The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (32 page)

There's an expression we didn't like much: Transit cops are like corks, they keep bobbing to the surface. Everybody always complained, “Oh, those damned transit cops, always standing on the street instead of being down there where you need them.” Well, you try standing for eight hours on a sweltering platform in the middle of August wearing a bulletproof vest. Imagine what a cop feels like, 120 degrees and encased in Kevlar. Or, in the winter, standing from midnight to eight on concrete in five-degree weather inside what amounts to a meat locker.

The train came whooshing into the station like a traveling oasis. The doors opened, and the cool air just about sucked us inside. I think Stengel got the point.

We invited the press on ride-alongs. The press looks for its own angles, but by excluding them you lose the opportunity to demonstrate the dangers, satisfactions, and joys of being a cop. Many police officials worry about what a reporter might find; I had faith in my officers, and I knew that the net result of a reporter's night in the system could only benefit us.

I began an initiative, modeled after New York City Schools Chancellor Ramon Cortines's Principal for a Day program, called District Commander for a Day. I invited around forty business leaders to spend a day in our districts and various commands. They had a ball. They rode the system with our men and women and came back and told me, “You guys have so little to work with. Your equipment's awful, the conditions your people have to operate in are ungodly.” Many were lifelong New Yorkers, some involved with the New York City Police Foundation and the Crime Stoppers Program, but it was the first time they'd had any exposure to the real world of transit cops. They were in awe of how much we could get done despite the lack of equipment and the sad state of the system.

Some managers might be embarrassed to show their organization's
shortcomings. I wanted to hype ours to the skies. As I tried to lobby for board-of-director and legislative support for transit, I wanted businesspeople to see the burdens we were working under and to understand, when they chatted at their dinner parties on the Upper East Side and Park Avenue, what it's like for a cop trying to make sure all New Yorkers get home safely.

JACK MAPLE WAS A WELL-KNOWN ECCENTRIC WITHIN THE TRANSIT POLICE. HE
had signed on with the department before he'd been eligible to vote, and at twenty-seven he had been its youngest detective, having made some four hundred arrests. He looked like a tough guy, he would rumble with the best of them, and he had a smart mouth. He was a workingclass guy with aspirations. Then the tunnel rat from Queens began a major self-transformation.

A solidly stocky five foot eight, Maple cultivated a taste for sartorial display. He actually wore a carnation in his lapel. Then, neglecting to inform his wife, he mortgaged his home and spent a substantial portion of the money buying clothes and a sports car and becoming a regular at the Plaza Hotel's famed and refined Oak Room. “I really believe,” Maple said, “when I was born, they messed up and put me in a civil-service bassinet by mistake.” When the cash was gone and he faced a future of eternal payments to the Money Store, he'd confessed. His Oak Room phase cost him his marriage, but his legend was secured when the writer Michael Daly profiled him in
New York
magazine and later used him as the model for a central character in his 1995 novel,
Under Ground.

Getting written up in
New York
put Maple in a whole new league. Every month, a select group of politicians, press, and police types gathered over
pasta at an Italian restaurant and bantered, off the record, about the events of the day. Maple, this Transit Police lieutenant, was now in the middle of it.

Police departments are not kind to eccentrics. I think it has something to do with order, obedience, respect for the chain of command; all the commandments that police professionals hold high are routinely challenged by eccentrics in the ranks, and anyone with a fresh perspective and the balls to say it out loud will pay a price. Maple was very ambivalent about the bosses. He was cop enough to respect those above him because they were above him, but enough of a loner not to give a damn what they thought of him. He was a wiseacre with a quick wit. He was also extremely smart, a thinking and creative cop. In 1988, when he got the top score on the lieutenant's exam, it changed his life and got him more serious notice within the department. Now, not only was he a personality, he was a presence.

Maple was in charge of the Central Robbery Squad when I came in as chief of transit. His squad loved him, they were called “Maple-ites,” and they worked and drank and played together. He and Dean Esserman, tunnel rat and Ivy Leaguer, were unlikely friends, both single, both basically without a life outside of work. On three occasions they went out to serve warrants. One night, they were in East New York, a tough section of Brooklyn, with a bunch of robbery and warrant detectives, waiting for a suspect they were following to come out of a bodega. They thought the man had a gun. Maple, the tough guy, and Esserman, the preppy former prosecutor, were the first two through the door. Maple, clearly the more effective representative of the Transit Police in this situation, knocked the guy down and Esserman piled on. The detectives came running in with their guns drawn—the place was pandemonium. Maple got the guy in a headlock. It was Friday night, and Maple looked up at Esserman and beamed, “It's better than sex, isn't it!”

But Maple wasn't getting proper respect. He was a wild card, in favor with one chief, out of favor with the next. He would consistently put together ideas and presentations and proposals for his superiors, but he was a lieutenant, and in the world of policing he could only have a lieutenant's opinion. Still, he kept plugging away.

When I came on, Maple said to his executive officer Tommy Burke, “Let's see what this guy's made of.” They sat down and wrote a ten-page document outlining his ideas for reducing crime and improving the department, put it in a binder and gave it to the chief of detectives, Mike
O'Connor. “O'Connor's got a coffeepot in his office,” Maple said to himself. “Any time Bratton wants coffee, he's going to go in there and get it. They're going to interact. This coffeepot is going to make Mike O'Connor a big shot.” Of course, Maple already knew that O'Connor was clearly a rising star in the department.

O'Connor passed the package along. He said, “I gave it to Bratton. I didn't even look at it. But don't ever give anybody anything like that; they're just going to put their name on it.”

Maple told him, “I don't give a shit.”

A couple of weeks later, O'Connor introduced us. I remembered the package and asked O'Connor to set up a breakfast where we could discuss Maple's ideas.

He had a million of them. He targeted fare beating, warrants, wolfpack robberies, interrogation, interviewing, crime analysis, and coordinated deployment between detectives and plainclothes and uniformed officers. He had so many ideas he gave me a headache. I told him, “The reason they brought me here is to reduce crime.” Maple said, “If we go by this plan it's going to happen.”

Not long after, Maple made a presentation to the command staff about an idea that he wanted to pursue. Always on top of the statistics, Maple said his figures showed that subway robberies against the entire population were up a staggering 60 percent but against Asians the jump was an extraordinary 210 percent. Since the Asian victims, particularly the Chinese, were in large part immigrants, often illegal, with little understanding of the American justice system, Maple's sense was that what was being reported was only the tip of the iceberg. In fact, he felt the reason Asians were the preferred victims of crime was precisely that they were less likely to report it and that the language barrier made identifying their attackers even more difficult. Maple wanted to put together a decoy squad to focus on the problem.

I said, “Go to it.” There had been a scandal years before in which plainclothes officers were accused of arresting people simply to inflate their number of summonses issued, and the department had been accused of covering it up. Maple had been running a decoy unit and had been targeted for investigation. The unit had been disbanded, and WNBC-TV reporter John Miller had tried to get Maple put in jail. Miller had pursued “the Evil Sergeant Maple,” but Maple was clean. The incident had nothing to do with Maple's unit. I was willing to take the risk.

Esserman got the Manhattan district attorney's office to sign off on the
Asian decoy unit, and we reinstituted a regular, and highly successful, decoy operation.

Regarding fare beating, Maple emphasized the need for volume. Our minisweeps were good for department morale and publicity, but he felt we weren't getting enough benefit from our efforts. He suggested that we not only arrest these people, but that we check them for warrants.

“If you run a warrant check on everybody,” he said, “there's a greater propensity that you're going to catch not only people with prior fare-beat warrants, but really bad people. It's going to knock crime down. And then you're going to create an environment in the subway where the criminal element is going to say, ‘It's just not worth doing robberies there.’”

The goal was to check everyone we stopped for any violation whatsoever to see if they had a warrant out on them. At first, people were just being given summonses and sent on their way. We'd have felons in our hands and we'd shoo them along because we didn't have the capacity to check them out. “Check everybody for outstanding warrants!” Maple said. It seemed like an obvious idea; all good ideas are obvious after someone's come up with them. I also liked it because it would put some teeth in the Desk Appearance Ticket program—the so-called “disappearance tickets” that frustrated the cops so much.

Maple also proposed a more aggressive deployment of the warrant unit, which tracked down people who were wanted on warrants, had failed to show up for court, or were wanted for crimes. Maple figured that since these people have already committed crimes, let's serve the back warrants and get them.

The warrant unit pursued two classes of people: wants and wanteds. A want is a person whom the police would like to question relative to a crime; a wanted is someone for whom a warrant has been issued. Transit had a warrant unit, but it was under the control of the NYPD and was extremely ineffectual. They were hardly bringing anyone in, and Maple felt we were missing opportunities to increase the pressure on the criminal element. Many of the criminals felt that once they had been arrested and bailed out, we would never go after them. Transit crime was one big free ride.

Many of transit's functions and responsibilities had been assumed by the NYPD. They were the powerful parent organization, we were the stepchild. Maple pointed out that while we had upward of forty transit detectives assigned to the combined NYPD-Transit warrant unit, transit warrants were basically not being served. The city squad prioritized crimes
and served warrants on the most significant cases, which were rarely if ever ours.

An additional problem was the NYPD bureaucracy. It could be four to six weeks from the time a warrant was issued until it got into the hands of a warrant officer. The paperwork was overwhelming; wire baskets were stacked three and four feet high with warrants waiting to be processed. Plus, the warrant squad wasn't working weekends. Warrants were served by the NYPD Monday through Friday, 8:00
A
.
M
. to 4:00
P
.
M
.—basically when no one was home.

I went to NYPD Commissioner Lee Brown and said, “We're taking our people back from the warrant unit. I'm going to set up my own warrant squad.” The NYPD's first deputy commissioner, Ray Kelly, was not happy about that initiative. His response was, “Take them away, but we're no longer going to have anything to do with your warrants.” That was fine with me. They weren't serving my warrants anyway.

First, we sped up the process by which warrants were processed. Dean Esserman dove into the basement of the courthouse and followed pieces of warrant paper from the moment a judge said, “Defendant didn't show up for court today; warrant ordered,” to the day, thirty to forty-five days later, when that piece of paper ended up at the NYPD being sprocketed into the wire baskets as a “new warrant.” Esserman used his contacts to stay with the paper and move it from the judge's signature to our office in forty-eight hours. We developed a computer program, believed to be the first of its kind in the city, that changed this warrant process from being paper driven to something more like electronic mail. Now, when someone defaulted or didn't show up, rather than being out in the street committing crimes for a month before the police even began to track him down, he had us banging on his door in two days.

The cops who returned from working with the NYPD weren't happy to be back home at the “Ohhhh” Police, but I put Maple in charge. He took this disgruntled group and transformed them. He changed the way we pursued criminals. We went after them seven days a week, starting at 3:30
A
.
M
. The troops, supervised by a uniformed sergeant, gathered each morning in Maple's office to go over the game plan: Here are the ten or fifteen people we're after today; here's what they look like, here's what they're wanted for, here's the layout of the buildings they are in. At four o'clock, the sergeant and his squad of six to eight detectives, all wearing Transit Police windbreakers, started banging on doors very loudly, so the neighbors could hear.

If two cops in plain clothes knocked politely at ten
A
.
M
., no one would know they were there. If you're walking up to the building at four
A
.
M
. in legitimate pursuit of a person with an outstanding warrant—
“Transit Police! Open up!”
—people look out the window and say, “Jeez, here's these cops serving warrants.” We made an impression. If someone inside said, “Dave's not here, man, haven't seen him for weeks,” we couldn't bust into the apartment. But if we went back every morning, banging on the door, eventually someone in the building might drop a dime that Dave really
is
in there, or that we could catch him coming out the door at six at night when he headed out to do his dirty deeds.