The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (19 page)

When I met him again at headquarters, he had become Joe Jordan's civilian director of operations. Both Wasserman and Dunleavy's offices were right outside Jordan's door, and mine was right next to theirs. They were constantly battling each other for the soul of the BPD.

Wasserman went out of his way to identify talent and work with people in whom he saw potential. That's his style and his enduring legacy. I came well recommended, so he took a look at me. Once I got past his gruff exterior, he turned out to be not only a brilliant thinker and a doer but a good guy with a warm personal side.

Wasserman approached policing not as an imposition of will but as problem solving. Wasserman first exposed me to the writings of Herman Goldstein,
Policing a Free Society
, and the idea that police have discretion. It seems simple, but the fact is often overlooked: It's not all black and white. The law says, You shan't do this, you shall do that, but society has given the police officer broad discretion in enforcing these laws. Police management tends to tell officers what not to do, not how to do it. Not every civilian gets a ticket for going through a red light; you can give an oral warning, you can give a written warning, you can write out an actual ticket. When used appropriately, an officer's discretion can be very effective; when used inappropriately, it can lead to abuse and corruption.

Wasserman explained that police can't be an island, that we have to work in partnership with the community. Cops, he told me, should not be allowed to roam all over the place; they need defined areas of responsibility. To prevent crime and fear and not just respond to it, the same cops should consistently be in the same places at the same time, so they can know people and know problems and develop a sense of neighborhood and make a difference. Responsibility didn't rest just on the sixth floor, it should be pushed down to much lower levels. We needed to be proactive, Wasserman explained, not sit and wait for things to happen. He was one of the first in the profession to understand and define the elements and potential of what we came to know later as community policing.

Many cops see the Miranda ruling, which states that a suspect must be advised of his rights, as an intrusion on their job; Wasserman understood that we needed to embrace the Miranda law to make certain our arrests become convictions. He was constantly telling us that we have to work with the law. You can't break the law to enforce the law. Wasserman's most firmly held professional belief was that police must be more progressive and tolerant than we had ever thought and, indeed, should help to lead the way for the rest of society. His views on the importance of education, training, and the desegregation of the police (both racially and sexually) gave us all new perspectives.

Wasserman stressed that a good manager has to have a handle on how he or she uses personnel. Early in our relationship, he signed me up for two courses that had a great influence on my thinking: managing police investigations and managing police patrol practices. These three-day conferences were held under the auspices of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), a federal organization formed in the 1970s to support and educate the police and other members of the criminal-justice system in the aftermath of the Kerner Report, which attributed some of the causes of the violent racial outbreaks in America to racial prejudice and police abuse. One of the LEAA's goals was to gather a body of knowledge about policing in areas where there was very little.

Dunleavy was not too enthusiastic about my going to these conferences, but Wasserman insisted. With police from around the country attending, it would be a great place to network, to share ideas, and to break out of the parochialism of our own department. I was excited about expanding my policing horizons, and I was honored that the department let me represent them. Wasserman's lesson stayed with me; we need to constantly look beyond the department, and indeed the police profession, for new ideas.

The Dunleavy/Wasserman, imagery/substance feast was a gourmet smorgasbord of police theory and practices. Some police professionals are concerned only with systems, some only with marketing and the press, others only with crime. I was first in line to taste everything, while so many others got only the usual blue-plate special.

In September 1977, Wasserman approached me about taking over an innovative neighborhood-policing project called the Boston-Fenway Pro-gram that he was proposing to Commissioner Jordan. It was to be located in District 4, probably the most interesting district in the city. District 4 encompassed the working-class, mixed-population South End, a gradually gentrifying neighborhood; the Back Bay area, for all practical purposes Boston's midtown Manhattan; plus the East Fenway and West Fenway, a diverse neighborhood home to many of the city's educational and cultural institutions, such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Symphony Hall, the First Church of Christ, Scientist, Northeastern University, Boston University, beautiful Frederick Law Olmsted–designed parks, and Fenway Park. It also included Kenmore Square, the heart of the city's nightclub district. District 4 was filled with college kids and was probably Boston's most racially, culturally, and economically diverse area.

In the late seventies, the decision to pull the police off the streets was beginning to take its toll. It was an anything-goes era. Marijuana and hallucinogen use was widespread. Under the banner of freedom of expression, society was becoming increasingly tolerant of aberrant behavior, with the cultural pendulum on a wide swing toward permissiveness. Instead of setting higher goals, we lowered standards. Aberrant behavior became so commonplace that society excused it. We were, as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “defining social deviancy down,” not understanding that all these little things, because they weren't being addressed, emboldened some in society to take what they saw as the next step.

Although not fully aware of it at the time, as a young officer I was experiencing three revolutionary social experiments that radically changed the quality of life in cities. As described by Professor George Kelling in one of his essays: “The first was the official recognition—indeed, the virtual blessing—of an anything-goes ideology on the streets. The second was the ‘depolicing’ of the crime problem. The third was the depolicing of urban streets and public spaces. The last two are similar yet distinct.

“Permissiveness grew out of the idea of ‘victimless crimes’ such as prostitution, aggressive panhandling, drug-induced and drunken behavior, creating graffiti, and squeegeeing. After all, the argument goes, who is really hurt by such crimes? Many, like prostitution, are consensual, agreed
upon by and affecting only seller and buyer. Why should the state and its criminal justice apparatus be concerned when nobody is hurt? Police have enough to do just handling serious crime, let alone nonviolent deviance. This argument went further: Much behavior considered deviant is really acceptable under other cultural standards—ergo, enforcing laws against minor crimes is really imposing white middle-class standards on minorities, the poor, and, later, the homeless. And the argument was extended further still: Society is enriched and ennobled by much nonviolent deviance. Graffiti is seen as a valid artistic expression by society's victims and should be appreciated as such, and aggressive panhandling is an important political message about social inequities.

“A similar ideology in the seventies shaped public policy regarding mental illness and drunkenness. To be sure, mental commitment and drunkenness laws had been abused, and many facilities were outrageously inadequate. Yet to some radical psychiatrists and civil libertarians, the problem was not sick individuals but a sick society. People weren't ill, society was, and the mentally ill were pointing this out to the rest of society. Thus, in the name of their ‘liberty interests,’ even the most seriously emotionally disturbed individuals, chronic schizophrenics, were turned out to the streets to receive ‘community treatment’—an unrealized fiction. Likewise, drunkenness was decriminalized without adequate treatment facilities, despite the well-known links among drinking, crime, and violence.

“The second experiment was in depolicing the crime problem. The axioms that defined the crime problem and its solution went something like this: Poverty, racism, injustice, and family breakdown cause crime. Crime must be dealt with by dealing with its causes. Police can do nothing about poverty, racism, and injustice; ergo, they can do nothing about crime. Police can, of course, arrest people who commit crimes—and through incarceration prevent crime—but short of that, all police can do is displace crime. Crime prevention can be achieved only by vast social change: either by eliminating poverty, racism, and injustice or by restoring family values, primarily by eliminating welfare.

“The third experiment was that of depolicing city streets. In the name of police efficiency, elimination of political influences and corruption, and the assumed anticrime benefits of rapid mobility, police were being sequestered in cars throughout the United States. The old model of diffusing police among citizens so that police could prevent crime by their presence and by reducing opportunities for crime was replaced by mobilized, reactive police who were remote from communities.

“Lost in all of this for decades were the enormous consequences to communities of uninterrupted disorderly conditions in neighborhoods. Johns might or might not be victims or criminals, but neighborhoods certainly lose out. Aggressive schizophrenics, drunken youths, promiscuous and scantily clad prostitutes, and all sorts of other ‘nonviolent’ deviants might enjoy their ‘liberty interests,’ but neighborhood residents who could not move were virtually imprisoned in their homes. Most tragically, such conditions affected those with the least resources to deal with it: the poor, minorities, elderly, and other inner-city residents. The idea that behaviors like public urination and defecation, drunkenness, drug dealing, aggressive panhandling, and other such forms of illegal loutish behavior were somehow a sign of cultural pluralism was a cruel mockery; it represented condescension toward both the poor and ethnic and racial minorities, and it forestalled official efforts to restore order and reclaim neighborhood streets. Disorderly, crime-breeding conditions were allowed to exist in inner cities that simply never would have been tolerated in middle-class areas. The nurturing institutions of society—family, religion, schools, and commerce—could not function under such circumstances.”

As a young cop, I became aware of the growing lack of respect for police. On the corner, instead of moving along as you asked them, people would sass you or push back. I'd listen to the old-time cops talking about the old days, and I'd know what they meant. I could see firsthand a diminishing of respect for the police and our symbolic authority.

Of course, the good old days weren't always so good; in Boston, you couldn't go into a police station to make a complaint about a cop—you'd get your head handed to you. If you were black, you couldn't go into a police station at all. There was no Miranda warning, and the interrogation of prisoners was an anything-goes proposition. It was the time of the third degree.

From time to time, proposals are made to do away with the Miranda warning and the exclusionary rule on the grounds that they inhibit good policing. That's a bunch of nonsense. We can operate effectively with the Miranda warning and the exclusionary rule. Many of the statements police get are from suspects who admit to crimes after they have been advised of their rights and have chosen not to invoke them. Until they say the magic words, “I want a lawyer,” we're free to talk to them. The whole idea is to keep them talking, keep them from getting “lawyered up.” You don't want them to seek an attorney until you're able to elicit the information you want. So now, rather than beating it out of them, we become much more calculating in our approach, more adroit in the use of mouth
and brain than foot and stick, while at the same time ensuring that their constitutional rights are respected. That's how times change for the better. You don't want a totalitarian state, you want a society that says, “We are willing, in order to maintain law and order, to tolerate this much interference in our lives and no more.” Society has to define the appropriate balance, and the police have to understand that that's as far as we go.

One result of this diminished police control and presence was a rising tide of crime in the streets of District 4. As well as the neighborhood residents, the people who were coming down from Lexington, Concord, and other suburban areas to the city's cultural institutions were now becoming victims of crime. Fenway was becoming dangerous, and the community's leaders were very concerned that patrons would stop attending exhibits, performances, and ballgames, that their buildings and physical plants would be vandalized, their workers hurt and terrorized. The eroding conditions severely threatened the vitality of this important neighborhood.

In an attempt to deal with this problem, a not-for-profit consortium of businesses and private institutions banded together as the Boston-Fenway Program, under the leadership of Claire Cotton, a writer and editor and former vice-chancellor of Boston University. They basically said, “We either need to control this situation or we need to move.” But how do you move Symphony Hall, Northeastern University, and the Christian Science Mother Church? You don't.

The Boston-Fenway Program's primary purpose was to develop a partnership among private institutions and the police and the neighborhoods to address the area's deteriorating situation. Cotton approached Wasserman and said he had the funding. What they needed was the expertise, the vision to get the job done.

Wasserman wanted to move me to District 4 to take over this initiative, but Dunleavy didn't want me to go. I was desperate for the opportunity to get back in the field and practice what I'd been learning. A deal was struck: If I could find a suitable replacement, I could take the assignment. I went to my old college classmate and sector-car partner, Mickey Roache, who was working in District 4 as a patrol supervisor. “Mickey,” I said, “here's an opportunity to come up to headquarters.” I worked on Roache and soothed Dunleavy, and they went for it.