The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (23 page)

Early the following week, a press conference was called to discuss personnel transfers and the reorganization of the department. The press was
jammed inside, rumors were buzzing, nobody knew what was going on. We marched into the fourth-floor conference room and Commissioner Jordan introduced his new command staff. In size and scale, it was the most significant change in the history of the Boston Police Department. When my name was announced as executive superintendent, jaws dropped. I couldn't help stealing a glance over at Corsetti, who was the most incredulous of all.

There was no shortage of speculation as to what had happened. The most widely disseminated rumor had it that Doyle and White were very close and that, over the years, Doyle had consistently fed the mayor inside information on the workings of the department and its personnel. As a result of the rumbles about the
Globe
series, the rumor went, he had gone to the mayor and made a move on the commissioner. Whatever the real story, which may never be known, Doyle was effectively removed.

It was made crystal clear to me: The Boston Police Department plays a mean game of hardball. Jordan and Doyle had spent every day of the past few years together. They were golfing buddies. The coldheartedness of it all was what struck me. Jordan had let Doyle sit through most of the morning, through all the placements and planning. Doyle steps out to take a call, and when he comes back his career, for all practical purposes, is over.

Meanwhile, I was suddenly the top uniformed person in the Boston Police Department. I now outranked Eddie Connolly.

For the next several weeks at meetings that included the new command staff, Steve Dunleavy, and the mayor's press people, we began to design the presentation of our new policing plan to the city council. We met at City Hall, police headquarters, and the Parkman House, the mayor's brick-front town house on Boston Common. Using our success in District 4 as a model, we expanded it to the entire city. The beat cop was coming back through neighborhood policing. We could bring down crime by developing a partnership between the population and the police. We developed maps, graphs, and pictures in a professional, comprehensive presentation. We were going to get this job done. Then disaster struck.

The principal funding for municipal government was the state property tax, and throughout Massachusetts those taxes were exorbitant. In Boston, a city filled with colleges and religious institutions, 50 percent of the property was owned by tax-exempt institutions, and thus untaxable. The city could not convince the state legislature to implement a city sales tax and, as a result, more than anywhere else in the state, Boston relied on the
property tax for revenues. Ultimately, this worked as a disincentive, driving the middle class and businesses out of the city. Voter resentment around the commonwealth led to the passage of Proposition 2½, the Tregor Bill, which capped the growth of any city's tax base at 2½ percent per year.

For Boston, this was catastrophic. In 1972, Kevin White had hoped to get the vice presidential nod and, failing that, was now trying to regain his stature as one of the leading mayors of America. He had preached the gospel of expansion and growth, and in spite of the school-busing issue, which cost the city tens of millions of dollars, had spent a lot of money to regenerate interest and development in Boston. One of his plans was to grow and finally professionalize the police department. But the money for this was going to come from property taxes. With this spending cap, these funds vanished and the city faced a revenue shortfall of about 25 percent. In an attempt to increase the amount of money allocated by the state to Boston, Mayor White cut back city services. He proposed laying off one-fourth of the police department and one-fourth of the fire department. He was going to close half of the city's police stations. It was a game of municipal chicken, and in the end, everybody lost.

I spent the next year as the department's point man, laying off police. Month after month, a hundred cops, a hundred more cops, a hundred
more
cops. It was my job to attend large public meetings and tell the good people of Boston why this cutback was going to give them better police service. “You've closed our neighborhood station, you're going to lay off 25 percent of the Boston Police Department, how the hell are you going to police the city?” Try answering that with a straight face.

What was meant to be a period of new philosophy, new initiatives, and great expansion degenerated into a time of retrenchment and stagnation. Needless to say, the neighborhood-policing programs we had planned were completely derailed. The public fear level increased. There were significant demonstrations against these cutbacks throughout the city. Some of the most serious were in East Boston, which is connected to the rest of the city by the Sumner and Callahan tunnels. It seemed like every night, its residents were closing the tunnels off in protest. We were arresting citizens who wanted more police protection; it almost got as crazy as school busing.

Fortunately, there was no appreciable rise in crime. We tried very hard to keep a lid on it, though all we were doing was chasing 911 calls. We managed to keep response time to a minimum, but there were no cops available to do anything else.

It was a devastating time for the department and the cops themselves. The years of school-busing overtime had encouraged cops to live beyond their means, and a lot of them now fell into both psychological and financial distress. Not only did they have large mortgages they could no longer afford, now they were out of work. The Civil Service Commission hearings were held in the guardroom at Area A-1 on New Sudbury Street, and all the officers who were subject to layoffs attended, often with their wives or husbands. It was my job to get up in front of the commission and testify that the city had no money, that we had to lay these men and women off. I was the face of the cutbacks.

It was terrible. You take a civil-service job, and you assume nothing's ever going to happen to you, you have a job for life. And these weren't newcomers getting laid off, these were men and women with ten, eleven years on the job.

Many of the cutbacks, done for symbolic purposes, cost the department dearly in terms of its traditions. In an attempt to give citizens a sense of continuing police presence while still making budget cuts, support facilities were consolidated into neighborhood station houses. That sounded like a good idea—additional officers would be seen on the streets going to and from work instead of being invisible inside out-of-the-way police buildings. But when the police academy was closed and moved into one room in a closed police station in East Boston, that was a disgrace. This was where you learned how to be a Boston police officer. The educational component of the Boston Police Department was decimated. The department I loved so much was in freefall.

I had difficult personal issues to deal with. As executive superintendent, I was exempt from the layoffs, but they hit my class hard. We laid off half the class, and I had the terrible responsibility of sealing people's fate. I had to testify at the civil-service hearings of my friends and colleagues, guys I came on the job with. On several occasions, I had guys out to my house in Canton for pizza and sodas to talk about what they were going through and how I could do a better job of communicating with them. I tried to be completely evenhanded, but I felt terrible, and there was really nothing I could do to help.

The damage caused by Proposition 2½ cannot be overestimated. During that era, the department shrank from 2,173 officers to 1,544. Coming on the heels of the school-busing turmoil, it was easy to understand why Boston cops were so angry. They had been badly abused. It would take a generation to repair the damage.

As bad as things were, I was charged with helping Joe Jordan run the
department during this time of great crisis, and I took my job as executive superintendent seriously. The resectoring plan that Dunleavy and I had designed was now taking hold. I had day-to-day operational control and administrative responsibility for the BPD. I kept track of the department's money and judged whether it was being spent wisely; I stayed on top of the superintendents’ budgets, reductions, and statistics.

My office was on the hallowed sixth floor of police headquarters, connected to the commissioner's by a small corridor and a private bathroom, and I'd go back and forth all the time. I had a computer terminal on my desk in the days before the computer revolution, but all it could really tell me was where the patrol cars were. More important was the cobalt-blue bulletin board I had installed, which ran nearly the length of one wall. On it, fourteen clipboards hung from metal hooks, each with a different heading: Crime Index, Clearance Rate, Overtime, Response Time, Personnel, Sick Time, Deactivated Calls, Bureau Stats, District Stats, 911 Calls, Total Calls, Zero Car Availability, Homicide, and Workload Analysis. I had at my fingertips timely, accurate information, the entire department's statistics from the previous day, such as how many calls we had answered, how many cops were out sick, and how much money was left in our overtime account, particularly critical information during the Tregor period. My staff was in early each morning collating and presenting the information to make an immediate picture of what had happened the day before. The intelligence was accurate; it was there to be analyzed and acted upon quickly. The clipboards were both functional and symbolic: I had a profile of the whole city and I wanted to show everyone who came into my office that I was staying on top of it. Al Sweeney nicknamed this the “Billy Board,” and ultimately I installed Billy Boards in districts around the city.

I was working hard, but I was not part of the old-boy network. Most of the headquarters superintendents had worked with Commissioner Jordan for twenty or twenty-five years. Jordan was a great one for putting his feet up on his desk, and at five o'clock they would all gather in his office to smoke pipes and tell war stories. It was “choir practice” without alcohol, and among the choirboys in there most nights were Jack Geagan, Frank Coleman, chief of the Bureau of Administrative Services, Tony Leone, and Chief of Detectives Joe DiNatale. Even John Doyle would drop by. I'd stop in on occasion, but I wasn't really part of their crowd. I was nowhere near done with my work by five, so often I'd be in my office taking care of business, and I'd hear the group laughing about old times. I wasn't smart enough to understand that I should have been in the room with them. I probably should have done more schmoozing than supervising.

Part of the difference was generational. These were older men who belonged to the VFW Post and bowled in bowling leagues. They drove station wagons and went out only to the local bar and grills in their own neighborhoods. They were very parochial in their views, and the world of policing did not extend beyond the geographic boundaries of the city of Boston. My world was wider, and I drove a Cadillac El Dorado.

It was about three years old when I bought it, but it was a gorgeous car. My father bought a used car every five or six years, and I can trace our economic development from a two-toned, two-door, 1950 standard-shift Ford that my dad ran till the floorboards rotted out, to the silver ’56 Chevy Impala with the white roof—the “Silver Bullet”—to the aqua ’61 Bel Air, to the green ’67 Mustang, to the ugly green midsize Plymouth, to the maroon compact Chrysler, two of which I managed to smack up in the process. Every once in a while, I drove my Cadillac to work and that drove them crazy. My secretary, Kay Leary, once caught Jordan, Geagan, and Coleman looking at it out the window. “Him and that goddamn Cadillac,” she heard one of them say. “Who the hell does he think he is, parking that thing in front of headquarters?”

All these superintendents in their mid-fifties technically answered to this kid. I don't know that they liked it, although in reality they all had direct access to Jordan. I chaired weekly meetings of all the superintendents at which we reviewed all relevant police matters and made decisions for the future, such as budgets, overtime, and personnel changes. Jack Gifford gave me a sign that I displayed prominently on my bookcase, so every time the old guard came into my office they couldn't help but see it. “Youth and skill,” the sign read, “will win out every time over age and treachery.”

I was by far the youngest man ever to ascend to the number two spot. In the late seventies, Dunleavy finally annoyed Jordan sufficiently that the commissioner, with the mayor's acquiescence, forced him out of headquarters. Dunleavy was hard to take even on his best day, and I think Jordan eventually got tired of him in his face. But instead of being fired, Dunleavy was promoted up and out of the Police Department and assigned to the mayor's office in the newly created position of director of the Office of Public Safety. They thought they had gotten rid of Dunleavy, but they were wrong. The fox had moved into the henhouse. He became closer to the mayor, ended up with a palatial set of glass-enclosed offices, and effectively ran the Boston Police Department—and the fire department for that matter—out of City Hall.

Dunleavy and George Regan of the mayor's press office arranged for
Boston
magazine to profile me. I think they intended the article to increase my visibility and start paving the way for people to think of me as Jordan's successor. As you might expect, I was not unhappy about being profiled.

The writer spent several weeks with me and Sergeant Bob O'Toole, a former member of the Tactical Patrol Force who served as my staff assistant. When I went on patrol, O'Toole was always at the wheel. The Tregor times had finally ended, and the reporter attended the official ceremony held by me and Jordan at Police District 11 welcoming back forty of the previously laid-off police officers. At some point, the writer asked about the future. “When Joe Jordan is ready to leave,” I told him, “he'll be able to leave with his head held high and with flags flying. My personal goal,” I said, “is to become commissioner. Be it one year or four years, that's what I want.”

The article came out in April 1982, while I was attending a three-week conference sponsored by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), an organization of progressive police leaders that conducts research and develops advanced thinking about the police profession. It was an excellent program that brought top-notch police instructors and attendees from around the country and provided me an opportunity to network and learn from my peers. Gary Hayes, one of di Grazia's original whiz kids, was PERF's executive director.