The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (18 page)

A bit of Boston Police Department history is important here. The commissionership was a political patronage plum, and because of concern over the level of corruption in Boston, for about thirty years after the election of Boston's first Irish mayor, control of the appointment of the police commissioner remained in the hands of the governor. The Brahmins on Beacon Hill, old-time Yankees, controlled the state house and didn't want to lose control of the city to the Irish. It wasn't until 1962, following a major police corruption scandal, that the mayor of Boston regained that right. Even then, restrictions were imposed. The police commissioner would be a civilian, and to insure his independence, his term woud run for
five years, overlapping the mayor's four-year term. The men who actually ran the department on a day-to-day basis were the superintendents, all of whom had come up through the ranks.

Di Grazia had brought together a band of civilians who became known as his “whiz kids”: Gary Hayes, Mark Furstenberg, Phil Marks, Steve Dunleavy, and Bob Wasserman. Civilians. It was unheard of. To have a civilian in a position of actual power in the Boston Police Department was like the pope appointing a Jewish bishop. After di Grazia left, Dunleavy and Wasserman convinced Jordan to implement the former commissioner's plan to bring in young sergeants from this new class and establish a mentoring and development program. Jack Gifford, Al Sweeney, and I were tapped to work with them.

A lot of people wouldn't take the job. “I'm not working for a friggin’ civilian; we'll be here long after they're gone.” In fact, some officers were blackballed for working with these guys. Some people wouldn't talk to us. You were supposed to go up through the ranks, you didn't break the blue line. We became “headquarters people.” You had to be a risk taker just to work in the commissioner's office.

For example, Al Sweeney was known as the start-up person; he was the tactical logistics person they sent in to lay the proper foundation for many new initiatives. He was assigned temporarily to the tow lot to set up the Denver boot program, in which officers clamped boots on illegally parked cars. “Captain,” Sergeant Sweeney said when he got there, “I'm reporting as ordered.”

“Oh, really. Who ordered you?”

“The commissioner's office.”

“The commissioner's office ordered you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, the commissioner's office has walls and ceilings and floors. Does the commissioner's office talk to you?”

“No, sir. The commissioner sent me here.”

“Ah, very good, Sergeant. And your name?”

“Sergeant Sweeney.”

“Ah, ha.” He stopped. “You talk to the police commissioner?”

“No, sir. He talks to me.”

It seemed to Sweeney that the captain was incensed. The department was controlled by World War II veterans and run like the military. You followed the chain of command and were not allowed to think until you reached a high enough rank. It was clear to Sweeney that, as far as this
captain was concerned, sergeant wasn't high enough. Sergeants were gofers. It was bad enough Sergeant Sweeney was at headquarters. How dare he talk to the commissioner when the captain couldn't?

Sweeney was sent to Alabama to take a Civilian Disturbance Orientation course. Upon his return, he found himself at a meeting with white shirts, superintendents; he was a young sergeant, the only light-blue shirt in the room. He made some comment, and one of the superintendents said, “Who is that wiseass kid down there?” From then on, Sweeney was known as the Wiseass Kid.

Sweeney, Gifford, and I were young wiseass kids walking around headquarters talking on a first-name basis with superintendents and the civilian whiz kids. What made us so special? Dunleavy and Wasserman identified us as guys with potential, and they encouraged us. We got a taste of headquarters and learned its inner workings at a very early stage in our careers.

The most important benefit of working at headquarters was that it exposed us to the idea of looking at the city as a whole. As beat cops or sergeants assigned to individual districts we were inclined to deal with the situations immediately at hand, but in the commissioner's office we were taught to approach problems citywide.

Dunleavy, now Jordan's director of administration, was very involved in the development of the professional policing model of that era, with a strong emphasis on centralized control. His strength was in his systems, and he believed strongly in research, reports, and grunt work in the service of a professional goal. Until di Grazia arrived, the Boston police were bereft of modern techniques and management practices, but Dunleavy, who saw his powers and influence greatly expand under Jordan, sought to bring us up-to-date and to market us. I was assigned to be his staff assistant. It was a good deal: a private office in the commissioner's suite and a marked take-home car with the unit designation “Commissioner's Staff” on the front fender. I had arrived.

In the late sixties and early seventies, American policing evolved significantly. In November 1976 when I was assigned to the commissioner's office, the latest concepts were rapid response, mobility, technology, and professionalism. The emergency number 911 had come into being in the early seventies and completely changed the face of American policing, putting a premium on “the three R's”: rapid response, random patrols, and reactive investigation. The cutting edge of policing theory in those years was all about response time and arrest clearance rates, the faster the
better. If we got to the scene in a hurry, we could either arrest the criminal or pick up his warm trail and hunt him down. American police forces began to measure their impact not on what crime they were preventing but on how fast they were responding to it. (This was more fiction than fact; studies showed that police made an arrest in only 2.9 percent of all 911 calls involving serious crime.) Increasingly, money and manpower were devoted to responding after the fact. Rather than preventing crime, we were in the business of chasing crooks.

One of the strengths of the old system had been that the beat cops knew the neighborhoods they policed, and their presence in and knowledge of the community prevented many crimes from occurring. Under the new system, in city after city, cops were pulled out of the neighborhoods and put into sector cars from which they responded whenever there was a call.

When officers were not chasing 911 calls, they were expected to patrol their assigned sector and, by the visibility and randomness of their patrol, deter criminals from committing other crimes. Because criminals never knew where the cops were, the thinking went, they lessened the risk of getting caught by committing fewer crimes. Advanced police thinkers and managers of the time were answering questions such as: How many cops should be in cars? How many should work in the stations? How many in one district? How many in another? The disposition of manpower was controlled not at the district level but from the commissioner's office. Unfortunately, one of the results of this new professionalism was that we got isolated in our cars and lost contact and familiarity with the neighborhoods and their residents.

Driving around the streets is very different from walking on them. In a patrol car, the only time you talk to people is after a crime has occurred. You're not a fixture in people's lives. You're an authority, not a friend; an occasional presence, not a personality. You become “them,” not “us.” The noted theorist George Kelling called it “stranger policing.”

Even the concept of the ideal cop was transformed. The friendly cop on the beat, known by good and bad alike, was replaced by the “Adam-12” impersonal model, very efficient, very stern. That bleeding assault victim or the seriously injured rape victim wasn't going to be offered an arm around the shoulder or a word of comfort. “Just the facts, ma'am.” Jack Webb on
Dragnet
had twenty-two minutes between commercials to solve the crime and make the arrest; he didn't have time to be concerned about prevention.

We also, for the first time, had modern technology, and we wanted to use it. Police were going to be a modern crime-fighting machine. To support the technology and the new mobile policing style, we had procedures for everything, and a lot of my time at headquarters was spent researching and writing these procedures and developing new accountability systems. Dunleavy, for instance, pushed the idea of measuring response time by computer, and under his direction we developed a Standard Beat Plan that recorded the comings and goings of every police officer on patrol—on paper, every shift, every day. I'm a systems-oriented person, and this assignment suited me. We designed a program to measure and record what time each car logged in, what time it logged off, the number of calls it handled, the average time in service. It was the kind of management control that the Boston police had been sadly lacking, and it encouraged accountability. Every morning, the superintendent in charge of the bureau of field services reviewed the sheets and saw how we'd done the day before. Then he'd call around and quiz the district captains. “You were supposed to put out eight cars, you only put out seven. Why?”

We also designed the first computerized vehicle inventory. The department, as best we could tell, had never done a vehicle inventory. We had six hundred or so cars, but we didn't know where a lot of them were. One morning, we sent staff out and actually inspected every police car in the fleet in order to come up with a complete, standardized vehicle report. It took us over two weeks to find them all—at least, all that we could. The previous records and accountability forms were so bad that to this day I believe some are still missing. We also discovered an interesting scheme in which low-mileage cruisers were being sold and then repurchased by police personnel at very reduced prices.

Dunleavy was also a great one for imagery. Boston police cars had been blue and gray, a drab, awful-looking combination that reinforced the public image that the BPD never seemed to change. Our logo was all block letters, staid, old. Dunleavy redesigned them both. The logo was modernized, the cars were painted white with a distinctive-looking blue stripe to make them more visible and professional looking. The words “
CALL
911” were printed in large letters on the back of every car. This proved to be a mistake, since the public started to call 911 for everything. The wording was then changed to “
EMERGENCY CALL
911,” but even later versions eliminated 911 altogether.

Walking around Boston, you couldn't help but notice these new cars, which gave the average citizen the sense of increased, more modern, and
better police presence. Interestingly, cops initially didn't like the new colors; they thought it made them too visible. They even described the patrol wagons as “ice-cream trucks.”

Dunleavy was very attuned to the political nuances of policing and to Mayor White's concerns. He pushed hard for increased police visibility in the neighborhoods, not only to maximize the impact of the force but to satisfy the political demand for it. As a former reporter, he understood the press's ability to deliver our message, and he trumpeted our response time, our technology, and all our advances.

Inside the department, however, Dunleavy was universally hated. He was tough and smart as a whip, but he had an awful personality. All he knew was one way: straight ahead. If the commissioner, or more important the mayor, said, “We're going to paint every street in the city of Boston purple tomorrow,” the streets would be painted purple tomorrow, even if it was snowing and there was ice on the ground. Nothing got in his way. He was a royal pain in the ass to work for, but I learned a lot from him.

Dunleavy was the most obsessive perfectionist I have ever known. When the prototype for our new fleet of police vehicles was delivered, Dunleavy was unhappy. “We didn't order that black plug,” he said. The department hadn't ordered
AM
radios in the cars, and the dealer had put a black rubber plug in the hole where the antenna was usually mounted.

“Well,” the guy told Dunleavy, “you didn't order the radio, so that's what we put there.”

“No,” Dunleavy told him, “that has to be filled in and soldered over.” This was the type of thing that drove people crazy. In some respects, Dunleavy and I were a good match. We both put great stock in getting things done and getting them done right. (You don't sit in your room as a kid making hundreds of clay figures without putting great value on attention to detail.) But working with Dunleavy also taught me what can happen when you drive it to the extreme and when you don't allow people to have input into the process. Largely as a result of my experiences with him, I have come to believe that the best leaders and managers are those who instill creativity but who take satisfaction in seeing their own ideas so embraced by their subordinates that the subordinates ultimately come to believe they were the original source.

Where Steve Dunleavy was almost entirely concerned with politics, technology systems, and imagery, Bob Wasserman, now director of operations, was more involved in the emerging philosophy of neighborhood policing
and substantive changes to implement this philosophy. Guys didn't like Dunleavy because he was a know-it-all and a nitpicker; they didn't like Wasserman because he was smart and irascible. Wasserman seemed to be impersonal and demanding, but, in fact, much more than anyone I have ever met in policing, he consciously went out of his way to be a mentor, to develop and implement not only his own ideas but those of others as well. He became a close friend.

Wasserman was an academic and a practitioner. He had a scholarly appearance, a mustached overbite, an occasional beard, and talked with a bit of a stammer. There were a lot of Bugs Bunny jokes flying around the department. His political leanings were progressively liberal; his police beliefs and practices were also progressive, which put him outside normal department thinking.

I was first introduced to Wasserman by Al Sweeney, who had met him when Wasserman was director of the Police Academy. Sweeney, whose opinion I held in very high regard, said Wasserman was an important thinker, but when I first met him, I wasn't impressed. He was curt; his reputation gave you reason to respect the man but his manner didn't give you a lot of reason to like him.