The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (17 page)

Each morning, black children were bused from their own neighborhoods in Boston to central points, where they were placed onto different buses and driven to individual schools around the city. Black children who were being driven to schools in South Boston first went to Bayside
Mall, an abandoned shopping center at the edge of the neighborhood. The streets of South Boston are narrow and lined with shingled baywindowed houses, the sidewalks are not wide, and a bus takes up a lot of space in such tight quarters. As these convoys made their way to their schools, they were often ambushed by groups of screaming white residents of Southie throwing rocks and bottles and brandishing signs reading “Niggers Go Home!” It was pure bigotry, pure hatred. Increasing numbers of cops had to be assigned to escort the buses.

South Boston High School and Charlestown High School became the principal battlegrounds of the efforts to resist integration. South Boston and Charlestown were very insular white residential areas with large public-housing populations. With white parents screaming outside, full-fledged riots often broke out inside the schools, and every day hundreds of patrolmen were stationed inside schools. There were daily fights and often stabbings. Conditions grew so bad that South Boston High became a virtual prison and the Boston police, assisted by the Metropolitan and state police forces and for a time the U.S. Marshals, worked literally around the clock to keep order. It was a terrible time for the city. The wounds caused during that era still have not healed.

Disturbances came anytime, day or night; the police got intelligence that a band of demonstrators was forming outside the school at midnight to graffiti the building or put up signs, and we'd have to show up and handle it. The situation got so out of hand that one Sunday, the District 6 station had to be evacuated; a rumor went around that it was about to come under attack by the antibusing forces.

Cops were on standby for the entire school year. Police stations began to look like flophouses. The Tactical Patrol Force spent the entire year, twelve hours on, twelve hours off, camped out on cots in the gym in the Marine reserve center in South Boston or by the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC) sewage-pumping station; cops spent so much time there, they didn't even smell the raw sewage anymore.

There was not much chance for police officers to get a break from the rebellion. Cops could visit relatives in the area, but in many cases that put them right into the neighborhood they were policing. Most of the police were from those neighborhoods—Joe Jordan, for instance, had been a star quarterback at South Boston High. It was their kids in these schools and their neighbors throwing the rocks. As with the antiwar demonstrations, the cops were in the middle. Officers looked across the barricades and saw the screaming faces of their sisters, their brothers, their
cousins and nephews. Many would go home at night and have to hear their friends saying, “Hey, we saw you up at the heights today. Why did you arrest Johnnie Jones?” The antibusing people could not understand why we were arresting them, why we weren't letting the rock and bottle throwers go.

Which is not to say that some cops didn't turn a blind eye to a lot of what was going on. They agreed with it. Not only was the city divided against itself, the department reflected those divisions. It, too, became a basket case.

On May 12, 1977, several sticks of dynamite were found inside South Boston High School, and seven arrests were made. The fighting grew fierce. Ultimately, the federal government brought in hundreds of U.S. marshals in their riot helmets to preserve order. It reminded me of Little Rock in the fifties.

On Father's Day 1977, a protest march was scheduled by the antibusing forces. They'd had a lot of these marches. This time, it was the fathers of South Boston who were going to parade. We brought in extra personnel for crowd control, but we were not prepared for the size of the demonstration, and very soon the scene got out of hand. The men began throwing rocks; bottles were crashing in the street. What had begun as a Father's Day parade quickly broke out into violence, and inside the crowd the word went out: “Take the high school!”

The best we could tell, they were going to seize the building. Word buzzed through the crowd, phones started ringing, people started coming from all over.

Calls were starting to come into headquarters that the march had turned violent, and the cops stationed at the high school were being overrun. I wasn't assigned to the parade, but I was patrol supervisor, responsible for policing the area. Basically, I was like a scout out hunting for marauding war parties of demonstrators.

I was about to swing down toward the L Street Bath House, South Boston's equivalent of an Irish-only country club, and then up to the school to join the troops, when I turned right onto East Sixth and came face to face with a loud and angry crowd of renegade marchers. Dozens of screaming protesters filled the two-lane street and were moving up the hill toward the school. They saw my cruiser and started cursing and hurling bottles. The language was unbelievable. This was no community protest, this was a mob, and they turned on me. These people were running at me, letting loose a rebel yell, a hateful sound like I had never heard.

I hit the brakes, threw the Matador in reverse, and backed up Sixth Street like a wild man. I was looking frantically over my shoulder, trying to keep the car straight, trying not to hit anything.

By the corner I hit forty miles an hour, backward. I did a two-point turn, came out spinning like you see in the movies, and raced up the hill. A boiling angry crowd was assembling on the top of Sixth Street. I felt like Davy Crockett fighting through Mexican lines to get into the Alamo. I made it to South Boston High only slightly ahead of the mayhem.

The call was going out to cops all over the city: Send reinforcements to South Boston. But it was Sunday, and, despite the ongoing conflicts, we were on minimal Sunday staffing, so cops were being called at home. Now all we could do was try to hold the fort and wait.

The brass started showing up. Of course, Commissioner di Grazia was there. The crowd hated him. With his liberal new policies and the police's insistence on not backing down to the mob, he was the archenemy. Joe Jordan arrived to direct the troops in double-breasted full uniform with gold buttons. Meanwhile, a pitched battle started up. The police assigned to the school had parked where we could find spots, and when the mob found a police car they trashed it. The windows in all our cars and vans were being staved in, the glass lying in shards on the seats and the pavement.

South Boston High sat on the top of a hill at the end of Sixth Street, and whoever held the high ground was going to win this battle. We were confined behind the metal fencing that surrounded the school property. With our helmets and riot gear, we could rush through the school's black iron gates and take the streets, but we didn't have enough manpower to hold them. All we could do was foray out and push the crowd back and then, when they surged, retreat behind the gates and regroup. Charge, retreat, regroup, all the while hearing the mob screaming and cursing us. Rocks and bottles flew out of the crowd. They didn't have very far to fly—it was only a couple of feet from the street to the steps of the building; any drunk could brain you.

Joe Jordan had had enough. Bostonians are supposed to be civilized people, and this behavior was beyond disgrace. Jordan was so angry, he reached down, picked up a rock that had smacked up next to him and threw it back at the mob like he was lobbing a grenade. We had no shields and we couldn't shoot them; it was a gesture of complete frustration. That's an absolute police no-no: A police professional doesn't attack a crowd with a rock. But I understood the feeling entirely.

I was ducking the incoming in the high-school courtyard and found
myself standing in the school's doorway next to the commissioner, who was surveying the scene.

“Well, good afternoon, Sergeant Bratton!”

I thought that was the funniest thing. We're under fire, and he's talking to me like we're on a buffet line.

“You know,” he said, “we've been talking about a new initiative to bring some of you young sergeants into headquarters to work on my staff and get a feel for the place.”

“That's great, Commissioner.” My eyes darted between his face and the sky. I didn't want to be disrespectful, but I didn't want to take a bottle on the head. It was a cold and overcast day, and my shoulders hunched like I was out in the rain.

“Would you be interested in coming up?”

It was as if the clouds had lifted. “I would love it!” I had been in South Boston for more than a year. The idea of going up to the commissioner's staff was very appealing, particularly at that moment.

“Good. I've got Dunleavy and Wasserman working on the program.” Steve Dunleavy was di Grazia's civilian director of informational services and Robert Wasserman was his civilian director of the Police Academy. They were high up in his brain trust. “We'll talk to you.”

If we lived. The insurrection at South Boston High went on for several hours before we finally got enough manpower to put an end to it.

It was anarchy. Racial animosity in Boston had spurred several horrendous beatings and murders. A white fisherman was beaten to death by several black kids over by the Columbia Point housing project. A black motorist was dragged from his car by a white mob in South Boston and severely beaten. They were going to kill him. One of the cops assigned to the school had to cut into the crowd, grab the man by the collar, and hold the mob back by firing shots in the air—all of it recorded on film by the media for the five o'clock news.

Through this whole period, we still had to handle our regular 911 calls. Not only were we policing the busing battles, we had to go into these people's homes and deal with the regular run of domestic disturbances. Of course, there was held-over animosity. From that time on, we ran up against a lot of cop fighters in Southie, guys who would go at a cop rather than accept his authority. It used to be that a police officer arrived on the scene, broke up a situation, told someone to move on, and they did it. Not anymore. Cops were the image of enforcement, and Southie degenerated into a small-minded world of its own. Sooner or later, we hauled these
guys away. When they got dragged into court, these yahoos and their attorneys had a constant refrain: “South Boston boy, your honor.” The judges heard that twenty times a day.

South Boston is a very close-knit community with some great strengths and tremendous pride. They played in their own ballpark and by local rules. They sought dispensation, and sometimes they got it. Every Boston cop who ever worked Southie can tell you about the “South Boston boy, your honor” defense. But when they used it to defend their actions during the school busing era, I'm not sure it's something I would have bragged about.

BEFORE I COULD GET TO THE COMMISSIONER'S OFFICE, DI GRAZIA RESIGNED.

Sometime after the Father's Day riot, he announced he had accepted a job in Montgomery County, Maryland, which surprised everybody, especially me. One day he's talking to me about coming to headquarters, the next thing he's leaving.

Di Grazia was a meteor who burned out too quickly. He brought excellent new ideas to the profession but was very outspoken and made deep cuts in the old-guard workforce. He once referred to America's police chiefs as “pet rocks,” which didn't endear him to his peers. He was also undermined by the mayor who had hired him.

Kevin White was very charismatic and well respected when he took office, but the school-busing issue had cut into his popularity. No one in the administration wanted to be the guy out front of the busing issue—there was too much potential for being hated. Di Grazia didn't seem to mind; this was his job, and he was the front person for the city's attempt to maintain order. He took some of the heat for the policing of the desegregation busing and was roundly hated in Southie, Charlestown, and Hyde Park, wherever the police protected the schools. In many other areas, however, di Grazia was a very popular figure.

Di Grazia was very smooth, tall, handsome, with a head of longish curly
hair. (This was the seventies; hair mattered.) In a department traditionally dominated by people of Irish heritage, di Grazia was the city's first Italian-American police commissioner. The elderly loved him, and with that head of hair he could even relate to the young. Polls showed he was the most popular public figure in the city of Boston. Then he made a mistake; he started to tell people, “I could run for mayor.” The phrase got back to Kevin White, and the mayor cut him off. He prevented di Grazia from receiving a pay increase, he canceled a job di Grazia had lined up for his wife, he did everything he could to stick it to him. Mayors, I have found, are very concerned about popular police commissioners.

Di Grazia was gone too soon.

The busing issue had also chewed up the department. Cops were worn out by the constant pressure and long hours, but because of all the overtime they began making a fortune. Many officers became very dependent on this extra money: They bought homes and boats and ran up mortgages and began to live lifestyles they wouldn't be able to afford once the crisis ended. Money became the god. We had bred a generation of cops who were motivated more by the money than by the job.

White appointed Joe Jordan as acting police commissioner to fill out the last year of di Grazia's five-year term. Where di Grazia had been innovative and progressive, Jordan was personable but conventional. He had broken free of the old guard, but, while he didn't renege on di Grazia's creative legacy, he did not push it forward as aggressively. White attempted to keep Jordan under his control, and Jordan could serve the next full term only if White appointed him to it. The commissioner's term ran five years and overlapped mayoral administrations precisely to avoid situations in which an appointee might be beholden to the mayor who appointed him. Under Mayor White, however, City Hall became increasingly influential in all matters affecting the police department.