Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (22 page)

But in campaigning and governing it was clear that Giuliani also believed in the rightness of his cause, had a good case to make, and was
exceptionally smart and fiercely, boldly determined to accomplish what he saw as his mission of saving New York City from itself. He did what he believed needed to be done, further polarizing an already polarized New York in the process. But he also helped spark the revival of a despairing city.

**************

About a month after his election, Giuliani stood with William Bratton and declared him New York City’s thirty-eighth police commissioner. Some of Giuliani’s key advisors had favored retaining Raymond Kelly, who had served as former Mayor David Dinkins’s police commissioner. Kelly was then regarded as a tough but reasonable NYPD veteran who shunned the limelight and had yet to develop the smug imperiousness that would later characterize his long tenure as New York police commissioner under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Those same advisors regarded Bratton as an unseemly publicity seeker, a characterization with at least a modicum of truth to it. Bratton
had
become the very public face and voice of the New York Transit Authority during his tenure there as chief, and had even been prominently featured in a series of transit commercials with the theme “We’re Taking the Subways Back—for You.” Back then,
Bratton had been “pleased and flattered” when morning drive-time talk-radio host Don Imus started parodying him and the TA commercials on his show. Imus had become the darling of the white, male, New York–Washington media/political “elite,” who daily gathered on Imus’s show to, in good-ol’-boy fashion, speak their minds and be insulted by Imus doing his acerbic, world-weary, dry-drunk, ex-cokehead routine.

That Bratton was flattered to be playing that game in that league was exactly the thing that would later get him in trouble.

But to be fair to Bratton, the commercials and the recognition were really a win-win situation: an extremely important opportunity to tout his reforms and his determination to reduce crime while enabling him to build public support for his efforts and improve the morale of his subway officers. It also allowed him to send messages directly to his transit cops outlining what he valued and what he wanted done.

He used the
New York Post
and its reporters in the same way, and the
New York Times
when he wanted to communicate to policy makers. New York’s media happily ate up all Bratton fed it, and not without reason. He was doing something newsworthy, something important, and he
had
been “taking back the subways.” He told reporters and the public all this, moreover, with a Boston accent so colorfully filled with clipped cadences and long, nasal vowels that his diction caught their ear and attention and spoke of something new.

Nevertheless, there was no denying that Bill Bratton had also managed to make the story all about him. And that was what Giuliani’s advisors feared would happen should the mayor choose him as police commissioner. But Giuliani chose to ignore his advisors’ misgivings. With the appointment of his top cop, he wanted to announce Big Change, not continuity. And in Bill Bratton he’d found a powerful vessel to carry that message.

**************

If Rudolph Giuliani appeared to have found his vessel, several months after being named New York’s police commissioner Bratton found his in a chubby former transit cop named Jack Maple. One night they were sitting with a crime reporter named John Miller at Maple’s favorite table in an Upper East Side Manhattan bar called Elaine’s, when
Maple began to scribble on a cocktail napkin.

A tall, dapper star for local TV station WNBC, Miller had been hired by Bratton as his deputy commissioner of public information—that is, his press guy. And in many ways Miller was a good choice: “Fun, smart as hell, and [with] the
best Rolodex in America,” as Bratton would later describe him. He was also a popular, distinctive television personality who loved the city’s nightlife, loved being a bachelor, and loved covering and
sparring with the “Dapper Don,” Mafioso John Gotti, perhaps because he fancied himself as something of a dapper don as well.

In other ways, however, Miller might not have been Bratton’s best choice. For one, he was too much like Bratton: too brash and independent, too much the happy partying companion, too used to being the star in his own movie to allow him to see the bigger picture and to warn
and protect his boss against the ruthless machinations of Giuliani and his loyalists, who wanted what both Bratton and Miller were incapable of giving: absolute subservience. They were supposed to do their work, keep their mouths shut, and allow the credit to go to Giuliani—who had once banned ads for
New York
magazine from city buses because of the line “possibly the only good thing in New York
Rudy hasn’t taken credit for.”

Jack Maple, the man scribbling on a napkin across from Miller and Bratton, was a character in his own right: a stocky, carnation-in-lapel, homburg hat– and bow tie–wearing former up-from-the ranks transit cop straight off the streets of Queens—and, as Bratton affectionately saw him, right off the stage of a Broadway revival of
Guys and Dolls
. While chief of the New York Transit Police, Bratton had quickly recognized Maple as a brilliant crime-prevention, police-deployment strategist and, once he became police commissioner, had astutely hired him as his deputy commissioner of operations.

It was
no accident that the three were sitting at Elaine’s. For decades the bar and restaurant had served as a kind of a see-and-be-seen hangout club for celebrity journalists, columnists, and writers, and Miller and Maple had long loved frequenting the place. And now so did
Bratton, whose third wife had returned to Boston. Soon they would be divorced.

Meanwhile, Bratton and his entourage of advisors were “having,” as Bratton later put it, “
a very good time.” And, in so doing, he was becoming not only the kind of outsized “
Broadway Bill” tabloid personality New Yorkers love but the face of the city’s dramatically declining crime rate—heretofore a signature Giuliani issue. Bratton, however, was not only getting the credit, and taking it, he was cutting Giuliani out of the script.

On this particular night, however, as Bratton would later tell it, Elaine’s would become famous not just for celebrity gossip but for that cocktail napkin upon which Maple had been writing.

On it Maple had been mapping out a new crime-suppression strategy. The theory behind it was startlingly simple: If you want to reduce crime, you had to understand the data-based reality of crime in a city like New York. In the still-new mass-computer age of the early nineties,
you could find that information by regularly gathering and inputting data onto computer-generated maps designed to then show exactly where and when specific types of crimes were occurring, and where they were clustering into “hot spots.”

Once a police manager had monitored and analyzed the map, he or she could then deploy enough cops and resources to reduce crimes in “hot spot” areas in a logical, data-driven manner. It was not a one-shot deal but a continuously updated daily accounting of data keyed to localities that held supervisors up and down the chain of command accountable for solving problems and preventing them from reoccurring.
Maple called it COMPSTAT, and its concentration on crime prevention and suppression, and on supervisorial accountability, would have a profound impact on increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of the big-city police departments that would soon employ it.

**************

As it turned out, 1994 was an auspicious year for Bill Bratton to plunge into his new job as police commissioner. The public was hugely supportive; New York’s economy was starting to boom; under President Bill Clinton federal money was flowing in for training, equipment, and hiring new police; and, most importantly, the ten thousand new NYPD cops that Giuliani’s predecessor, Mayor David Dinkins, had found the money to hire were now trained and ready to hit the street. The nationwide crack epidemic that had fifteen-year-old street-corner dealers carrying Glocks and shooting each other in record numbers all over urban America, moreover, was finally winding down, and partly as a result, the decline in violent and property crime that had begun nationwide in 1991 was accelerating.

Bill Bratton’s contribution would be to maximize that trend in New York City. By using COMPSTAT to track crimes and complaints and efficiently respond to them, and broken windows and stop-and-frisk policing to reorder the city, Bratton reenergized and refocused a previously adrift
NYPD that was now thirty-eight thousand officers strong.

As if by magic, New York’s homeless—a large number of whom were mentally ill and/or drug or alcohol addicted—also seemed to suddenly
disappear. Bratton had ordered the formation of a
special thirty-five-officer unit to push the homeless off the sidewalks of Manhattan. But that was just a quick cosmetic fix. What really began impacting the homeless problem was the success of David Dinkins and New York governor Mario Cuomo in raising funds for the building of 7,500 units of single-residency apartments for the homeless. One hundred million dollars, meanwhile, was also being provided by the Clinton administration for homeless housing, while large numbers of
new public housing units commissioned by Mayor Ed Koch during the eighties were simultaneously coming on line. The disappearance of the homeless and of aggressive panhandlers—who were being arrested for any code violation the NYPD could come up with—would have an instant impact, as the city’s residents realized that seemingly intractable, high-visibility problems could actually be made to go away.

Meanwhile, crime was plunging dramatically. The number of
murders in New York City in 1995 dropped by almost 385 from 1994—an almost 25 percent decline in just one year. By the end of 1996 they
would fall by almost 590, a decrease of over 37 percent.
Total felonies in 1995, moreover, would also decrease by 27 percent,
robberies by over 30 percent, and
burglaries by 25 percent.

So remarkable was Bratton’s impact on the city that in January 1996
his image, dressed in a 1940s tan raincoat, collar turned up Bogie-style, appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine. “Finally,” read the story’s cover line, “We’re Winning the War Against Crime. Here’s Why.” By sheer force of will, William Bratton had become that rare thing not seen in America since the gangbuster days of the 1930s, when J. Edgar Hoover had become the face of not just the FBI but American law enforcement: a national celebrity cop, one who was being hailed as New York’s savior.

Willie Williams, 1992–1993, Los Angeles

Meanwhile, back in L.A.,
Willie Williams, despite his troubles with departmental insiders, was also being hailed by the public, who continued to hold him in high esteem. In October of 1992, his job approval rating
was 67 percent. By February of ’93 it had
jumped to 72 percent. And by the winter of 1993, a
Los Angeles Times
poll found Williams the most popular public figure in the city.

Unfortunately, exactly the opposite was growing even truer within and around the LAPD, where something akin to bewilderment had set in, and a pattern was starting to emerge. The commission would give Williams policy directives,
and he would ignore them. His energy seemed to be flagging, and his organizational skills seemed weak or nonexistent when it came to planning for big policy changes. It was as if he’d run extremely hard to get the job of chief, continued to sprint toward the finish line as he attended those hundreds of confidence-building meet-and-greets, and then suddenly realized that he was only at the start of the marathon ahead.

Meanwhile, another realization was starting to set in: not only did Willie Williams have no idea how the political process and important LAPD-related bureaucracies of Los Angeles worked—which was understandable—but he had no desire to
learn
, about either the city or how the department’s history informed its present.

Being incurious was a particularly grievous character trait for Williams, given that he was in many ways a one-city provincial. He knew only the Philadelphia PD, and was an utter stranger to Los Angeles and the Machiavellian machinations of the LAPD.

In Los Angeles, for example, the political control of the police department was multilayered, and many people needed to be courted as potential allies if Williams was to succeed at reform. (The Philadelphia police commissioner, on the other hand, was directly accountable only to a powerful mayor.) But instead of learning about and using L.A.’s elected officials to further his goals, Williams chose to ignore them as much as he could.

In fact, Williams would tell reporters as a point of pride that “
in Philadelphia he had only one boss—the mayor,”
but in Los Angeles “he had 21 bosses” (the mayor, the Police Commission, and the city council) and “didn’t want to be seen in the camp of any one of them.”

Williams was also uninterested in building professional alliances, at least in Los Angeles. He quickly
stopped attending L.A.’s Criminal Justice
Group, for example. The group, which met regularly, comprised the city’s and the county’s top law enforcement officials and judges, and representatives of the state attorney general’s and governor’s offices. Throughout his five years in office, Williams would attend only two of the group’s meetings, missing the opportunity to rub elbows with people who had an enormous amount of collective experience working in his strange, new city and county, and who could also have become highly influential allies.

But he wanted none of that. Not even when he was being courted. “
He never talked to the commission about building partnerships or soliciting advice,” says Anthony De Los Reyes. “Anytime I tried to broach the subject of creating a political power base or at least a network of people that could support him—because it was already clear he wasn’t getting any support within the department—he wasn’t interested.”

So De Los Reyes, who believed that “a chief of police can’t function without a constituency,” organized a group of influential players from Los Angeles’s business and political community to meet with Williams. “I got them together . . . and we all sat in a dining room waiting for Willie to show up for our breakfast meeting,” De Los Reyes later recounted. “Then he called and said he couldn’t make it. I asked if we could meet another time, and
he said he’d get back to me. But he never did.”