The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (20 page)

Roache came to headquarters at a time when, spurred by the busing rebellion, Wasserman and Jordan were grappling with the issue of race violence. Wasserman, with Jordan's approval, came up with an extraordinarily creative unit, the Community Disorders Unit, to investigate race crimes.
There were no volunteers from the Boston police for this very controversial unit. Wasserman thought highly of Roache, and since he couldn't find anyone else to accept it, he cajoled him into taking the job. Very moral, very straight, smart, hardworking, and, most important, free of prejudice, Roache was absolutely the right guy.

Cotton, Wasserman, and I worked hard on the Boston-Fenway Program. We knew we couldn't target the cultural areas of Fenway alone—that wouldn't sit well or be fair to the entire community. We devised a plan to address crime districtwide. In some respects, this was one of the first community-policing initiatives in the nation, fifteen years before that term gained currency.

First we had to establish exactly what the problem was. We planned to go into each neighborhood to find out.

The commander of District 4 was Captain James McDonald, a hailfellow-well-met who disappeared for a couple of hours every day to play handball. Cops loved him. Old-time, old-school captain, easygoing, smart, he managed the district quite well but also understood he was working for a guy who was very hands-on: Deputy Superintendent James “Mickey” MacDonald.

Mickey MacDonald was always puffing on a cigar. He had a silver mane of hair, piercing blue eyes—guys called him Old Blue Eyes—a barrel chest and a constant tan. Just a rugged, handsome Irish guy. He belonged to the Old Colony Yacht Club in South Boston and spent much of his off-duty time playing cards there with the boys. Like much of the leadership of the Boston police at that time, he was one of the old-guard generation; many of his contemporaries had been hooked into the era's corruption and inefficiency.

You can appreciate the awkwardness of my situation. The police commissioner told the commanding officer of District 4, “I'm sending this young sergeant from my staff down to redesign your district.” Here's this kid, working for the civilian whiz kids Wasserman and Dunleavy, and he wants men twenty-five years his elder to work with him and with this consortium from Fenway. Both MacDonald and McDonald, as you might expect, initially looked at me a little askance.

But MacDonald had seen the light. When di Grazia came in, he had gone from old school to new school. In many ways, he was out in front, leading the charge.

Several older men in the department resented that di Grazia and his outsiders had to come in and make the changes they knew should have
been made. These men had great pride in the BPD. They were not necessarily resistant to di Grazia's ideas, only that they were being made so publicly. Did we need to do it in full view, with so many people's lives and reputations being ruined? With lesser men, this resistance could have presented me with a serious problem.

Mickey MacDonald and I hit it off. Like Mo Allen before him, he quickly became my mentor. I like to believe he learned something from me as well. He set me up in an office right outside his own and soon recognized that I was going to work to his betterment and bring in some additional resources. I rode around the district for a couple of hours every day, just to get a feel of the territory, and MacDonald and I spent a lot of time patrolling together, chasing calls, observing. He understood the importance of being there to observe conditions for himself, to instruct or correct if necessary, but to be a leader. He was a walk-around manager years before they coined the phrase.

MacDonald loved being a cop. He loved strutting. He loved being out on the street. He always wore his dress uniform, crisp white shirt, and was neat as a pin except when he was dropping cigar ashes on himself, before he finally gave stogies up after a heart-bypass operation. He had command presence. When he walked into a room, in uniform or plain clothes, you knew: Here is the guy who's in charge. I loved and respected Mickey MacDonald and learned a lot from him about the importance of a commander leading. In that district, he set the tone. He went through his paperwork every day; nothing went on in that district that he was unaware of. We were going to work on crime, we were going to develop the hot spots, we were going to work on systems. He had a temper and a half, and he could rip you up one side and down the other, but he was fair, and the cops loved him. Most important, they worked for him. And together, we did redesign that district.

MacDonald was a great believer in using crime statistics to target hot spots and staying on top of his detectives, but he also understood the importance of working with the community. When I arrived, the district had been divided up like any other into sectors comprised of a number of federal census tracts, each with approximately the same calls-for-service workload and each assigned a police car. There were seventeen sectors and seventeen sector cars, each ostensibly spending most of their time in their own area. But the way 911 calls came in, particularly in the more troublesome areas, all seventeen cars could conceivably be in the South End catching calls. One emergency could empty all the other sectors and leave most of the district essentially unpoliced.

According to the statistical tracking and computer systems of our professional police model, we were responding to incidents quickly and were eminently successful. From the management side, we were doing a hell of a job. But from the operational or philosophical side, there was a lot to be desired. The public wasn't happy. “Sure, you get there within six minutes, but what good is that? The crime has already been committed. And what do you do when you get there? You come in, take a report, and leave. You haven't solved our problems.” Crime was going up, the fear factor was rising, and people weren't even getting to know who their cops were because the guys in the cars were coming and going all the time.

A classic 911 story came up back when I was working in Southie at District 6. In one year, 1,300 calls came in regarding the corner of I Street and East Seventh Street. A gang of kids was hanging out on that corner, and an old-timer was living in an apartment with a window right next to where these kids were drinking and acting up. The old man called constantly. We would send a two-man sector car, get there in five minutes, kick the kids off the corner, notify the dispatcher, and leave. The kids would come back, the old man would call—always anonymously—we would arrive … 1,300 times. Nobody ever tried to locate the caller or solve the problem.

That was the essence of professional policing. By department standards, we were doing a great job. Meanwhile, no one was happy and nothing changed. The kids hanging out felt harassed, the guy calling was not pleased, and the cops in the car were pissed off at the constant futility of shooing away these disrespectful kids. It would have been more economical to have put a police officer on the corner twenty-four hours a day holding a lamp. At least he could have provided some light for the neighborhood.

In District 4, the situation was much the same. The assaults, the drug dealing, the prostitution, the public drinking, the graffiti, and the loud parties were not being dealt with effectively by the police. Conditions didn't get better, the public got more and more aggravated, some people moved out, and the quality of life in the neighborhood went on a downward spiral. So I was given an extraordinary opportunity: power, money, resources, staff, attention, and the mandate to create a program that would take into account the various needs in order to find a new and better way of policing. There were two factors in this equation: the neighborhood's needs and the cops’. We addressed them simultaneously.

In order to solve problems, you must know what and where they are. Boston-Fenway Program funding allowed me to hire several staff people,
including Julie Rossborough, a former Amtrak policewoman, and Donna Taylor, a Northeastern University criminal-justice student intern, to identify the community groups and the issues. In the early 1970s, while still a captain, Mickey MacDonald had been one of the first Boston commanders to hold community meetings in his district. It was this initiative that first brought him to di Grazia's attention and had led to his promotion to deputy superintendent.

District 4 was huge, and you couldn't expect people to traipse over from the Back Bay to the district station in the South End. Boston is a city of neighborhoods, and people tend to stay in their own. So we leafleted communities and advertised. For the first time in the history of the Boston Police Department, we took the police department to the people.

If there were groups with organized meetings, we went to those. Otherwise, we set up our own in schoolrooms, community halls, whatever was available. We provided refreshments and a little show-and-tell.

Instead of the deputy superintendent who would tell them about the grand scheme of things, I brought the cops, the detectives assigned to that sector, and the sergeant who was working that night. Meet your police. We talked about our perspective of the neighborhood's specific problems and gave crime-prevention tips. And we listened: “What are your problems? What is the biggest issue here?”

It turned out that the police had one perception of the largest problem in an area and the neighborhoods had another one altogether. Ours was usually serious crime. Theirs was usually a lot more mundane. This was a major problem of the professional model: different priorities.

Because so much of our time was consumed chasing 911 calls, we were focusing what little time we had left on solving major crime. If we handled that, we figured, we would ease the public's fear. Meanwhile, the public felt plagued by a constant invasion of little things, exactly the day-to-day annoyances that had been handled in previous eras by the beat cop. Or at least he gave that impression. Who hasn't heard the old story about the cop dragging a kid home by the ear and telling his mother, “Johnny's been acting up”?

At one of the community meetings, the police focused on a string of burglaries: This was important, a major thief breaking into people's homes. The community, on the other hand, was upset that the streets were filthy and cleaning couldn't take place because cars were clogging the streets and cops weren't tagging them to be towed. The officers took this to heart, and the next day we began writing tickets. In the process of tagging
and towing the cars, the officers started talking to the people, and it didn't take long before they found residents who had seen the burglar on the street. The burglary was solved, the case cleared. Had we not addressed the sweeping of the street, we wouldn't have opened the dialogue that solved the larger crime. It taught a valuable lesson: Seemingly unrelated problems can be responded to so that each positively affects the other.

It wasn't the easiest lesson in the world to absorb. I was still a young cop. We all wanted to make the good pinch, the gun pinch. We wanted to disarm felons, we didn't want to be wrestling with drunks. But as I went to these community meetings, it quickly began to sink in. Though both searching for the same destination, police and community had been going in opposite directions.

Officers walked away from the community meetings saying, “I heard your complaints about noise and vandalism, and we will address them. But here's our problem: We've got a cat burglar breaking into houses. Here's what we can do; here's what you need to do.” We made our promises back and forth. Then the phones started ringing. We opened up a tremendous amount of communication that had been cut off before because the police always had an us-versus-them relationship with the community. We were beginning to become accountable to the community and their priorities.

We held these community meetings three or four nights a week for the entire year. Julie Rossborough took notes as people raised their hands and named their issues. In the average meeting, we fielded thirty or forty questions, some of them very tough. People's anger and built-up frustration over not having their needs met for many years came to the surface. But once they understood that we were actually going to act on these problems, they were very grateful.

Rossborough developed a matrix chart of approximately twenty key issues that were raised consistently, and it was a surprise. As a percentage of the population, very few people are actually robbed at gunpoint. Even in the worst neighborhoods, if there is a shooting on the street while you are at work, you don't know about it. It could happen in your own building, and you might not be aware of it. People were complaining about the so-called signs of crime, the constant irritants, the stuff in their faces every day: prostitution, graffiti, filth in the street, noisy parties. It became clear that the system Steve Dunleavy and I had designed and implemented and believed in was not meeting the needs of the public.

Bob Wasserman brilliantly recognized this and began to put systems into place to deal with it.

The issues we had to face were:

• How do we motivate the cops?
  

• How do we get cops to respond to the identified concerns of the public?
  

• How do we get the cops to work with the public?
  

• How do we get the operational philosophy of the Boston Police Department more in sync with the needs of this district?
  

We developed the Neighborhood Responsive Police Plan. We designed a sector map for District 4 that was not based on the traditional census tracts. Instead, we tried to develop sectors that were clearly identifiable geographically in the public's mind as their neighborhood and worked from there. Within the four large quadrants that were the Back Bay, the South End, East Fenway, and West Fenway, we identified sixteen distinct neighborhoods. We assigned one sector car to each.

Wasserman was familiar with a British policing model called the Two-Car Plan. Two-officer rapid-response vehicles were sent when a problem call, for example, a robbery in progress, came in. The more routine, leisurely policing of the neighborhoods was done by the bobby on the beat, on a bicycle, or in a one-man service car. Two cars handling two different responsibilities. Wasserman suggested using two types of cars in District 4.