The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (40 page)

That worked for a while, but eventually reporters want to talk to a new police commissioner to get the department's plans and views. The media kept taking soundings, and after a while the enforced silence became more than uncomfortable. About two weeks had gone by when David Seifman, a columnist for the
New York Post
, called Miller and said, “We understand the commissioner has been muzzled.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?” Miller told him. “Let me get right back to you.”

Miller called the Hall. “Seifman's on the phone saying we've been ‘muzzled.’ What do I tell him?”

“Tell him you haven't been muzzled.”

Miller called back with the nondenial denial. “Look,” he said, “he's been the most high-profile commissioner you could imagine. He's been on the talk shows, he's been at press conferences, there's not a day goes by that he's not in the papers. If that's a muzzle, I don't know what a muzzle is.”

I had intended to use the media to influence the public, the cops, and the bad guys. We had a message to get out, and I wanted it broadcast. This was going to present a problem, but first things first. I concentrated on the mayor's request. The squeegee issue was closest to his heart. It alone might have won him the election. The squeegee people were a living symbol of what was wrong with the city.

During the campaign, Giuliani hit Mayor Dinkins very effectively over the steep decline in the quality of life. The presence of squeegee people was one of the most visible and annoying examples of this decline. It seemed as if any time a driver stopped at a red light, men and women approached the car, wiping the windshield with squeegees or rags or newspaper or whatever they had in their hands…and asking for money. They seemed to swarm particularly at the entrances and exits to every bridge, tunnel, and highway going into and out of New York City, a thoroughly unpleasant de facto welcoming committee. Implicitly—and often not so implicitly—they threatened motorists. You didn't give them a quarter or a
dollar at your peril; they were perfectly capable of hitting your window or scratching your vehicle if you didn't come across.

The general feeling was that there was nothing anybody could do to get rid of them. This was a big broken window that wasn't being fixed, and the more squeegee assaults you saw, the more you felt the city was being abandoned. This sense of futility festered into real anger, and Giuliani used it to his advantage. Dinkins was losing votes around quality-of-life issues, and the NYPD under Ray Kelly made fixing the problem a priority. George Kelling came down from Harvard, and Mike Julian developed a strategy to deal with it.

The police department had always thrown numbers at the community. “Look at all of our arrests, look at our activity.” But the department only measured activity, it didn't measure results. Civilians who complained about the squeegee men were in the same situation as the guy at I Street and East Seventh in Southie who placed 1,300 calls to 911 and never got satisfaction. The cops were a powerful group who could walk into community meetings and say, “It's the criminal-justice system that doesn't take this seriously, it's the judges who let these squeegee guys go, it's the society who created them in the first place. Don't blame us.” People would back off because numbers don't lie, and so nothing ever got done.

But it was a lie. The strategies the NYPD was using were not effective, and the department knew it. They'd go after squeegee people and for a month show substantial arrests and summonses, but there was no urgency. They'd go after them for an hour, once a week. It was the same as working with prostitutes; if you tell them “Friday is sweep day, I'm going to arrest you; the rest of the week you can make all the money you want,” you are inviting failure. Success comes with constant attention.

Could we move the squeegee people? Isn't begging covered under the First Amendment's protection of free speech? In the past, when the police arrested the squeegee people for interfering with traffic, the New York Civil Liberties Union was prepared to step in with an injunction, and they would have been right because the cops were applying the wrong law. Julian's group found a law directly on point: Traffic Regulation 4–04, which prohibited approaching a vehicle to wash a windshield. The NYCLU backed off. Its outspoken executive director, Norman Siegel, said he didn't agree with the law, but the cops weren't acting illegally by enforcing it.

It became the policy of each precinct to check their squeegee corners
every two hours to ensure that the people were either chased away, issued summonses, or arrested.

In the past, none of the squeegee people had answered summonses. If they were given one, they disregarded it. With Traffic Regulation 4–04 in hand, the cops changed policy by warning them that they would be taken to jail. This immediately reduced the number of squeegee people by 40 percent; they left. The 60 percent that remained got arrested. Of those, it was found that half had previous arrests for serious felonies: robbery, assault, burglary, larceny, or carrying a gun. Almost half had been arrested for drug offenses.

As soon as they got arrested, they didn't return. In a month, the squeegee people were gone. It turned out that, despite seeming to be everywhere, there had been only seventy-five squeegee people in New York. They had worked only in high-visibility clusters, and when they were gone, their absence was highly visible, too. Sitting at a light without being hassled reminded New Yorkers of what they had missed.

This turnaround was effected by Dinkins and Kelly. When I arrived, we kept up the police presence and pressure. Ironically, Giuliani and I got the credit for their initiative, but understandably Giuliani was happy to take credit for making squeegee people an issue during the campaign and spurring the action. I saw the squeegee population as a fitting symbol of the sad state of the previous NYPD. They had given up. It was a damning confession: The world's greatest police force hadn't been able to handle seventy-five street people toting rags and sticks. Only politics prevented David Dinkins and Ray Kelly from receiving their due.

With all the resignations on my desk, I replaced four super chiefs. Unfortunately, NYPD resignations take thirty days to finalize, and I had created an awkward situation in which three-star chiefs were hanging around marking time for a month while the younger one-stars who replaced them were eager to begin doing their jobs. I should have handled things differently. But with Timoney, Julian, Anemone, Borrelli, and Reuther in place, Dave Scott as my first deputy commissioner, Jack Maple as my deputy commissioner for Crime Control Strategies, Miller as my DCPI, and Peter LaPorte as my chief of staff, I had put together a Dream Team of police professionals that was experienced, energized, and full of good ideas.

While we were working on our new policing initiatives, I supported a proposal from John Linder that the Police Foundation hire Linder's firm to work up what he called a “cultural diagnostic” of the NYPD. He defined
this cultural diagnostic as “an analytical tool that determines the cultural factors impeding performance and the corrective values that must be employed as principles for organizational change…. To this end, the analysis defines the cultural assets; cultural obstacles to change; inherited operating culture; inherited core identity; projected core identity; and value or values that must guide revision of key organizational systems to institutionalize a new, high-performance culture.” We both believed that change can be brought about rapidly by the creation of and reaction to a “discernible crisis,” which leads to self-confrontation and requires both strategizing and action to correct.

I appointed Pat Kelleher as director of the department's reengineering process. Kelleher, like Marty O'Boyle, had been identified as another superstar. Over time, I came to be extraordinarily impressed with Kelleher, and when Walter Mack was removed, I promoted him to head up internal affairs.

I involved more than three hundred people from every NYPD rank and bureau and formed twelve reengineering teams on productivity, discipline, in-service training, supervisory training, precinct organization, building community partnerships, geographical and functional organizational structure, paperwork, rewards and career paths, equipment and uniforms, technology, and integrity. They surveyed nearly eight thousand cops and eventually made more than six hundred recommendations, of which 80 percent were eventually accepted. What they found was striking:

• At the highest levels of the organization, the basic aim of the NYPD was not to bring down crime but to avoid criticism from the media, politicians, and the public. As one police executive put it, “Nobody ever lost a command because crime went up. You lose a command because the loudest voices in the community don't like you, or because of a bad newspaper story, or because of corruption.”
  

• The greater the distance from headquarters, the lesser the trust from one rank to the next. Exclusion was the rule. Creativity was actively discouraged. One commander said of his troops, “I have three hundred potential [career] assassins in my unit.”
  

• Police officers believed the department had not backed them up, even when their actions were warranted.
  

• The department was structured to protect its good name (and the careers of its senior executives) rather than to achieve crime-fighting goals.
  

• The Internal Affairs Bureau was seen as intent on tripping up officers for minor infractions rather than rooting out real corruption.
  

• The mayor and my strongly voiced support for the department had encouraged people throughout the organization, but they were waiting to see what we would do.
  

They found a wide disparity between what was said by the bosses and what the officers believed was actually wanted. Officers felt they were in a twilight zone where staying out of trouble—and thus keeping their bosses out of trouble—was more important than achieving anything concrete and measurable in fighting crime.

1. Write summonses
   

2. Hold down overtime
   

3. Stay out of trouble
   

4. Clear backlog of radio runs
   

5. Report police corruption
   

6. Treat bosses with deference
   

7. Reduce crime, disorder, and fear
   

1. Reduce crime, disorder, and fear
   

2. Make gun arrests
   

3. Provide police services to people who request them
   

4. Gain public confidence in police integrity
   

5. Arrest drug dealers
   

6. Correct quality-of-life conditions
   

7. Stay out of trouble
   

Maple and Timoney became good friends, but they had it out. Maple had been quoted by the writer Jack Newfield as saying, “Those guys over there at the NYPD have given up on crime fighting.” Timoney was livid and confronted Maple.

“When have you guys ever addressed crime?” Maple demanded.

“What the hell are you talking about? Operation Pressure Point. Operation Take Back. Ben Ward dealt with it seriously.”

“No, no, the NYPD never focused on crime. What are precinct commanders
judged on? Corruption. Always. If you keep your nose clean, stay out of trouble, and don't rock the boat, you're gonna get promoted. No commander is held responsible for crime figures.”

Timoney took it personally. When he'd had the Fifth Precinct, he had concentrated on crime, but as a former narcotics cop that was his background.

“That's not the point,” Maple argued. “I'm not talking about individual commanders, I'm talking about the department. No one is held accountable. If your crime rates go up, okay they go up, so what. If you've got any kind of answer, you're fine. You're not going to lose your command over crime out of control. But one corrupt cop and you're dead.”

Timoney couldn't deny it. The department required each commander to produce a state-of-command report listing the five top priorities of their precinct. Ever since the 1970 Knapp Commission, which publicized the NYPD's institutionalized corruption and made Frank Serpico a household name, the number one priority was always controlling corruption. The rest varied from commander to commander, but crime was way down the list. To prevent cops from being corrupted, bosses took them away from temptation, which meant out of proactive situations. They might set up crime-fighting units, but they saddled the cops with so many constraints that they were effectively prevented from doing their jobs.

For instance, it's incredibly difficult for a police officer to make a legally sound drug-dealing arrest while in uniform. He or she might stumble on a deal, but by and large, who's going to sell drugs to a uniformed cop? When we set up drug-bust units, we need to allow cops to work in plain clothes. However, plain clothes is where corruption might occur, with an officer pocketing drugs or money, and commanders were more worried about their cops going bad and sabotaging the boss's career than about making good arrests. Therefore, the arrests didn't get made, or were made strictly for the numbers and without any real concern for eliminating the problem, the crimes kept being committed, the bosses kept moving up the ladder, the cops kept being frustrated, and the streets remained dangerous. While there were individual commanders who trusted their cops and made fighting crime a priority, the department was institutionally paralyzed.

“Tell me I'm wrong,” said Maple.

“You know,” said Timoney, “I hate you, but you're right.”

Timoney, good Catholic that he is, believes that confession is good for the soul and allows you to start anew. He felt that before we could go
forward we had to make certain admissions. He made them in public forums and on television. He began speaking to cops and telling them, “The NYPD hasn't done its job in twenty-five years. We failed….
I
failed to do this job. I made a lot of arrests, but you know what? I wasn't doing my job, either. But I'm going to start doing it from now on.”