The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (34 page)

I quite consciously decided to give this issue a very high profile. My constituency, the cops, would appreciate my efforts because they wanted the better weapon and they liked to see the boss out there fighting for them. Managerially, I was on solid ground because I had great belief and
faith in my organization. Operationally, I was investing in better equipment that would improve the safety and skills of my officers. Morally, I had the high ground; I was on the side of the safer weapon.

For some reason, Commissioner Brown did not come to the board of directors meeting and make a personal appeal. He was on record as opposing the purchase of nine-millimeters for his department, and he must have decided that was enough. I knew Brown through Wasserman, and I liked and respected him. I understood the power of his office, and I was pleased not to have to argue against him.

Both sides lobbied intensely. The little Transit Police took on the city's entire power structure, and we didn't back down. All the mayor's people voted against us. The decision came down to a single man: Dan Scannell, eighty years old, vice-chairman of the MTA, a former cop—who carried a nine-millimeter.

We won. I went down to my car and got on the radio. “Chief Bratton here. I just want to notify members of the department that the board of the MTA today voted to approve the issuance of nine-millimeter weapons to Transit Police officers.”

The calls on the radio went wild. Around the districts, they were cheering in the locker rooms. From that day forward, they would have gone through brick walls for me because I had taken on the mayor, the NYPD, and
The New York Times
, and we had won.

The weapon we bought was the Glock semiautomatic. I was with Cal Mathis, out in uniform on one of my ride-alongs one night, when a couple of kids no more than thirteen years old eyeballed us. “Hey, man,” one said as we walked by, “you guys got Glocks!” These kids knew the firearms just by looking at them. It became a big thing on the platforms. “Hey, Transit's got nines!”

Some in the media and around the city felt that my main impetus for championing the nine-millimeters was to improve Transit Police morale. The transit cops now had things the city cops didn't: better cars, commando sweaters, nine-millimeters, and a chief who trusted them. Critics found that reason insufficient and Machiavellian. They were wrong. It was, in fact, a better weapon for the subway. The fact that this was a safety issue is what ultimately won the day. After his appointment as police commissioner, Ray Kelly ultimately approved nine-millimeters for the NYPD.

DON IMUS DOESN'T MAKE FUN OF JUST ANYBODY.

John Linder, the Transit Authority's director of marketing and corporate communications, decided the TA was going to make me a New York household name. He knew from focus groups that if we told people that only 3 percent of the city's crime occurred on the subways, it would have no impact. He felt we should gradually assure people that real action was being taken to improve safety on the system.

Linder recognized that when I'd told the transit cops they were demoralized and looked like slobs and didn't feel like real cops, and then had presented a plan to engage them, I had instinctively followed the same guidelines he had discovered. I told the truth, got their attention, and then went about correcting the problem. He arranged for me to go citywide.

In July 1991, Linder's shop put together a series of radio ads seeded with negative images while at the same time presenting a positive message. The campaign was centered on the phrase “We're Taking the Subway Back—for You.” Implicitly, we acknowledged that the subway had been in the wrong hands and that it had to be taken back. There were criminals on it, we admitted; people thought it was unsafe. Explicitly, we told how we were reclaiming it. We were adding 20 percent more cops, deploying decoy units, patrolling the trains with canine units, and sweeping up fare evaders
and aggressive panhandlers. As a result of our efforts, crime was down, and we were continuing the fight.

One of my particular favorites was an ad called “We Know Who You Are.” It was about the Wake Up Program.

Dean Esserman and Central Robbery's work with the Parole Department had produced results. Most bad guys have criminal records; a lot have finished their jail time and are still on parole and under the eye of the state while they're committing more crimes. They found that parole was required to give police a twenty-four-hour notification before a convicted felon was released into a town. It was upstate thinking; a parolee gets off the bus with his brown bag, and the sheriff is there to say, “Hey, Bubba, welcome back, be good.” It turned out they had to talk to us, too. They asked whether there was a way for one computer to talk to another to establish that the officer whom the parolee must contact be a member of the Transit Police. There was. So began the Wake Up Program.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” intoned the announcer, “the chief of the New York City Transit Police, William J. Bratton.”

Behind me, a tape of street noises made it sound like I was outside.

“Serious crime in the subway has gone down dramatically for seven months in a row,” I began. My Boston accent never sounded so pronounced as it did on New York radio. New Yorkers, for some reason, love a Boston accent. “Robbery alone has fallen 12 percent. That's because there are a lot more cops in the subway, and because of the many strategies they are using to stop crime.

“Today, I'd like to tell you about one of those strategies.

“Our crime-analysis unit keeps computer files on everyone who has been arrested in the subway. We have their names, their aliases, and their jail time. And when they come home from jail, a transit cop goes to visit them.

“First, we wish them well. Then, we tell them we're keeping their pictures and records on file. We think that's going to prevent a lot of crime, because someone who has committed a crime in the subway—and paid for it the hard way—is going to think twice about doing it again if he knows we know who he is.

“That's one way we're working to take the subway back for you.”

Our ads were all over the radio, an inescapable presence in the way all successful campaigns are. They certainly didn't escape the attention of Don Imus.

Imus is a take-no-prisoners radio talk-show host who takes great and humorous pleasure in insulting people. He holds forth on world events
and local stories every morning, and everything is a source of commentary and amusement. He is forever coming up with oddball characters and voices. Imus is a New York fixture, syndicated around the country, and he doesn't give much of a damn what people think. He's also a very funny guy. So he took us on.

His announcer intoned exactly like ours. Then this character with an exaggerated, heavy Boston accent came on the air. They followed my script word-for-word until they got to the part about the visits to parolees, which were made, “usually about three in the mornin’. To throw them a little welcome-home party.” Was it my imagination or was the accent getting thicker?

“Now, I know you're thinkin’: Who's mindin’ the store downstairs when the Transit Authority's got teams of officers up on the street makin’ door-to-door social visits to paroled ex-cons?” Crime was down, in the world according to Imus, “because when a former felon's got a piece of pound cake in his mouth, he can't be down in the subway poundin’ you in the mouth for your cake.”

I thought it was hysterical. I was pleased and flattered that Imus thought I had high enough visibility to parody. Any cops listening would get a big kick out of it, and anyone who hadn't already heard the real transit ads was getting a heads-up about them.

We were making an impact on the city and on the law-enforcement community. George Kelling and Bob Wasserman were trumpeting our successes among the academics. I spoke about the Broken Windows concept before the Executive Session on Policing at Harvard. I had been excited to be invited to these conferences when I was on the rise, and now I took many people from my staff with me to tell them thanks, showcase them, and allow them to network. I was also invited by New York attorney Adam Walinsky to join a group of law-enforcement experts on a visit to Moscow after the fall of communism and consulted with Russian police officials on how to police in a democracy.

With NYPD Commissioner Lee Brown, I coordinated joint monthly meetings in which we and our staffs discussed and pursued common issues. My staff and I always came with a prepared agenda. The NYPD didn't. Their senior staff usually sat in stone-faced silence, waiting to take their cue from Commissioner Brown. I never forgot that. I also earned a degree of respect from the city's political community, both the administration of Mayor Dinkins and those who were trying to unseat him, like mayoral candidate-in-waiting Rudolph Giuliani.

But my professional success had its downsides. Cheryl was in Boston,
and I had spent two years commuting back and forth every weekend to see her. I knew what the pressures of a job could do to a relationship, and that kind of separation is not good for a marriage. It was exhausting, both physically and emotionally. It was also expensive. We were paying for two residences, the cost of round-trip Boston shuttle flights was not going down, and we were going into debt up to our eyeballs. I had come into the organization at a significantly smaller salary than other senior vice presidents in the TA. (In addition to the title chief of police, I also held the position of senior vice president.) This was done initially at my request, so I would not make more than Lee Brown. But the deal was, if I delivered, I would be compensated accordingly, about another $15,000 a year, commensurate with the salary level of other senior vice presidents. True to his word, TA President Alan Kiepper supported that deal.

While I was doing my job, Bob Kiley had resigned as chairman of the MTA and been replaced by Peter Stengel. When Kiepper asked about my raise, Stengel said the MTA was under budgetary attack and had to reduce costs. When I arrived, subway crime had been rising for thirty months, with robbery growing two-and-one-half times faster than in the city at large. Our results included a 22 percent decline in felony crime, with robbery down 40 percent. We had reduced felony crime and disorder in the subways, fare evasion had been halved, and we had increased ridership and greatly improved rider confidence. We had turned around the entire Transit Police department.

Still, I was not going to get the raise because Stengel felt it was not politically feasible. I also sensed that Stengel didn't fully understand or appreciate how we had effected our turnaround. Our motivation techniques did not appear to resonate with him. Unlike Kiley, who had extensive police experience, Stengel was a railroad guy, and he gave me the strong impression that he wanted to return to the simpler operation and just post cops at turnstiles. All of these factors led me to begin looking for other opportunities.

Lee Brown seemed like he was going to stay for his full term, so the NYPD commissionership wasn't on the horizon. Los Angeles, however, seemed like a possibility. After the riots, its embattled police chief Daryl Gates was being pressured to resign, and I decided to get actively involved in the search for its next leader. The LAPD required exactly the kind of turnaround I enjoyed performing, and the challenge of trying to rebuild that department in particular would be extreme. The job paid $175,000 a year, the highest police chief's salary in the nation.

I put in my application, met with their representatives, and was on a select list of eleven candidates when I took my name out of consideration. First, it became obvious that they wanted an African American to head up the organization. The LAPD had been severely criticized for racism, and the people running the selection process felt they needed a black man in the position to answer that charge. It was also clear that Willie Williams, the police chief from Philadelphia, was going to be that man. Second, the selection process had been confidential, but word of the final candidates was about to reach the public, and if I had been on that list it would have damaged the morale of my department. I would have taken the risk if I'd thought I had a good chance of getting the job, but without an actual shot, why undermine transit and my continuing ability to lead the department?

I was in Boston for New Year's 1992, at lunch with friends in a little Italian restaurant in Wakefield, when I picked up the
Boston Herald
and read a front-page story that the St. Clair Commission, established to investigate the Boston Police Department and headed by President Richard Nixon's former counsel James St. Clair, was about to recommend that Mickey Roache be replaced as commissioner because of incompetent management.

I had been watching the BPD. Jack Gifford, who had resigned as superintendent and returned to the rank of lieutenant, was always very involved behind the scenes, and we'd kept in touch. I thought to myself, “This might be the opportunity.” I excused myself and went across the street to a pay phone and called Roache.

It was New Year's Day, but I knew where he was: behind his desk, where he always was. Sure enough, he answered the phone.

“Mickey, how're you doing? Bill Bratton.”

“Hey, Bill, how're you doing?”

“Mickey, I've been reading the paper, all the problems with the St. Clair report. I think I might have an option you might want to consider.”

Mickey was interested. He'd been reading the same paper I had. We arranged to meet the following Saturday at a hotel in Brighton. I had been very envious when my old sector-car partner had gotten the commissionership, of course, but that was natural, and we both understood. We talked for a couple of hours.

I told him I was starting to look around for a new position. I told him about my frustrations with commuting back and forth to New York. “It strikes me,” I said, “that I can do something for you and you can do something for me.

“I've got a pretty good reputation for turnarounds and management, and this place, according to the St. Clair Commission, needs to be significantly reorganized. I need to get back to Boston, you need the department put in shape. Would you consider bringing me into the organization as the number two?”