The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (28 page)

The irony of the merger, particularly for the Mets, was that many of the state-police systems were not compatible with our computer systems. After the merger, many of our computers were effectively unplugged, and we went back to paper and pencil for such things as payrolls and attendance. It was a very discouraging movement back.

As a result of the merger, I was certainly going to lose my command and, at best, could hope for a second- or third-level position in the command staff of the Massachusetts state police. I was not very interested. Fortunately, in the spring of 1989, in the middle of all this political maneuvering, I got a call from Bob Wasserman and George Kelling. Would I meet with them over breakfast?

Bob Kiley, who had served as Boston's deputy mayor and head of the MBTA, had moved to New York in the eighties to accept the position of chairman of the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority, the agency responsible for the New York Transit Authority (TA), Metro-North, the Long Island Rail Road, and a number of the city's bridges and tunnels. Along with Kiley, the president of the Transit Authority, David Gunn, had hired Wasserman and Kelling to research New York's subway system to develop solutions to its considerable crime and disorder problems.

The New York City subway system was a horror. Crime was skyrocketing, fare evasion was epidemic, graffiti was rampant, the fear underground was overwhelming, and as a result, ridership and public confidence were plummeting. Despite significant improvements in the condition of the trains, stations, and infrastructure, the continuing crime problem led Mayor Ed Koch to support the concept of merging the Transit Authority Police into the NYPD. Wasserman and Kelling had been hired to study the idea. Their research indicated that merger was not in the best interests of the Transit Authority and that the TA Police was an organization uniquely positioned to test many of their most progressive theories. What it needed was a leader, a new chief. I had turned around the MBTA Police. Bob Kiley had pinned the PERF Gary Hayes Award on my lapel. He knew me and he trusted Kelling and Wasserman.

We met for breakfast at the Bostonian Hotel, and Wasserman and Kelling immediately set about recruiting me. Would I be interested in heading the New York Transit Police, with four thousand people, twice the size of the Boston Police? Yes, I'd be very interested.

That summer I met secretly with David Gunn at his mother's house in Medford, Massachusetts, and in the fall he invited me down to New York to tour the system and continue our discussions. It was only when I got off the shuttle at La Guardia Airport that I began to realize what a hellhole New York had become.

In the baggage-claim area, four different limo drivers were haranguing exiting passengers, arguing over who was literally going to take us for a ride. I ran their gauntlet before I hopped into a grimy, dilapidated licensed yellow cab. The highway into the city was covered with dirt, grime, and litter
so thick it looked like it hadn't been cleaned for decades. The medians between east- and westbound lanes were filthy, and when traffic slowed to a crawl there was little to stare at but debris. Abandoned cars were stripped and strewn along the side of the road like rat-eaten carcasses. The walls lining the road were scrawled with graffiti.

We came out of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and were double-teamed at the stoplight by men with filthy rags demanding money, the official New York City greeters, the squeegee men. Welcome to New York. On Fifth Avenue, I saw table after table of unregulated peddlers; the great New York thoroughfare looked like a Third World Casbah.

We went down into the subways. Reality outstripped even the vivid descriptions Kelling, Wasserman, and Gunn had given me. After waiting in a seemingly endless line to buy a token, I tried to put the coin into a turnstile and found it had been purposely jammed. Unable to pay the fare to get into the system, we had to enter through a slam gate being held open by a scruffy-looking character with his hand out; having disabled the turnstiles, he was now demanding that riders give him their tokens. Meanwhile, one of his cohorts had his mouth on the coin slots, sucking out the jammed coins and leaving his slobber. Most people were too intimidated to take these guys on: Here, take the damned token, what do I care? Other citizens were going over, under, around, or through the stiles for free. It was like going into the transit version of Dante's
Inferno.

On the platform, while we waited for the train all the benches seemed taken by people stretched out sleeping. At one end of the station, there was a cardboard city, homeless men and women camped day and night in packing boxes. Then we got on the train, the doors closed, and things got worse.

Now locked inside with no place to go, we couldn't help but observe the people splayed over the seats asleep, most riders giving them a wide berth. One foul-smelling sleeper could take up a quarter of a car by himself. No one made eye contact. If you could have held your breath for the entire ride, you would have. A parade of aggressive beggars was sliding open the doors between cars and tramping from one to another. “I've got TB,” “I've got AIDS,” “I'm going to breathe on you,” “Give me money.” It didn't quit. The entire ride was unnerving. I was not unhappy to get above ground. David Gunn, understandably, was not happy with what he had shown me, but he had made his point. All the improvements he was making in the conditions of the cars and stations would be for nothing without a turnaround in the system itself.

Gunn indicated that he was interested in bringing me in, but as with
Jimmy O'Leary and the MBTA, there was a lag time. Before a decision was made, he resigned and was replaced as TA president by Alan Kiepper, who had been recruited from Houston. I interviewed with him as well. Kiepper wanted three problems addressed by police: fare evasion, disorder, and crime.

I began to look closely at New York.

I was living north of Boston in the seacoast town of Marblehead. Each morning, I drove to work through the Sumner Tunnel, took a sharp right turn into the North End, and headed for the Freedom Trail Coffee Shop, a hole-in-the-wall luncheonette with a Formica counter and five vinyl-covered booths next door to the historic Paul Revere House. The Police Academy had been right down the block in 1970 and, a creature of habit, I'd been eating breakfast there ever since.

Most days I ate my bacon and eggs and read the
Herald
and the
Globe
before going to the office. In the summer of 1989, I began to read
The New York Times
and the
New York Post.
The
Times
influenced the decision makers, the
Post
was read by the cops. I was looking for the issues. How was transit being covered? Who were the players? Which reporters covered transit? And, as important, who were the usual cast of characters the press would go to for comment on the Transit Police? If I took the job and successfully turned that department around, I could legitimately begin positioning myself as a contender for the number one job in American policing, New York City police commissioner. It would require gaining high visibility and success very quickly in the country's most complex city and toughest media environment.

I found that New York newspapers report obsessively on subway issues. Three and a half million people ride the subways every day, another million and a half ride the buses, so literally the majority of New York's population had a personal interest in the chief of transit's job every day. And crime, fear, and disorder were going through the roof. It was the ideal situation.

For six months I studied the New York Transit Police, and finally, in April 1990, I got the job.

ALAN KIEPPER GAVE ME MARCHING ORDERS. CRIME STATISTICS, HE TOLD ME
, were grim. Robberies in the subway system had risen 48 percent over the past two years, far more than in New York City as a whole. Crime was causing fear; fear was causing abandonment of the system. “Your performance,” Kiepper wrote in his letter welcoming me to the Transit Authority, “will be judged largely on whether you can show significant improvement in the reduction of crime and in the restoration of confidence.”

I had three major issues to deal with:

Fare evasion.
Fare beating was epidemic. People were entering the transit system without paying at a rate of about 170,000 per day, costing the city about eighty million dollars a year. Token scams were running wild. Fare beaters were pulling back the turnstiles and sliding through—a little New York dance step that everyone had gotten used to seeing—or jumping and pushing their way through the slam gates, and nothing was being done about it. Legitimate riders felt that they were entering a place of lawlessness and disorder. They saw people going in for free and began to question the wisdom of abiding by the law. Some were angry, others were disgusted, others just gave up and felt the entire city was out of control. Still others got the brilliant idea to jump the turnstiles as well. It fed on itself. The system was veering toward anarchy.

Disorder.
Aggressive panhandling and vandalism was undermining rider safety. The threatening spiel had become part of the daily ride. People just didn't feel safe on the subways, and large numbers of New Yorkers were finding other ways of getting around. The fact that there were an estimated five thousand people living in the subway stations and tunnels was both a safety and a health hazard.

Crime.
Frightening face-to-face crime was becoming more violent as juvenile robbers operating in gangs, or “wolfpacks,” increasingly used firearms and assaulted their victims. Surprisingly, the transit system generated only 2 percent of the overall reported crime in the city, at its peak maybe fifty-five robberies a day. Nevertheless, fear of crime had become a major deterrent to use of the system, especially at night and particularly for women.

And while the transit system was becoming more dangerous and anarchic, the 3,500-person Transit Police was probably the most demoralized police force in America. Their work environment was awful, their equipment was semifunctional and obsolete, their morale was miserable, and it seemed that no one but their union cared. They had no champion. They were also the only police department in America that drafted officers into its ranks. New York City police applicants did not pick their own department—they took a civil-service exam and then by lottery were sent to the NYPD, transit, or housing police. Those who went to transit didn't want to be there. As the number of younger officers grew, the union leadership supported the concept of merging with the NYPD, which most of the transit cops wanted to join anyway. It was the only police force in the United States trying to merge itself out of existence.

Transit cops were known as the “Ohhhh” police. For generations, they had been treated as part of a second-class operation. People would ask cops in social situations, “What do you do for a living?”

“I'm a police officer.”

“Oh, where?”

“City of New York.”

“No kidding! I've got a brother who's a cop. Where do you work?”

“Uh, I work in Manhattan.”

“Oh, yeah. What precinct?”

“I'm with the Transit Police.”

“Ohhhh.”

The “Ohhhh” Police.

Compounding the problem was the fact that several of transit's most
recent chiefs had not come from within the department but had transferred over from the NYPD at the end of their careers. It was widely felt that these chiefs were more sympathetic to NYPD issues than to the organization they led.

There was also a culture of competition between transit and city cops, and transit cops were losers. They had nothing, they were nothing, they went nowhere. Unfortunately, when I arrived, a lot of them believed it. They wanted out.

My first day on the job I got a glimpse of why.

I had been announced as the new chief at a press conference that morning at Transit Headquarters in Brooklyn. (Cheryl and I had taken the subway from Manhattan and had quickly managed to get lost.) Afterward, I went to the second floor to meet my command staff in my new office. Exiting the elevator, a security officer was stationed to screen all visitors. This cop was sitting with his feet up, reading a newspaper.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“He's assigned to the office.”

“Why is he here?”

“That's his assignment.”

I was incensed. “That's the image we project? He's got his tie hanging off, he looks like crap, people walk into the chief's office every day, and they see that for our image? Have that officer removed. I don't want him here when I come out of this meeting.”

My command staff was reasonably apprehensive to meet their new chief. I seized the opportunity to inject optimism into an organization that was sadly lacking in good news. “I didn't come down from Boston to lose,” I told them. “I intend to win. I believe in working hard, and I am expecting all of you to work hard with me. I also believe that we should have some fun. My intention is to succeed and to have fun succeeding. We should enjoy our time here.” They looked at me like I was nuts.

Cheryl had flown home. She had decided to stay in Boston and continue practicing law. We would see each other on weekends. Around five-thirty in the afternoon, I left the hotel where I was staying for my first month, around the corner from Grand Central Terminal, and went out for a walk in my new neighborhood. I got a big kick out of being in New York.

I was strolling west on Forty-second Street across from Grand Central and the Grand Hyatt Hotel and I saw a cop leaning against a building. As I got closer, I saw that he was very disheveled. He had shaggy hair and looked as if he hadn't shaved that morning. His shirt was wrinkled and his
clip-on tie was pinned off to one side on his collar, a particular pet peeve of mine. His gun belt, which had originally been black but was now brown from wear, hung from him like he was Mister Goodwrench, and his hat was hanging from his holster.

You could differentiate transit and housing cops from the NYPD by which shoulder their patch was on; the NYPD wore theirs on the right. His was on the left—he was one of my men. Even his patch was beat-up, the corners curling and the stitching starting to fray. I walked over, identified myself, and stuck out my hand. It was something I did thousands of times: Look at the nameplate below the cop's shield, stick out my hand to shake theirs, look them in the eye, and say, “Hi, Officer Smith, I'm Chief Bratton, how're you doing?”