The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (45 page)

But it's a slippery slope when you start picking and choosing which lies you're going to tell under oath, and as the Mollen Commission had docu-mented, NYPD cops were sliding down it in increasing numbers. The more contempt they showed, the more they began to lie outright. Then
they'd hang themselves. Cops lost sight of the fact that the end does not and cannot, under the law, justify the means. As I told them in videos and face to face at countless roll calls, you cannot break the law to enforce the law.

When I addressed the issue I told the cops, “People think you're all liars. The judges think so, the D.A.s think so, the public thinks so, the media thinks so. I'm going to try and change that image they all have of you, but to do that I need you to work with me. I can only tell the stories that you give me. If you give me stories of brutality, corruption, and dishonesty, those are the stories I'll have to tell. I'm not going to protect you. If you give me stories of courage, honesty, and hard work, I'll also tell those stories. It's up to you. And if you break the law, I'm going to fire you, I'm going to put you in jail. I've worked too long in this profession, and too many others have dedicated their lives, to have the profession dishonored by a few.”

I would rather lose a hundred cases than have one cop arrested for perjury. If a cop tells the truth, that he made a mistake, and a criminal goes free, we still get that gun off the street, we still get those drugs off the street. We'll get another chance to catch the same bad guy next week. But if the cop lies, an absurd outcome is possible: We get the gun and the drugs off the street, the criminal walks, and the cop goes to jail.

Much has been made of the police profession's traditional “blue wall of silence.” Judge Mollen was told by a cop at one of the commission hearings, “Judge, I don't think you should call it a code of silence, I think you should call it a code of reluctance.” Most cops don't think informing on fellow officers is their job. “That's Internal Affairs’ job,” they'll tell you. “I didn't sign up to catch corrupt cops, I signed up to catch criminals.” One cop may refuse to work with another he knows to be corrupt, and when he goes to his superior and says, “I don't want to work with Officer Spitz,” everybody will know why without it being said out loud. And when the bosses do grab a bad cop, the others will silently applaud. But they will not usually turn him in themselves. Cops depend on fellow officers for their lives. They need to know when they go through a door that they will be backed up. Rather than inform and then worry that their back won't be covered, they leave the job for the bosses. That's unfortunate, but that's too often the reality. The ultimate irony is the singling out of cops for this problem. How many judges, lawyers, doctors, and teachers do you see turning in their colleagues?

Internal Affairs, the unit responsible for finding and disciplining corrupt
cops, has not historically been effective. The cops feel they are overly punished for minor violations and that the bosses are less concerned with their doing a good job than with keeping their noses clean. No cop will turn in another when slapping a drug dealer in the face gets treated almost as harshly as stealing and selling his drugs. “Mortal sins and venal sins,” says Timoney, “we've never been able to make the distinction.”

As the Mollen Commission's investigation had so vividly revealed, the NYPD was in danger of “going native” when I got there. I felt the crux of the problem in developing a new kind of policing and a new department culture was to prevent this negative transformation. We sent kids into environments where they were coming in contact with awful people, and we had to train and instruct and supervise them properly with these realities. We could not allow another generation of police to plunge into the
Apocalypse Now
jungle and go Marlon Brando on us.

This is the challenge and dilemma of modern policing. How do we control our environment and at the same time train our people to work in the community's best interests? With its emphasis on treating people respectfully and as partners, on interacting with responsible community and religious leaders, and on understanding that even in the toughest neighborhoods most citizens are good and law-abiding, community policing offered the best hope for the department and for the city. Unfortunately, some of my predecessors had unintentionally mitigated the effort by refusing to trust the officers they sent out to do the job. They were putting these kids into the neighborhoods to be problem solvers, but they didn't trust them to enforce the laws without getting corrupted or to carry weapons needed to do the job properly.

During his brief time as chief of personnel, Mike Julian was instrumental in beginning to change the way we recruited, hired, and trained new officers. Too many police officers view their relationship with the public as “us versus them.” Community policing had encouraged them to go out into the neighborhoods and talk to people, to work as partners with them. Well, sometimes they would get cursed out and treated with contempt, and the unpleasant encounters stick in the mind. Often a cop will think, “It's easier for me to go dead. I'll look stoic and tough, and I'll walk the other way when I'm approached, because when I try to be nice to people, look what happens.” Sometimes the media, for its own reasons, will run a negative, exaggerated story about one officer, and then they'll all feel hung out to dry. And, of course, the basic job of apprehending criminals puts them in contact with some rough individuals. It mounts up.
Linder's focus groups and officer surveys had shown that 90.8 percent of the cops felt the public has no understanding of police problems, and only 23 percent felt the community had a good relationship with the police. So we were dealing with cops who had troubling feelings about the public.

Julian believed that we could develop a more positive police culture. We would put recruits through the five months of academic work at the police academy and then put them on the streets for a month, where they would face the realities of patrol. We would then take them back in and allow them to describe their positive and negative experiences. We would explore their feelings and the reactions that were common among their peers in the station houses. We expected to hear complaints about how people treated them poorly, how the media maligned them, or how the criminal justice system dismissed good cases. These are some of the negative forces that cause cynicism and insularity among cops.

Despite these experiences, many cops maintain professional attitudes through their long careers. We showed new officers that there are cops who have not lost their ideals after ten or even twenty years on the force. We wanted the cops to listen and talk freely in an academy setting because they won't in the street. We had to expose them to the street professionals rather than leave it to chance whether they rode with a cynic or a believer.

The question we asked and answered was, “How can you follow the law and still get your job done?” How could we do what Timoney said was needed without kicking guys in the balls? How do we get our cops to understand that citizens are entitled to respect while cops need to earn it?

Julian felt that cops were historically taught what not to do in difficult situations—don't use force, don't take bribes, don't lie, don't do this, don't do that—but had never really been effectively taught how to do their jobs. The strongest example of this was the admonition, “Don't use choke holds to subdue suspects.” But the training didn't provide effective alternatives to choke holds. The department covered itself with a blanket rule, and the cops were left to fend for themselves on how to stop a violently resisting suspect.

Early in my administration, we had a problem with a death in police custody that led us to examine the entire manner in which our cops were being trained. In this case, in an action in a housing project on Staten Island, the police encountered Ernest Sayon, a man who was on probation for a drug conviction and resisting arrest and who was free on bail after being charged with attempted murder for allegedly firing twenty shots
into a housing project. They arrested Sayon, he struggled, and during the course of the fight, he died. It was a DPC, death in police custody. The city's medical examiner decided Sayon's death was a homicide and that he died of suffocation caused by pressure on his neck and chest while his hands were cuffed behind him. The community took to the streets, it became a media cause célèbre, and we had a potential crisis on our hands.

I formed a task force led by Julian to come up with specific recommendations on how cops can restrain people without killing them or getting themselves hurt. The task force included among others, a civil rights attorney, the leading academic authority on police use of force, and the chief medical examiner. They asked the people in charge of training at the academy, “What restraint techniques do we teach cops?”

“Martial arts. We train them in arm and wrist holds.”

Julian got agitated. “That's the problem! We put a cop in a situation where he has to make arrests and detain people, but we don't require a certain skill level before he leaves the academy, and we never retest the skills during his career. Anything he learned in the academy is gone a month later. Any martial-arts person will tell you, you've got to be constantly training to make this useful in an actual situation.”

“Is that true?” I asked.

The academy personnel didn't know. I instructed Julian to find out, and he returned with records showing that six thousand cops and six thousand prisoners a year are injured in arrest situations. Cops die wrestling in arrest situations. Prisoners die under the same circumstances. The medical examiner reviewed the previous four years’ files of DPCs and found that most died from cardiac arrhythmia—heart attacks. Others died from cocaine intoxication. There was no clubbing; police don't club people to death in this city. There was not one incident caused by a choke hold. Yet when we questioned cops on how they restrained people, each said, “I grab them around the neck and take them down.”

We finally found out that people died from positional asphyxia. Cops, trying to handcuff violently resisting prisoners, got them on the ground and usually either stood or sat on their chest or back while struggling to get the cuffs on. The prisoner, often intoxicated or under the influence of drugs, continued to flail and the cop sat on him harder, trying to restrain him even more. The medical examiner said, “When the prisoner is fighting, sometimes it's because he has no air. He can't breathe, but you think he's fighting you more, so you put more pressure on him, and that causes him to fight even more. Sometimes the price of tranquility is death.”

So we developed a video training tape that used attention-grabbing animation to demonstrate the deadly effect of sitting on prisoners when trying to restrain them. We advised cops to sit people up as soon as they were handcuffed.

Cops do not want to kill anyone. In the three years since the police were properly trained, no one has died in police custody from positional asphyxia.

We taught the cops what to do, and we saved lives.

The best cops are able to use communication skills to avoid the use of force. New York cops may not have the best equipment in the country or be the best trained, but New York's Finest are some of the best at talking to people, which is what a cop spends most of his time doing. No police officer in the world deals with as wide a variety of people as a New York cop, who encounters a diverse mix of ethnic groups at the highest and lowest economic levels in one of the most stressful environments. We wanted a program in place to increase communication between the cop and the public; an officer can defuse a situation by talking and by showing respect. We brought a man named George Thompson, a retired Albuquerque cop, to the academy to teach a course in “Verbal Judo,” or how to use the confrontational behavior of people to the cop's advantage.

Thompson's approach used humor, which the best cops use to defuse the tension in a crisis. Mike Julian felt Thompson's humor was unfortunately sometimes directed at the public. Cops love to laugh at the public as a way of insulating themselves, but when the humor was directed at everyone in the situation, it worked better. Cops often don't like to laugh at themselves because they always want to be in a position of power, and they feel being the butt of a joke is the wrong end. But we had to make them understand that it's not about how you look; you have real power when the situation ends in your favor.

We also began to raise our standards. We raised the minimum age from twenty to twenty-two, which gave a prospective cop more life experience before he or she came on the job. Instead of a high-school diploma, we required two years of college. We also upgraded the physical standards. For ten years, no physical exam was required to enter the NYPD. According to Julian, the physical exam in place when I got there could be passed by a seven-year-old. We developed a finger-strength test that measured whether an applicant could repeatedly and successively pull the trigger of
a gun and found that thirty candidates, who would otherwise have been hired, couldn't pass. The department had, in fact, hired several people who could not be issued a firearm because they did not have the finger strength to pull the trigger. They could not be out in the street with a gun but were nevertheless being given full pay as New York City police officers.