was twenty-seven years old—moved into leadership positions. In our ranks were Al Sweeney, Jack Gifford, Tom Maloney, Paul Evans, Joe Saia. Mickey Roache made it. A lot of the Boston State College guys. Three police commissioners ultimately came out of that class. We were a new generation of police but very different from the “youth generation” that was rocking and rolling in the streets. Our training began immediately.

It was a time of great change for the city. What had been kind of a drab, backwater city was being reinvigorated. Exciting public spaces such as Faneuil Hall and Quincy Marketplace were being developed; Kevin White was an activist mayor who had hired a dynamic young police commissioner; the whole city seemed vibrant. I was excited to be a part of it.

Rather than send us right out into the field, the department put the whole class of sergeants through three weeks of postpromotion training at Boston University. Di Grazia wanted to make sure we were well guided when we went out to spread his word. Our teachers built upon the progressive policing books we had been expected to master for the exam. A lot of our training had to do with leadership. We were taught management-supervision techniques and how to discipline people. We had anticorruption seminars and discussed ethics issues, things a police officer would never otherwise hear about. We had classes on how to give public presentations and speeches because we were expected to speak persuasively on behalf of the department.

The most important effect of our new training was to show me and the rest of my class that there were ideas and approaches to policing beyond the narrow confines of the Boston Police Department. Our teachers were very smart, very capable, and very much in touch with the world outside. To his everlasting credit, di Grazia took us out of the blue cocoon.

In his continuing effort to eliminate the corrupt practices of the old regime, di Grazia used his newly promoted sergeants to effect a turnaround in the department. He had eighty new sergeants, and rather than
send eight each to every district and risk our being tainted, if not corrupted, by the old guard, he chose four districts and completely changed the leadership. The only problem with this method was that the layer above us was still made up of old-style lieutenants. From district to district, this clash of cultures caused problems.

I was raring to go. After three weeks of cutting-edge police training, my enthusiasm was skyrocketing. I was going to do everything right, make the changes from day one, bring the Boston Police Department into the future.

My first assignment as a sergeant was to District 6 on Athens and D streets in South Boston. “Southie” was a very insular, parochial, lower-middle-class Irish and Polish community. They did things their own way and were not too hospitable to anybody from the outside. When my new fellow sergeant Joe Saia and I showed up our first day at our first roll call, we found the cops were like that, too. Everything was laid back, kind of a wink and a nod.

My first roll call was the day shift. I had planned my presentation the night before. Maybe I had practiced it out loud. I was ready. I had bought a brand-new gray Samsonite briefcase to hold the Polaroid camera I had bought to take pictures at crime scenes, along with my tape recorder and my cuffs and clubs and ticket books and all the department forms I thought I'd need. As safety monitor on the corner of East Street and Adams, I'd had a Hopalong Cassidy lunchbox; now I had my new briefcase.

There were fifteen to twenty cops slouching in front of me and Sergeant Saia, and when we looked at their faces, we saw some of them had not quite recovered from hard drinking the night before. Alcohol abuse was a big problem in the department in those days. But they were going to hit the streets.

Every cop there seemed to have in excess of thirty years in the department. Most had spent all of them in South Boston, and many lived in the neighborhood. Every one of these men had been on the job longer than I'd been alive.

I introduced myself. I knew they were suspicious of this young kid who was going to upset their world, but that's what I was there for. “Here's some of the things we're going to be looking at,” I told them. “Response time. I don't want you hanging around the station, I want you out there on your sectors, chasing your calls. And expect to see us.” I wasn't going to be one of those District 14 supervisors who stayed cooped up indoors. When my officers needed me, I was going to be there.

There was a stirring. The idea that a sergeant might be out in the street could be unnerving; the assumption was that we were there to catch someone at an infraction. It's in a cop's nature to assume that anyone above him in the chain of command will go out of his way to catch him doing something wrong. Because there are so many rules, and those rules were disregarded so routinely, the cops weren't too pleased with anyone looking over their shoulder. “That's as much to assist as to supervise,” I assured them.

The day lieutenant at District 6 was a guy named Barney Ryan, old school, about forty years on the job, gawky, six-three, glasses on the end of his nose. He looked like Ichabod Crane, and I think he'd been in the district station since they built the place. Barney was the duty supervisor and a great guy, but one of his principal interests was the ever-present domino game in the back room.

District 6 continued my education. I was alone in the station one night on a midnight-to-eight shift, having let my clerk grab a few winks while I covered the front desk, when a guy came in and gave himself up on a warrant. He'd been accused of beating up his girlfriend, and he was turning himself in. The guy admitted he'd hit her, but he was showing remorse, and he didn't seem like such a bad guy. I took down the information, called it in to headquarters, and got a booking number to make the arrest official. The guy asked if he could make a phone call, and I said sure. He talked into the receiver for a couple of minutes, and then he bolted. Apparently, he and his girl had kissed and made up, and now he was making a break for it.

But if he got away he was an escaped prisoner,
my
escaped prisoner. The paperwork alone would have cost me days of work, plus, losing a prisoner was next to a sin and that kind of thing stays with you forever. I chased the guy four blocks before I caught him and dragged him back to the station house kicking and screaming.

Fortunately, District 6 was led by Captain Morris Allen. Captain Allen's previous command had been the Boston Tactical Patrol Force, an aggressive unit that every cop wanted to get into. It was the crème de la crème. Allen was a great leader, an honest guy who cared about his troops. He was one of my first mentors.

We had been taught the importance of morale in our postpromotion training, and Allen was very involved in the physical condition of the station and its effect on the people who worked there. He was in the process of remodeling the station, literally out of his own pocket. You couldn't get money out of the city government, but in the two years I worked there,
building materials came in from all over, and the place was gutted and put back together. We actually had a multitiered garden fountain in the middle of the lobby!

Captain Allen was particularly interested in the cleanliness and condition of the district's cars. I'm convinced that every Christmas someone in fleet management got an envelope from Allen, because his district always had the best cars.

But Allen's best attribute was that he encouraged those under him to be creative. Di Grazia saw to it that overtime pay was budgeted so sergeants and lieutenants could come in for a couple of hours a week and meet with the commanding officer to discuss the problems in the district and what we could do about them. Captain Allen built the police in District 6 into a team.

We had many nightclubs in our district, and one in particular was a problem. It was called the Channel, and every Thursday and Friday night they'd get 1,500 kids down there, and it would be a bloody mess—underage drinking, fights, stabbings. I was night supervisor, and Allen gave me the responsibility of dealing with this club. This was exciting. I designed a plan in which we put undercover cops inside the place and cops in uniform outside. We got the club's floor plan and drew up diagrams for contingencies. Then, I brought in the cops and detectives and worked on the strategy. “Okay, who's going to be inside in the undercover? Where are the uniformed cops going to be?”

The cops ate it up. Police work requires officers to work alone much of the time, and this coming together in a group created a lot of excitement. Even the old-time cops got into it, and the action was a success. Allen encouraged this type of creativity and gave his young supervisors enough leeway to make our own decisions. It was a far cry from District 3 in Mattapan, where the nightclubs had been protected and I'd had to steer clear of them.

One sunny summer morning, I was out on patrol by myself in Boston's standard-issue Matador station wagon. (In a well-intentioned effort to upgrade our transportation, di Grazia had made the Matador our patrol car. Cops hated the big square clunkers because they didn't maneuver well, but we were stuck with them.) I was halfway over the Broadway bridge on the very edge of my patrol area when a call came over the radio: holdup alarm at the New England Merchant's Bank on Dorchester Avenue. I was about a half mile away. I radioed that I was nearby and immediately looped around.