The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (30 page)

We brainstormed for many hours that night. The Transit Authority had six thousand subway cars and a couple of thousand city buses Linder could plaster with billboards. He had the budget to reach all of New York on television and radio and the capacity to hire writers, designers, and everyone else needed to put together an extensive campaign. He could provide a design department to upgrade the Transit Police's in-house image, to get the cops onboard.

People needed good news in a bad way. What story could we tell them?

In their 1982
Atlantic
Monthly
magazine article, James Q. Wilson and George Kelling had outlined their “Broken Windows” theory. As synopsized by Kelling, its three major points were:

1. Neighborhood disorder—drunks, panhandling, youth gangs, prostitution, and other urban incivilities—creates citizen fear.
   

2. Just as unrepaired broken windows can signal to people that nobody cares about a building and lead to more serious vandalism, untended disorderly behavior can also signal that nobody cares about the community and lead to more serious disorder and crime. Such signals— untended property, disorderly persons, drunks, obstreperous youth, et cetera—both create fear in citizens and attract predators.
   

3. If police are to deal with disorder to reduce fear and crime, they must rely on citizens for legitimacy and assistance.
   

We began to apply this concept to crime in the subways. Fare evasion was the biggest broken window in the transit system. We were going to fix that window and see to it that it didn't get broken again.

The Transit Police was not arresting fare evaders in any great numbers. It seemed like such a minor offense—tokens cost $1.15 at the time—and it often took up to twenty-four hours for one cop to process one fare
beater. If he issued a summons or desk-appearance ticket, very frequently the person would not show up in court or pay the fine. A warrant would then be issued, but no one ever really tracked them down. If a cop made an arrest, by the time he did the paperwork, took the perpetrator downtown to Central Booking to be held for arraignment, sat at the courthouse until the man or woman was arraigned, then testified and watched as they either walked or paid a minuscule fine, he was out of the system for sixteen hours. It just didn't seem worth the effort. Once or twice a year my predecessors did major sweeps, rounded everybody up, and brought them out to Yankee Stadium for a big publicity splash. That was about the extent of attention paid to fare beating. Rather than make arrests, the Transit Authority's preferred action was to station a cop at the turnstile while spending millions of dollars to make turnstile arrays more difficult to climb over or under. Meanwhile, the system was being overrun.

Could we devise a plan that attacked fare evasion, attacked disorder, attacked crime, and also dealt with morale? We came up with the fare-evasion mini-sweep.

Some stations were being treated as if they didn't even have turnstiles. I put a sergeant and five, eight, sometimes ten cops in plain clothes at these problematic stations day and night, and they arrested the people who were streaming in for nothing. The cops nabbed ten or twenty jumpers at a time. They pulled these men and women in one by one, cuffed them, lined them up on the platform, and waited for the next wave. When they had a full catch, they marched them upstairs in a daisy chain and put them into wagons to be taken downtown for processing. We did this all over the city.

For the first time in a long time, the cops were making arrests. They were being cops! The cops were motivated and getting noticed. Twenty people handcuffed in a line is a sight that will attract attention in a subway station. Riders saw fare evaders getting arrested and thought, “Good. I pay a buck-fifteen, why shouldn't they?” They saw cops hauling long lines of folks out of the subways and said, “Go get 'em,” “Great job!” “Way to go!” “It's about time!” When was the last time a transit cop heard that?

By assigning a sergeant, I was assured of supervision, our cops were doing what we wanted, and they were doing it according to Hoyle. Focus, direction, supervision.

We ran these sweeps day and night. Our undercover officers saw people come into the stations even at three in the morning, check that the
uniformed police weren't there, then attempt to evade the fare. We'd nab them. We publicized our efforts, and over time word got out that the Transit Police were serious about fare evasion twenty-four hours a day, throughout the city. Of course, we couldn't be everywhere, but the tactic of plainclothes patrol, as opposed to patrolling only in uniform, created the impression that we might be there. The fear of arrest, the control of previously uncontrolled behavior, began to change behavior. Fare evasion began to decline significantly.

It also became evident that many of the people we were arresting were exactly the ones who were causing other problems once inside the subway system. By focusing on fare evasion to control disorder, we were preventing a lot of the criminal elements from getting on the trains and platforms in the first place.

An unanticipated by-product of the sweeps came when we checked the identification and warrant status of everybody we were arresting. During the early stages of the initiative, we found that one out of every seven people arrested for fare evasion was wanted on an outstanding warrant for a previous crime. One out of twenty-one was carrying some type of weapon, whether a box cutter, a knife, or a gun. As so often happens in policing, we had focused on one problem to the exclusion of others. Now we were beginning to understand the linkage between disorder and more serious crimes. We hadn't thought of it, but it stands to reason that someone coming into the system with the intention to commit a crime is not likely to pay for the privilege.

For the cops this was a bonanza. Every arrest was like opening a box of Cracker Jack. What kind of toy am I going to get? Got a gun? Got a knife? Got a warrant? Do we have a murderer here? Each cop wanted to be the one who came up with the big collar. It was exhilarating for the cops and demoralizing for the crooks. After a while, the bad guys wised up and began to leave their weapons home and pay their fares. If the cops were going to be out in force, it was better all around not to be armed on the subway. Fewer weapons, fewer robberies and armed robberies, fewer murders, fewer perpetrators, fewer victims.

We were changing behavior by using the police more efficiently. We were defying the common wisdom of the last twenty years that the most cops can do is to respond to crime. In the subways, we were preventing it. As the press and the public began to take notice, the cops began to feel better about themselves and their effectiveness.

The major problem presented by the sweeps was what to do with all these people once we had arrested them. It continued to take sixteen
hours to dispose of a case, and even if two officers were now handling twenty at a time, the hours mounted up. We were still losing cops off the system like crazy when they transported arrestees to the Central Booking facilities. Esserman and I and several of my staff were in a meeting, talking about arrest processing and logistics, when the proverbial lightbulb went off over my head: We were in the transportation business. I said, “Why don't we bring the arrest processing to them?”

Probably a dozen people believe they were the originators of this idea, and that's fine with me. My basic concept of leadership is the ability to enthuse and encourage the people in your organization so highly that, whatever idea is put into action, they embrace it so fully they forget the genesis and assume it was their own.

Thus was born the Bust Bus. We completely retrofitted a city bus into an arrest-processing center. Four cops, several telephones and fax machines, fingerprinting and photo facilities, a holding pen, and we were in business. It was a mobile district station. We led our daisy chains past the law-abiding citizens and onto the Bust Bus, which we parked around the corner from the station. We called the men and women carrying weapons or with outstanding warrants “keepers” and shipped them downtown. If the others had proper identification, we gave them D.A.T.s and sent them on their way. Instead of sixteen hours, someone arrested for evading a fare could be in and out in an hour, still a significant inconvenience to them but not to us. The cops could stay downstairs and continue making arrests. Now, rather than throwing up our hands every time we ran into a problem, we began to solve it.

The Bust Bus got great press. The American Civil Liberties Union raised hell about the fare-evasion sweeps, so I invited the city's corporation counsel, Victor Kovner, and his assistant, Diane Volk, to ride along and take a look for themselves. We parked the bus down at the bottom of TriBeCa and set up shop. Esserman, O'Connor, and I each made a presentation.

“There's nothing unconstitutional about this operation,” I told Kovner and Volk. “We're moving people around in daisy chains, but if they didn't evade the fare, they wouldn't be arrested in the first place, so what's the problem? We have a system that's designed
not
to detain them any longer than is absolutely necessary. If anything, by having a bus right there, we have reduced the amount of time they are detained. The city is saving a significant amount of time and money, and of course you currently are involved in a lawsuit with the Legal Aid Society concerning the forty-eight- hour time constraint in arrest processing …” I gave them a good dose of statistics to prove my case.

“How's this program affecting arrest processing, Dean?”

Esserman gave the legal perspective, which we had researched; we were on firm ground.

“Mike, would you give the big picture?”

“What we have effectively developed,” O'Connor told them, “is a system that deals with fare evasion and disorder and crime at the same time. For example, our statistics show that a large number of criminals arrested for subway crimes in the borough of Manhattan are actually from Brooklyn.” It was a variation on Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's favorite theme: Manhattan makes it, Brooklyn takes it. “How do you think they come over? By subway! If we are able to arrest them in the act of fare evasion, they won't come to Manhattan and commit their crimes.”

After the meeting, the five of us stood outside the Bust Bus among several cops. The sidewalk was cordoned off, as the arrest-processing activity continued. Civilians know what's up when they turn the corner and all these cops are standing around; they're both drawn to it and kept away. The more assertive ones saunter over. “What's going on?” It was clearly a crime scene. Prisoners in handcuffs snaked in a long line from the nearby station onto the bus. An officer stood on each side of the door.

An old woman pulling a wire shopping cart read the lettering on the bus: “Arrest Processing Center.” “A jail on wheels!” she exclaimed. “Why don't you bring that on up to my neighborhood? You can lock 'em up all day!”

And so crime, disorder, and fare evasion began to go down. I'd always tried to obtain multiple benefits from my actions, and this had been a particularly successful operation. We had reduced fare evasion, motivated the cops, streamlined the arrest process, and increased police productivity; we had involved the public, increased their attention, and won their approval; we had controlled disorder and achieved a decrease in crime. All from arresting people for a buck-fifteen crime. We were proving the Broken Windows theory.

We were doing all this good work on a shoestring. As well as being demoralized and undirected, transit was woefully underfunded. If I was going to encourage cops to be more assertive and more proactive and to make more arrests, I had to be able to back them up. That backup would come from the city police, who would respond to the radio, but it would also come from transit. The districts were large—District 4, for instance, ran from Fourteenth Street up to 140th Street on the west side of Manhattan—and when you've got a prisoner cuffed on the platform and
you're hanging around waiting for backup with a crowd gathering around you, it can seem like an eternity until the cavalry arrives. We desperately needed more cars to back up the cops as well as to transport the increased number of prisoners to the jails and courts. I doubled the number of each district's patrol vehicles to four. This meant not only were my officers more secure and backed up more quickly, but four more cops could now get a change of assignment. Multiply that by three shifts and ten transit districts and you have 120 more cops per day with a change of work environment. Once again, I was getting multiple effects: higher employee morale, increased efficiency, increased safety of officers, increased visibility of the Transit Police.

I had to fight like crazy to get those vehicles. The Transit Authority was adamantly opposed. They didn't understand the rationale; we were the subway police, we were supposed to be below ground, what did we need cars for at all? They were putting together a new capital budget, and I was lobbying for a new radio system and improvements to the facilities, but that was going to take a long time to come through. We needed a jump start, a quick fix. I was having critical funding difficulties, and no one in a position to do us some good was responding.