The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (47 page)

Walter Mack bridled immediately. Internal Affairs had traditionally guarded its investigations and findings against the threat of exposure and shared its information only with the commissioner. If there was an Internal Affairs problem in a precinct, the precinct's commanding officer was usually not informed. The thinking was that few if any police personnel in a precinct could be trusted; if a cop found out, he would expose a corruption investigation to save his fellow cop. Timoney went right at him.

“You're wrong,” he said heatedly. His brogue took on a life of its own. “You don't understand police work. If you think you can't trust a precinct captain and put him in the know about what's going on in his precinct, and you won't give him the authority or the information that you keep to yourself in the hallowed halls of One Police Plaza, then you're out of your mind.”

“No,
you're
wrong,” said Mack, a former U.S. attorney. “I've been in this business long enough to know the Michael Dowds of this world. [Michael Dowd was a corrupt cop who was the subject of some of the Mollen Commission investigations.] You don't understand how this works.”

Timoney said, “We're eating our own. We spent the last twenty-five years doing nothing but worrying about corruption. We didn't do any police work for twenty-five years, that was left up to the individual cop. We knew there were cops out there taking opportunities, but you deal with them…the way the department's going, we're paralyzed. We're being driven by the political motives of the D.A.s without any concern for what's right and wrong, for the soul of the police department.” I smiled at this comment, for I believed strongly that this was the crux of the problem at the NYPD, and one I intended to change.

Mack firmly believed that there was systemic corruption throughout
the NYPD. He felt that this was a real problem and that we couldn't include the precinct captains, because they were too close to their people.

“Somebody's got to speak up for these cops.” Timoney was in his twenty-seventh year on the force. “I'm not going to protect corrupt cops, but I'm gonna protect the department, and I'm not going to let people run roughshod over it. I'm not going to tolerate that. You don't get it, you don't understand the NYPD, you don't bleed blue.”

Several chiefs pulled Timoney aside afterward and said, “Jeez, John, you ought to be more careful with what you say.” It had been their experience that the organization had not treated candor kindly in the past. I was perfectly happy to let them go at it, so long as the argument didn't get personal. As commissioner, my job was to say, “Okay, I've listened to all of you. This is how we're going to go. If you can't deal with it, you're going to have to get out. If you stay, and I find you are still not with the program, then I'm going to have to get rid of you.” That's what happened eventually with Mack. He was smart, dedicated, and I respected him, but he couldn't adjust to the idea of inclusion and trust that was essential to the way I intended to reengineer the NYPD. For that reason, as well as other concerns relative to his management of IAB, by early 1995 he was gone, replaced by Pat Kelleher.

If the precinct commander was going to be the person I trusted to keep the cops from going native, he or she needed to be aware of the symptoms of that disease when they first appeared. Internal Affairs had that information. It was as if the precinct commander were a family physician trying to treat a patient who has a number of tests done, but the lab refuses to share the results. How could you hold someone accountable for corruption in his or her command if you didn't provide the resources to deal with it and didn't share information critical to success? In my opinion, and in that of most of my inner circle, this had been a fatal flaw in the department's anticorruption efforts going back to the major reforms of Pat Murphy in the early 1970s. As in the fight against crime, we needed to include as many players as possible, not exclude them by effectively saying, “We don't trust you.” How do you expect people to deliver when you send that message?

While informing the commanders of the IAB presence, and getting them personally involved in the investigations, we also greatly expanded random integrity-testing cases—things like sting apartments and sting cars and cops posing as drug dealers—to monitor the cops. In 1995 we conducted over 700 stings involving close to 1,200 officers. Union officials
were advising their members to treat all calls as if they might be stings. Needless to say, we did not object to those instructions. I demanded increased cooperation between bureaus and units. Because the inclusion of precinct commanders could facilitate assigning suspect officers to designated locations, stings that had taken many weeks were being done in two. Corruption dropped. Normally, an organization dealing with corruption has a tendency to slow down, get its story straight, circle the wagons. We kept the line moving forward. We were aggressively going after the corruption while speeding up our crime- and disorder-reduction efforts. We also instituted Compstat-like briefings where Internal Affairs commanders were grilled with the same intensity as their precinct counterparts.

The rest of the command staff at Wave Hill responded exactly as I had hoped. I think many of the police bosses remembered their frustrations as precinct commanders. We were guided by the three Ps: partnership, problem solving, and prevention. We wanted community involvement, innovative tactics, and assertive policing, and a focus not simply on reducing crime but on not allowing it to occur. We outlined the strategies we had already announced and those we would continue to present to the public.

Within nine months, we replaced a significant number of the seventy-six precinct commanders, installing many new people who understood what we were asking of them and who had shown at Compstat that they were capable of doing the job. The reengineering of the NYPD was on its way. Risk taking was being encouraged and rewarded for the first time in the history of the department. I couldn't have been happier or more excited.

THE OFFICE OF THE COMMISSIONER OF THE NYPD IS TREATED WITH REVERENCE
by people in the department. Unlike in Boston, you didn't hear cops or their unions bad-mouthing the department or the commissioner. It's part of the tradition. The fourteenth floor of One Police Plaza was like the hallowed sixth floor of the Boston Police headquarters, only more so. Uniformed members did not appear there unless properly attired in their dress uniform. It was a sign of respect for the office and the person of the police commissioner.

As well as the commissioner's office, the fourteenth floor held the offices of the first deputy and the deputy commissioners of Legal Matters, Policy and Planning, and Trials. This was not a place for casual attitudes or casual behavior; this was the command center of the greatest police organization in America.

Judy Laffey, my executive assistant, kept my schedule tight and organized. Maple and Miller joked that she commuted to work on a broomstick, but she actually had a very sly sense of humor and was tremendously valuable in maintaining order in what might have been a chaotic office. Having served three of my predecessors, she was also the institutional memory of the Office of the Commissioner. Also, for someone like myself who maintained an open-door policy, she served as a very
able traffic cop to ensure that the open door did not get clogged with too many coming through at the same time.

So everyone was on their best behavior, except Jack Maple. As deputy commissioner for crime-control strategies, and later deputy commissioner for operations, a position that gave him an operational rather than just a policy role, Jack's office was on the ninth floor but, Maple says, “Commissioner, secretly I knew you liked me best.” Maple had some unusual habits, such as piling a dozen pairs of shoes under his desk and working out on the heavy bag he hung in the corner. (I gave him an office with a shower, a very important status symbol and public-health concession.) He would not stand on ceremony, he would float—if Maple could float—from office to office visiting senior commanders, talking up ideas, building consensus, saying, “Listen, here's a thought …” He would “pollinate” police ideas. He and I rarely met for more than a daily total of ten minutes outside of general meetings, but he would pop into my office ten times each day like a bee returning to the hive, tossing ideas for discussion and approval. I also used him to test the waters for me. When we did have sit-down staff meetings, the plans had basically already been formulated and could be put into effect immediately.

He was also an excellent leader. He took critical operations that had not been functioning properly, redirected them under his own temporary command, then handed them back to their original commanders to manage, while he went on to the next. He took the quality-of-life initiative and then the warrant unit under his wing.

His first project was the Detective Bureau. Maple and Borrelli butted heads many times as Maple sought to involve a notoriously aloof bureau in the coordinated activities that were essential to our success in reducing crime and disorder. Our lead team of detectives was very good—they could solve ten cases at a time. Below the first team, however, we found the detectives had real problems.

The NYPD was a very promotion-driven organization, and, as a result of union lawsuits and contracts, if an officer spent eighteen consecutive months in certain units, the department had to promote him or her automatically to the position of third-grade detective, with a significant increase in salary. (In some cases, the timetable was twenty-seven or fifty-four months, but by and large the promotions occurred after eighteen.) Many of these people had not been performing traditional detective work, which is to investigate and solve crime. They were working in other valuable areas, but they were not learning true detective investigative and
interrogation skills. For instance, we had 1,500 people assigned to the Organized Crime Control Bureau, the entity that dealt with narcotics. But many of those officers spent most of their time on dangerous plainclothes assignments running buy-and-bust operations, trying to arrest drug dealers. They didn't participate in hard-core investigations like a “rated” detective does. Over time, the department found itself with many detectives who had a very limited number of years on the job and no schooling and no real expertise in detective work. We had some super detectives who had been excellent plainclothes officers—“white shields,” they were called because they had traditional patrolman's shields rather than detectives’ gold ones—but others were wannabes who had never worked the streets. Compounding the problem was a very high retirement rate among our more seasoned detectives.

The Detective Bureau was particularly adept at responding to highprofile crimes. During my time as police commissioner, very few of these “press” cases did not get solved. But in many of the more mundane cases, they were not doing the job as well as they should, or could. In some respects, it was “slide-show policing”; they would focus on whatever was on the screen; nothing else would get looked at. Unit after unit, crime after crime, problem after problem, there was often minimal coordination and cooperation between units. Even on homicides, they were satisfied to catch one perp and not necessarily all his accomplices.

When we arrived, there were 27,000 “wants” in the system, dating back a couple of years. The detectives said they had been hunting these people down and couldn't find them. Maple said they were full of crap. He told me, “I'd like to import a couple of people from transit, along with some NYPD people under Lieutenant Norris. We're gonna take a look at a couple of precincts to see how good they are at catching people.”

Lieutenant Eddie Norris was a Maple protégé and in some respects a clone. One night at Elaine's, we looked up to see two Jack Maples coming in the door. As a joke, Norris had dressed in a topcoat, homburg, bow tie and spectator shoes. The only thing missing was the mustache.

They took the want cards, visited the addresses listed on them, and with a squad of three or four cops caught several suspects right in their houses. That got the attention of the chief of detectives.

Maple's shop became the hot spot for NYPD creativity. The tunnel rat showed up the rest of the organization. Of course, he was bringing well-trained people to do the jobs and giving them the support they needed. He was bringing in ringers. But he knew that if you make unreasonable
demands, you will get reasonable results. As the man whom I had chosen to create the crisis of confidence that Linder and I felt was essential to turning the department around, he had his detractors, but he also had many strong supporters. He forged relationships with Timoney and Anemone, who, to their credit, quickly realized that the NYPD had not been living up to its true potential. Even Borrelli and Reuther came begrudgingly to respect Maple.

Maple had leaped from transit lieutenant to the man in charge of NYPD crime strategies—as he liked to describe it, “the biggest leap in the history of law enforcement”—and he had to win the respect of the more established command staff. He did it with street brains and levity. His humor was as constant as his policing, you just had to have an ear for it. Maple was gruff, like a kid pushing the big guys to see how far he can go. For instance, I used to talk about the “special environment” we had in the Transit Police, and NYPD lifers such as Timoney and Anemone would good-naturedly make fun of me behind my back. They made transit jokes all the time. Maple used to respond, “Gee, why don't you talk to the big transit cop when he walks in here? I think he's coming in in about a minute. Why don't you tell him that little joke?”

He used to delight in torturing Timoney. Any time I'd hear laughter in Timoney's office, I'd know Maple was in there, Robin Williams with a homburg. He would imitate Timoney's accent. “Oh, I know you, you're a big mahn, Timoney, you're a big mahn. Today it's ‘Good marnin’, Commissioner Maple. Sure an’ that's a fine suit you've got, Commissioner Maple.’ But when Bratton leaves it'll be, ‘Where's your man Billy Bratton now, fatso?’”