The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (4 page)

Minister Don had probably not had extensive dealings with Sharpton up to that point, and now he'd gotten a good look. Sharpton, he saw, was just looking to keep the pot stirred up. Minister Don knew me to be a fair guy he could work with. Now here was an opportunity to represent the Black Muslims in New York and build a relationship in places where he had never before had access, and I think he didn't want to squander it. He called later to set up a secret meeting.

In the meantime, Dave Scott had pulled the tapes of the 911 call that had reported the disturbance in the first place plus the transmission from the cops’ radios on the scene. It's important to work with the facts. They were revealing.

The 911 call was anonymous. The voice said two men, armed with guns, had entered Mosque Number 7 to rob it. As we examined the tape more closely, it became apparent that the call was a hoax, but the officers who responded didn't have the luxury of that analysis. They'd had to assume the call was for real and respond quickly.

The radio transmission documented a pitched struggle. It was clear from listening that the officers were being assaulted by a group; they were screaming bloody murder for help. The Muslims’ claim that the police had come in force, invaded their mosque, beaten everyone, and left was simply untrue.

But a serious mistake had been made. The department has a protocol when dealing with incidents at what are called “sensitive locations,” such as mosques, churches, and synagogues. There were over six hundred sensitive locations on the books at the time, and they were to be approached with more restraint than normal locations, with a supervisor required to respond with the officers. In fact, this protocol had been developed in response to that 1972 confrontation at Mosque Number 7 in which a police officer had been shot and killed while responding to a false report of a robbery. It was clear from the tape that the dispatcher who received the 911 call had not informed the officers that the disturbance was at a sensitive location.

John Miller wanted to release the tapes to the news media and get a jump on the debate over who started the fight because it wasn't going our way. Radio news reports had begun evenhandedly enough with phrases such as “Charges that police stormed into a Harlem
mosque,” but as the story wore on, it got shortened to “
When
police stormed into a Harlem mosque.” Then it devolved into “stormed,” as in storm troopers, as in police, as in Harlem. It was turning into a disaster, and Miller felt we had to reverse the trend.

Chief of Detectives Joe Borrelli wanted no part of playing any tapes. “This tape could be evidence,” he said. “And we're going to need it.”

We decided that we would play the tapes in-house for the press. They could take notes and describe what they heard, but the tape would remain in our hands. It was at this point that ex-reporter Miller learned his first lesson about how the press looks from the other side. Articles in the next day's papers said, “Police, in an attempt to gain spin control of the mosque incident, played a three-minute tape on which cops could be heard screaming. The cops who stormed into the Harlem mosque …”

My staff and I met secretly with Minister Don and his entourage, minus Sharpton and Mason, in the conference room of a Wall Street brokerage firm, five days after the incident. The Muslims felt the police hadn't shown sufficient respect for their house of worship, that we had rushed inside and would not have been as aggressive to the congregants at a Catholic church or a Jewish synagogue. The point had some legitimacy; the officers could have shown more sensitivity, and perhaps if they had entered a religious location they were more familiar with, they would have. We explained, however, that they had not been informed by their dispatcher that this was a sensitive location, that they were trying to protect the community from what they were told were armed robbers, that despite whatever appearance of disrespect, their intentions had been entirely honorable.

We discovered that the entire incident had been deliberately created by local drug dealers who had been chased away from the area around the mosque by the Muslims. In retaliation, they had made the call to provoke a confrontation between their two enemies, the Muslims and the police.

At the meeting that afternoon, we all agreed, in good faith, to disagree. The Muslims refused to turn over any suspects, and the police department told them we didn't need their help, we would catch the criminals on our own. Which we did after an extensive investigation by the department's detectives that took many months to complete.

The Black Muslims are a complex group that must be reckoned with. They espouse many high ideals, including family values and pride in black heritage and culture, and they are often a very strong force for good in terms of securing black neighborhoods from drug dealers and other criminal elements. Unfortunately, as much as Louis Farrakhan tries to deny it, their good is often more than washed away by the phenomenal amount
of racism, prejudice, and hatred of whites they espouse, particularly toward Jews. In Boston, their rhetoric did not seem to be on the scale that Farrakhan uses on the national level, but race is a major issue in New York—as it is around the country—and ultimately the effect on the city of Farrakhan's rhetoric and efforts is problematic.

I felt it was important that the police department be understood by the black and other minority communities, particularly because the actions the mayor and I believed necessary could be misconstrued as putting down blacks or Hispanics. Our statistics told us clearly that a large percentage of the crime in New York was being perpetrated by blacks and Hispanics. This was a fact. But what also needed to be understood was that most of the victims were also blacks and Hispanics. They were the chief victims of crime and of police ineffectiveness in reducing crime. They had a right to be protected.

I had selected David Scott as my second in command in the NYPD, making him the highest-ranking black officer on the force. He was sworn in the day after my meeting with the Muslims. Dave was a thirty-three-year veteran of the department and would help me become an insider. He was respected up and down the organization, he deserved the job, and I was not unaware that this appointment would demonstrate my recog-nition of good work regardless of color and my desire to involve the minority community. I intended to make him the most powerful first deputy commissioner in the history of the NYPD, unlike Ray Kelly's first deputy commissioner, John Pritchard, also black, who had been largely a figurehead.

I planned to be assertive in stopping crime throughout the city. We had to make a particular effort in minority neighborhoods, where the crime was felt most. It would be difficult to do our job if we were viewed as doing it in a negative or disrespectful way. As I had told the cops at the 103, it was essential to treat all communities and all residents of the city with respect. It was important to win the respect of citizens—white, black, or Hispanic—in all of New York's neighborhoods. We could not be successful in the long run if we were seen only as an occupying force. This was critical because we were going to be much more assertive than previous police administrations, and we knew that maintaining our presence as firm but fair and respectful would present a continuing challenge, perhaps our most important one.

At the beginning of his term, the commissioner has a golden opportunity to influence the media, the public, his own police force, and the bad
guys. We planned to use the press to market our message. It wasn't enough simply to bring about change, we had to sell a better image of the department, and we had to market the change as it came. In fact, we had to market the change
before
it came. “Get ready, things are about to get better. Things are getting better, see? Things are already better.” We wanted to capture the press early and build momentum.

The press, of course, will not be complicit in a police department's marketing plans. They don't view themselves as an arm of our public-relations department, and they're right. But the police commissioner is a mayor's most important appointment, and any new person in the job can expect a series of honeymoon articles about who he is and how he intends to attack crime. Crime sells newspapers, and the commissioner is the living symbol of the city's attempt to deal with crime, so it's only natural that reporters will gather round and attempt to get a handle on him. It was our job to focus this attention properly. That's why I hired Miller, who came from that world.

Many police commissioners aren't comfortable with the press. In all large organizations, there are plenty of areas that a leader doesn't want made public, and a commissioner can feel vulnerable to being exposed, to being made a target. At the same time, exposure can be a bonanza, and I welcomed it. I admit it, I don't mind seeing my name in the papers. But, more important, I wanted to get the message out that change was here and we were serious. The media was the best and quickest way to do that. In some respects, what I was trying to do was similar to what Lee Iacocca had done with Chrysler: to make my identity synonymous with the organization's.

The cops read the papers, they listen to radio, they watch the evening news. Departmental memos can establish formal guidelines, but headlines give cops the feeling. We can issue directives telling them we're changing procedure, and they'll take it as an order; let them see the commissioner on the tube talking about taking back the streets, and they'll get the picture. It will affect their lives. When cops’ friends start talking about the news—“I see that you're going after criminals from now on”—they bring it home.

Bad guys read the papers too. They'd had it pretty good in New York, but now we put them on notice: The party was over.

The public wanted results. They wanted less crime; they wanted to feel safer in the streets. The first step to reducing fear is to tell people we're on the case. The cavalry is coming.

Events in the city and the influence of John Miller ensured that I was all over the papers, the radio, and TV my first week as commissioner. On Friday, on my way from police headquarters to a television interview, I met with New York
Daily News
reporter Patrice O'Shaughnessy, who was doing a piece for the Sunday paper. “My number-one priority,” I told her, “is fear reduction.” We discussed the mosque incident and another shooting that also had happened that week. “I got a quick crash course in how to deal with crisis in New York under scrutiny,” I said. “It also allowed myself and the mayor to spend a lot of time together, and now I know how we'll work together. … The mayor trusts what I'm about. For a guy everybody suspected would be intrusive in police matters, he hasn't been; he lets me run the department.”

I also wrote an article for the
Daily News
opinion page explaining department thinking on the mosque incident and outlining my thinking on race relations.

That Sunday, the reporter's quick profile gave me and the mayor high marks for our handling of the difficult situation. It was a nice piece. The
Daily News
saw fit to run a full-page picture of me on the front page. The headline read “Top Cop William Bratton:
I'LL END THE FEAR
.”

Well, that just started the fear.

Miller got a call from Cristyne Lategano, the mayor's communications director. “When was this
Daily News
thing set up? Who knew about it? Why was the commissioner talking to the
Daily News
?”

“It was a routine request,” he told them. “They wanted an interview about his first week in office. You know, where did you go, what did you do?” The public-information office had been going its merry way, trying to pump out good stories about the NYPD and its new commissioner, trying to get people involved in this new turnaround. Apparently that wasn't what City Hall had in mind.

The issue was who was supposed to get the credit. Any time that week a positive story had appeared that was focused on me, or on both the mayor and me, the Hall's position was that it should have focused solely on the mayor. Miller was left with the distinct impression that, as far as City Hall was concerned, the
Daily News
had a photo of the wrong man on the front page.

No one had told us the game was rigged. As smart as we all thought we were, it took a while for this fact to register.

Jack Maple and I got summoned unceremoniously to City Hall. “Be in Peter Powers's office at five o'clock” was the way they put it. It was Sunday
night. I'd been on the job seven days. We weren't told what the meeting was about, just show up.

After hours, you come into City Hall through the front door. You have to ring a buzzer to get in, unless the cop on guard duty is on the ball and spots you coming up the steps. Once inside, you go through a marble entranceway, pass two columns, and make a left until you hit a waist-high gate that is manned by a New York City police officer twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Straight ahead are a pair of French doors in front of which sit a pair of receptionists, but at five o'clock on a Sunday the desk was empty.

Go through the doors, and you're in a small rectangular office. It's not an office filled with the trappings of power, not an intimidating office, unless you know the Hall and that its placement is meaningful. This is the seat of power, the office where Peter Powers does business.

Powers was Giuliani's deputy mayor for operations. He had overall charge of the operations of the New York City government. Most of the city commissioners reported directly to him. I didn't. Unlike his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani had certain commissioners reporting directly to him, particularly the police commissioner; he wanted it clearly understood that he was hands-on and would be very involved with his police commissioner. One of Giuliani's campaign criticisms of Mayor Dinkins was that he was too distant; Commissioner Brown had reported to the deputy mayor for criminal justice. Rudy wanted no such buffer. I was a direct report and we had hot lines linking our offices.

Powers was a lifelong friend of Giuliani, as close as they come. While he had never worked with him in the U.S. attorney's office, Powers had run both of Giuliani's mayoral campaigns and had been one of the Giuliani inner circle who, about seven weeks earlier, had met with me prior to my appointment. In his late forties, a little stooped over, with hair combed straight back and glasses on the end of his nose, hearing aids in both ears, Powers had been a tax attorney and cultivated the scholarly look of a kindly schoolteacher. Appearances can be deceiving.