The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (31 page)

The white shirts hadn't been in the system in so long that many had forgotten what life below ground was like. The irony was that every boss had come up through that system, and indeed, as tough as conditions were now, they'd been worse twenty years before. Promotion may have seemed like an opportunity for them to escape the responsibility to deal with those conditions. They had made it out of the electric sewer and didn't want to go back. What you don't see and hear, you don't have to respond to, so rather than feel guilty the white shirts stopped watching and listening.

Since Cheryl wasn't in New York, I got used to roaming the system all night, sometimes with someone from the department, sometimes by myself. I'd just get on a train and go, learn my way around, much as I'd done in Boston as a kid with Franny McNulty. I got a sense of what it must be like for the cops, and I must admit, alone in the middle of night, the tension did begin to build. I loved to have the doors slide open, step into a subway car at five-thirty in the morning, and see the reactions of the cops on their shift as I said, “How's it going, fellas?” It became a matter of pride for cops to be able to point to my signature in their memo books and say the chief had given them a “scratch” at a faraway station at some ungodly hour.

I began to take my command staff out of headquarters and into the
district stations so they could see how bad conditions really were. The Fourteenth Street–Union Square station, for example, is multitiered, and the District 4 station was buried deep in the bowels of the system. If you opened the fire-exit door in the locker room, you were on the tracks. The steel dust from the wheels grinding against the rails was inescapable. Our officers hung their uniforms in metal lockers with the little vents, and every shift the uniforms were covered with steel dust before they could be put on. At the end of the shift, after eight hours of riding the trains, my officers wiped their hands across their faces and got fists full of black dirt. By taking the bosses back into the districts, I was letting the cops know that we were aware of their problems and would try to do something about them. These district visits became a regular event.

My instructions to each of the ten district commanders were purposefully vague. I wanted to test their creativity and presentation skills. I told them I was bringing the transit command staff and the other nine district commanders along so everyone could see what their peers were doing. I also told them, “When we get there I want my head of the Bureau of Administrative Services to see the conditions you're working under. I want a briefing on the conditions on your system and also on operations, what you're doing about fare evasion, what you're doing about disorder, what you're doing about crime.”

For starters, we all rode the train to the districts. The commanding officer at the first meeting was well prepared. He provided coffee and donuts and made a good presentation. He was on top of his assignment, and I praised him for it.

At the next meeting, several weeks later, the CO was more razzledazzle. He had seen an acceptable presentation, and he wanted to go one better. His figures were more up-to-date, his outlook more advanced, and with the coffee and donuts he also served bagels and lox.

It got to be a competition! Not only did the refreshments improve with each visit, the ideas did, too.

But how do you reach 3,600 cops working all hours of the day and night in forty different locations? I had my staff produce videos for distribution to all units of the Transit Police. We had tried written bulletins, but many of the cops had grown up not reading newspapers but watching MTV. They would probably not read or absorb leaflets or even single-sheet flyers concerning new department developments, but they would watch a video from the chief at roll call.

The districts busted their butts trying to outdo each other. I knew I had
them when they began trying to show each other up. And the more creative they were encouraged to be, the more the ideas flowed. Captain Frank O'Hara of District 4 made a video that ran eight minutes and was one of the best I'd ever seen. And instead of coffee and donuts he served a six-foot submarine sandwich.

Mike Ansbro, with whom I had not initially been impressed when he interviewed for captain, turned out to be one of the best thinkers. He was kind of a rough and tough lieutenant, a real New Yorker who hid his significant intellect behind his bravado. But when he came in number one on the captain's test, he was sent to the district station at Hoyt-Schermerhorn, one of the major hubs in Brooklyn. There, he instituted a program of walk-throughs: his officers walked through the cars and corrected all conditions; if someone was sleeping, they woke him up; if someone was aggressively panhandling they ejected him. They dealt with what was in front of them, and the public saw them, or so Ansbro thought.

Ansbro, responding to my edicts to get out in the system and show the flag, would walk through the cars behind his officers. He noticed that no one was looking up. It's the New York attitude—you sit in the subway and do not make eye contact. He thought, “This is ridiculous. I've got two New York Transit cops in full uniform walking the length of the train doing good work, and nobody notices they're there. I'm not getting the benefit I'm looking for.”

What causes people to look up on a subway car? The loudspeaker. When announcements are made, people look up; one, because it's hard to make out what's being said, and two, because they figure something bad has happened. Ansbro developed what he called Operation Glazier. Why “Glazier”? How do you fix a broken window?

He put a sergeant and four cops on the platform. Each time a train pulled in, the sergeant gave a printed card to the conductor to read over the train's loudspeaker system. “Your attention, please. The Transit Police are conducting a sweep of the train. There may be a momentary delay while they go through the train to correct all conditions. Thank you for your patience.”

The walk-through took only a minute. His officers were instructed to say hello to people, to engage them in a friendly way. They got the drunks off the train, quieted down the kids who were acting up, and sent it on its way. People saw the police doing their job, and they felt safer.

This type of creativity was beginning to flourish all over the department. It was a transit renaissance.

Once I was satisfied they could handle the responsibility, I decentralized power down to the ten district commanders. I told each of them, “Here are the goals: reduce fare evasion, disorder, and crime. I have certain requirements, mostly a certain number of cops on the trains, but beyond that you make the decisions. How many cops do you want in uniform, how many in plain clothes? Your call. You be creative as to how you're going to use those cops. You supervise them, you make sure they're not being abusive, and you make them productive.” All they had to do was produce and be able to answer our questions when we asked them. I gave them authority and responsibility but held them accountable.

One of the Transit Police's major problems was the radio communications system in the subways themselves. It had been designed for train operators, not for cops. The subway stations, made of concrete and steel, were a hostile environment for radio and were filled with dead spots. We had among the worst police-radio systems in the nation. As long as officers were near the antennas that ran over the tracks, they could have radio communications, but as soon as they walked any distance away, they had no expectation of their radios working.

One notorious dead spot ran for a couple of stations through the middle of Harlem, so if an officer on an express train got in trouble, he could be out of communication for many potentially life-threatening minutes. Being out of touch for ten minutes at three o'clock in the morning in the middle of a jam on the A train could cause serious problems. It was a wonder more transit police weren't getting hurt. Over the years, more antennae had been added in mezzanine areas and passageways, but this put an added burden on an already antiquated and overloaded system.

The Transit Police union had made the radio system an issue, and before I came onboard the TP's position was that the problem was not as bad as the union said. I walked into Al O'Leary's press office and said I wanted to do a story on exactly how bad the radio system really was. O'Leary thought it could do some good, but he said, “Keep in mind, you're going to alienate the people who hired you. You're pointing a finger and saying, ‘You didn't give our cops what they need to do their job.’” I told him, “They recruited me. They've got to be nice to me for at least six months.” We did the story.

David Gunn had a terrific reputation, but when I looked at previous capital program budgets to see how requests for Transit Police funding had been treated, I found that of the billions spent on transit, minimal resources came to us. Trains were bought, tracks were fixed, but the Transit
Authority leadership was focused on moving commuters, not protecting them. Unfortunately, Transit Police leadership over the years had not been effective in lobbying to make the case for what they really needed. Our offices got painted and other inexpensive cosmetic repairs were arranged, but no significant capital had been invested in improving the Transit Police. It reinforced the cops’ attitude that the Transit Authority didn't care about them.

I had made a point of contacting certain notable figures in the law-enforcement field who I thought could help the department. Tom Reppetto, head of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York, was among the first. The CCC is a privately funded organization that comments on police and criminal-justice issues, and Reppetto was constantly being quoted in the papers. I had read and admired his history of New York policing,
The Blue Parade.
A former Chicago police detective commander, he was very smart and knew New York inside and out. I asked him to give me some background on how New York functioned and who the players were. Reppetto, it turned out, knew very little about transit; his focus had always been on the NYPD. I invited him to tour the system.

To increase the visibility of our organization and to demonstrate our needs, I began to conduct these tours regularly. Few in the city had a real sense of the dangers and difficulties facing the Transit Police day in and day out, and I wanted to show them. I invited significant business and government people, including Victor Kovner, and Queens District Attorney Richard Brown, as well as members of the media, specifically reporters who regularly covered the transit system. Some of these people were only vaguely interested; some were what cops call police buffs. We buffed them up real good. We rode them all over New York on a Disneyland tour of the subways.

I would invite seven or eight prominent people on each tour, men and women who were in the position to help transit if they understood what we were asking for. We would start at five o'clock in the afternoon in my office over pastry and coffee. I'd give them a briefing and off we'd go. Four hours later we'd discuss what we had seen over dinner.

First stop was the communications room, where I'd show just how poor our communications system was. I would explain the dangers that transit cops lived with every shift, then we'd go ride the trains.

I introduced our group to certain transit units. The canines would be in one station or on the trains. The department had one of the best canine units in the country and regularly used them for station and train patrol.

For law-abiding citizens, they are a very comforting presence; for the criminal element they were very intimidating. Then we would get on a train, and I'd ask my guests to pick out the members of our decoy unit from the regular passengers. They'd look around and see the usual assortment of New Yorkers in transit. They usually got about two out of eight.

Then we'd take them into the tunnels. Most subway passengers don't even think of the tunnels when they ride the trains, but my officers had to deal with them daily. We'd go to the end of the platform, step down a short set of stairs, and stand on the ground as the trains roared by. Equipped with flashlights and reflective vests and guided by Transit officers assigned to the Homeless Outreach Unit, we'd begin to walk the tracks.

It was dark as a coal mine, with low-wattage bulbs the only illumination. The cars look big enough when you're standing beside one on the platform, but when you're on the ground at track level, there's another eight feet of wheels and connecting rods as long as your arm; the doors you normally walk through are above your head, and everything is out of scale. Eight or ten cars is a real load. A train, it becomes clear, is a large and dangerous vehicle.

In the tunnel, rats scurry everywhere. A ferocious wind, swirling and thick with underground debris, is blown by the speeding trains. The expresses and locals barrel through, banging from side to side, and there's very little space between the cars and the tunnel wall itself. Pressing your body back against the tunnel's filthy sides doesn't seem certain to save you. The noise is overwhelming, disorienting, and in the dark you can't tell which way the train is coming.

We took our guests to the cul-de-sacs where people had set up homes. The smell of urine and feces and unwashed bodies was often overwhelming. Indeed, you could detect where people were living just by the smell. A population of several thousand people lived in various parts of the subway system. Mattresses lay on the ground, and syringes and crack vials littered the alcoves—watch where you walk. One night, on a three-foot ledge right adjacent to the tracks, a couple was having sex as we passed by.

One of the more intriguing parts of our tour was the “Condominium.” Under an emergency exit down in SoHo, a character had set up a duplex, his bedroom on one floor and his kitchen and living room—with television—on the level below, his electricity bootstrapped from one of the system's light sockets. There was a world underground, filled with an
unsettled and not necessarily lucid set of characters, and we had to police that too.

When Peter Stengel, former president of Metro-North, became chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, we took him out on the tour. It was a hot summer night, over ninety degrees, horrific New York humidity. The air conditioning in the cars was a delight. Then we got off and waited on the platform. I got lucky, there was a delay. I always hoped for this kind of good fortune. It's the subway; trains are late for all kinds of reasons, riders and cops are always waiting for them. This time, the train took an eternity to come, and Stengel and I were standing there, covered in sweat, having trouble breathing, getting hotter and hotter.