The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (44 page)

There was an almost imperceptible hesitation. Maple put his hand over the microphone and whispered to Anemone, “They're not doing it.”

The commander was standing across the room. He leaned in to the mike and said, “Yeah, we are.” Bad move.

“You are? You know something, I really don't have anything to do now. I put my boat up for the winter. I'm gonna go collect the cases where credit cards were in evidence and look at them and find out who called the credit-card companies. Now, do we do it or we don't do it? Tell me. Tell the Jackster.” They hadn't done it. “Then let's do it.”

Precincts sent out squads to check warrants and issue quality-of-life summonses. They gave out ten. Maple said, “You know, we sent out a squad of eight people in plain clothes. Now I know that's the only job they had to do, but we sent them to five different precincts and they were averaging one hundred summonses a night. You're averaging ten.”

We issued an order that all prisoners were to be debriefed, and a lieutenant stood there and told us, “We're debriefing everybody.”

“Really. You're debriefing all the prisoners, Lieutenant, is that correct?”

“Yeah.”

“Well then I guess the books are wrong here. It says there were four thousand arrests made in your precincts and you debriefed three hundred prisoners. What happened to the other 3,700? Why is it that no one is making statements to your detectives, and yet…. Is the assistant district attorney from the Bronx here?”

A voice from the corner said, “Yeah.”

“What percentage of felons make statements to you folks without a cop there, and you put him on video and everything?”

“Sixty-three percent.”

“And of them, how many are inculpatory statements?”

“Fifty percent of them.”

“So, here's the district attorney with a camera, asking them Q and A and getting these statements, and the world's greatest detectives can't do it?”

You walk into any precinct and see the sign: “World's Greatest Detectives.” There was a drug dealer in Brooklyn who raised pigeons and was consistently eluding arrest. Maple tore into that precinct's commanders. “A guy that raises pigeons in an abandoned building is outsmarting the world's greatest detectives? Come on now.”

Sometimes Maple and Anemone would torment people. The most notable bit of aggression came when Tony Simonetti, who had become chief of Brooklyn South, was reporting, and up on the projection screens behind him appeared a computerized drawing of Pinocchio with his nose growing. That went over the line. When I heard about it, I raised hell with the two of them. One of my main rules is: You don't intentionally humiliate people in public, and they had violated that, and they both apologized to Simonetti.

But it wasn't all calling people on the carpet. When someone did particularly well we told them, “You did an excellent job here.” We made a point of sharing their good ideas with the rest of the commanders, first to spread good police technique, and second to encourage and motivate good workers.

Over time, commanders brought in beat cops from their precincts who had done an exceptional job, performed heroically, or run an exceptional investigation. They described the circumstances and heard the whole room burst into applause. You can imagine the effect on a young cop and his or her career to stand there and be applauded by everyone in the department from his commanding officer up to and including the police commissioner. Compstat became a rallying point to encourage and reward people for good work. As at transit, where district commanders had begun improving their presentation and showing off their troops, at the NYPD, while the food didn't get any better, the performances did.

We encouraged creative thinking and backed our people up when they practiced new technique. We freed them from old restraints, gave them responsibility, held them accountable, and were very pleased with the results. We were often amazed. Commanders came up with solutions and innovations that none of us on the command staff had thought of. It was great to watch their minds at work.

Mostly, we attempted to involve the commanders in one another's problems and share successful solutions. “Inspector Chan, Fifth Precinct,”
Anemone called from the head table. “Didn't you have a problem similar to this with the robberies around the Grand Street station? Weren't they following people home and doing home invasions? What were your deployment tactics there? Maybe you could tell us about them.” There was a reluctance for one commander to criticize another, and in the macho world of policing, even volunteering assistance might be considered criticism. We tried to mitigate this problem by taking it out of their hands; if he was called upon by his superior to respond, one commander wasn't showing the other guy up, he was helping him.

“Captain Smith from the six-two. Wasn't there a problem with car theft around Sheepshead Bay? What were your tactics there? How did that work?”

“Inspector Dunne from the seven-five. Didn't you have a problem with burglaries there in sector George? Right? With those Nehemiah Houses? What did you do to address that?”

If this had been a football game, Anemone would have been the guy carrying the ball forty times. He has a tremendous work ethic.

Compstat cut through a lot of crap because everyone in the barrel knew they were coming back in four weeks. But despite warnings, sometimes we asked a commander three, four, five weeks in a row for action and it didn't get done. At that point, Maple would explode. “I want to know why those shootings are still happening in that housing project! What have we done to stop it? Did we hand out flyers to everybody? Did we put Crime Stoppers tips in every rec room and every apartment? Did we run a warrant check on every address at every project, and did we relentlessly pursue those individuals? What is our uniform deployment there? What are the hours of the day, the days of the week that we are deployed? Are we deployed in a radio car, on foot, on bicycle? Are they doing interior searches? Are they checking the rooftops? How do we know we're doing it? What level of supervision is there? When they're working together in a team with a sergeant and four cops, do they all go to a meal together? When they make an arrest, does everybody go back to the precinct or does one person go back? Are we giving desk-appearance tickets to people who shouldn't get them? What are we doing with parole violators? Do we have the parole photos there to show? Do we know everybody on parole? Parolees are not allowed to hang out with other parolees, they're not allowed in bars. Of the 964 people on parole in the Seventy-fifth Precinct, do we know the different administrative restrictions on each one, so when we interview them we can hold it over their heads? And if not, why not?”

No one ever lost his job over not having the right answers. No one got in trouble for crime being up in their precinct. People got in trouble if they didn't know what the crime was and had no strategy to deal with it.

There are four levels of Compstat. We created a system in which the police commissioner, with his executive core, first empowers and then interrogates the precinct commander, forcing him or her to come up with a plan to attack crime. But it should not stop there. At the next level down, it should be the precinct commander, taking the same role as the commissioner, empowering and interrogating the platoon commander. Then, at the third level, the platoon commander should be asking his sergeants, “What are we doing to deploy on this tour to address these conditions?” And finally you have the sergeant at roll call—“Mitchell, tell me about the last five robberies on your post”; “Carlyle, you think that's funny, it's a joke? Tell me about the last five burglaries”; “Biber, tell me about those stolen cars on your post”—all the way down until everyone in the entire organization is empowered and motivated, active and assessed and successful. It works in all organizations, whether it's 38,000 New York cops or Mayberry, R.F.D.

WHEN I SEE NEW POLICE OFFICERS COMING ON THE JOB, I SEE A WORLD OF
difference being made. Being a police officer is not easy, and people come on the force for many different reasons. Lee Brown once said something I found very appropriate: “We talk and preach service, but we hire adventurers.”

Police departments have traditionally marketed the job as a civil-service position. Frequently, as well as the police exam, candidates will also take the fire exam. We talk about helping citizens and upholding the laws and getting good pensions. But the job is also marketed by forces we don't control—television, books, newspapers, the movies—and they do a more effective job. Young people coming on the force are attracted by the action, the uniform, the power. They want the action precincts. They want the police movie image, to throw the food out the cruiser window on the way to the next dangerous call. They want eight hours of nonstop excitement, the radio barking all night. They're action junkies. Then they get in the Police Academy and out on the job and find they've been fooled—the bosses don't want them running wild in the streets; it is about service after all—and they get very disappointed. Most recognize what the real world of policing actually is and eventually adapt.

It's like throwing seeds; some land on soil, some on rocks. Cops by nature
have a strong need to be accepted by their peers—they often cannot tolerate being a pariah—and the controlling station house voice is almost always cynical, and unfortunately it's the most vocal, and it carries. That cynicism too often frames the new cop's response to the realities of the street. As a result, only the most idealistic cop will buck the trend and speak up and say, “No, it doesn't have to be this way.” If he's lucky, a recruit will land a mentor with a positive outlook, but all too many new cops are immediately thrown in with veterans who have a jaundiced view of the world. Former NYPD Commissioner Ben Ward said that when he first came on the job, he was amazed to find all the wisdom of the world in the back of the station house. Just talk to the cops, they knew everything about every issue. But as he grew, Ward learned that they knew very little. They didn't care about the facts, they just knew everything.

Many good people who enter policing become cynics in a very short time. There are two schools of thought on how to deal with this. In my circle, they were represented by John Timoney and Mike Julian.

Timoney felt that in some neighborhoods people will not work with the police because they're scared to death. Violence, drugs, lawlessness, and retribution have combined to create a void where a sense of community ought to be. That leaves control of the streets in the hands of either the criminals or the cops. “You've got to get in the face of these drug dealers,” Timoney said, “and just bluffing isn't any good at all. They'll see right through you. So, to establish that ‘this is my block,’ it may come down to physical force.”

A cop will try and stay within the bounds of acceptable behavior, but sometimes, when he gets immersed in the job, he begins to identify more with the people in the street than with his own family and friends. The bad guys become reality. In high-crime precincts, cops spend a lot of their time dealing with hard-core criminals, sociopaths, and psychopaths. Timoney himself, when he was younger and worked the Forty-fourth Precinct in the South Bronx, began to feel that anyone who wasn't facing violence and street morality all day long was, in the language of the street, a
maricón
. He recognized a metamorphosis occurring in himself. He was living the nitty-gritty, everybody else was in some ivory tower. Even off duty and among friends, he was acting more like
them.
Timoney describes it as “going native.”

Some cops will adopt a street morality. They're in a war on crime and are not above meting out battlefield justice. This also extends to their behavior in the court system.

Some cops lie. We as a profession have finally matured to the point that we can admit that dirty little secret. Cops often lie for what they consider to be the greater good. They lie to get around the exclusionary rule. The Constitution as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court has very specific rules concerning how evidence is gathered. Evidence obtained outside legal boundaries is excluded. In an effort to put bad guys behind bars, throughout history cops have gone outside that boundary, and the exclusionary rule is a court-designed remedy for these police violations of the law. It has never caused cops to follow the law; it has caused cops to violate the law and then lie about the laws they violate.

There's a perverse morality to this. Most good cops won't fabricate evidence. They won't say a suspect confessed when he didn't. They won't get a gun and plant it in a car. But if they know they've got a bad guy and they search his car and find a weapon, they will justify the search by saying they saw the gun handle sticking out from under the seat.

It's called “testi-lying.” Nobody wants to talk about it, but it happens all too frequently. Cops think, “The exclusionary rule says that evidence doesn't exist when it does. I know he had the murder weapon, but the courts are saying he didn't have it, at least not for the purposes of determining his legal guilt or innocence. So the courts are lying, so I'm lying, so we're all lying.”

Many cops have contempt for the exclusionary rule and the entire system that, supposedly to correct a cop, could set a predator free. Let's say the suspect is a child molester, and every time he goes out he's a serious threat to rape a child at gunpoint. The cop sees him with a child in the front seat, turns on his red light and stops the guy's car. By turning his red light on and pulling him over, the cop has violated the law, which requires probable cause to stop a suspect. If the cop admits that he pulled him over without reasonable suspicion, the courts would probably suppress the gun and let this guy go free, and any confession would not be allowed in evidence. If the cop had pulled the man over for a minor violation like going through a stop sign, it would be a good bust. The cop thinks, “This is insane. I've got a rapist here. I am preventing another rape. I'm going to create a violation to justify the stop.” As far as the cop's concerned, it's what he has to do to get the job done.