Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (8 page)

Few of the city’s residents had any faith in the city’s police to effectively intervene. In many ways the NYPD had never recovered from the self-inflicted blow it suffered in the late 1960s and early 1970s when it was racked by a deeply rooted corruption scandal. Hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of dollars in graft was being paid by heroin and other drug dealers to street cops, but most especially and most systemically to narcotics detectives. It flowed up to captains and field commanders, a fact that then was ignored by high-ranking police and city officials wanting to avoid the kind of embarrassing, epoch-defining police scandal that eventually erupted despite their best efforts to contain it.

Afterward the police commissioner resigned and was followed by much of the department’s top-ranking command staff. In the decades that followed, a chastened, gun-shy NYPD focused on eliminating police payoffs and keeping its officers away from drug crimes and racially charged situations that could explode into scandal.
In 1972, for example, a police officer was shot and killed with his own gun inside a Black Muslim mosque in Harlem. The officer had responded to a bogus 911 call of a fellow police officer reportedly under duress within the mosque. When additional officers arrived on the scene, they rounded up and detained a group of suspects; but, fearing a confrontation with an angry crowd gathered outside, they left the mosque without the suspects. The killing of a cop in such a circumstance is the kind of crime pursued with fierce, unbridled determination by police departments, but in this case no one was ever charged in the officer’s murder.

Richard Goldstein, in his
New York Times
obituary of Albert Seedman, the legendary cigar-chomping NYPD chief of detectives during the early 1970s, exactly caught the dizzying tumult of the era. In just one eleven-month period, he wrote, “three pairs of police officers were shot—four of the officers were killed and two grievously wounded—in ambushes by the Black Liberation Army. The underworld boss Joseph A.
Colombo Sr. was shot in the head by a gunman who was himself shot to death seconds later at Mr. Colombo’s Italian-American Day rally in Columbus Circle. The mob leader Joey Gallo was fatally shot at a Little Italy restaurant [and] gunmen posing as guests looted 47 safe deposit boxes at the Hotel Pierre.”

That was New York City in the seventies. The decades that followed would also have their own watershed racial and criminal events. One occurred in 1989 when a lone young woman jogging in Manhattan’s Central Park was so savagely attacked that she was near death when found. Five teenage boys from Harlem who’d been in the park that night were soon arrested. It was a lurid, horrific, electrifying story, made more so by the fact that “
the Central Park jogger,” as she was dubbed by the tabloid press, was white, and the five arrested and then convicted teenagers were black. There were significant problems with the case from the start, but little was said about that in the ugly heat of the moment. In 2002, however,
the defendants were declared innocent by a new Manhattan district attorney, who, after reviewing the evidence, successfully petitioned to have their convictions overturned. (A murderer and serial rapist later confessed to the attack.) But all that hadn’t taken place until thirteen years later—thirteen years during which the case as earlier adjudicated had played a pivotal role in stoking racial fears among white New Yorkers.

A second incident that stunned the city occurred early in William Bratton’s tenure as chief of the transit police. In late August of 1990, during the U.S. Open tennis tournament in Queens, a twenty-two-year-old tourist from Provo, Utah, named
Brian
Watkins was standing with his family in a subway station when they were attacked by a gang of eight muggers. When one punched his mother in the face and a second slit his father’s pants pocket open to expose his wallet, Watkins tried to defend them and got stabbed to death with a four-inch butterfly knife for his courage.

That September,
New York
magazine ran a lead story entitled “All About Crime,” with a shiny
black .38-caliber revolver on the cover, along with some questions and promised information: “Is it worse than ever?” “Who kills whom?” “How safe is your neighborhood?” and “The
most dangerous subway stations.” That same month
Time
magazine also ran a
New York cover story, this one entitled “The Rotting of the Big Apple,” while the
New York Post
addressed then Mayor David Dinkins with a banner headline: “Dave,” it demanded, “Do Something!”

Six years earlier, another case of subway violence had also become a cause célèbre. A thin, pale man named
Bernhard Goetz, fearful of being mugged, as he had been previously,
armed himself with a handgun. When four would-be muggers crowded around him on a subway car, demanding $5, he shot each of them once. Moments later, standing above one of the fallen, he asked, “Want another?” and shot him again. Tellingly, astoundingly, Goetz was hailed as a hero by a vast number of New Yorkers and
found not guilty by a jury (although he
later was sentenced to eight and a half months in prison for illegal gun possession). The public’s reaction was a signal of the growing movement for stronger police protection.

Perhaps because he was an out-of-towner, Bill Bratton looked at the situation with fresh eyes and saw something others did not in Brian Watkins’s murder. He saw opportunity. “The whole catalyst for the turnaround in New York City occurred right then,” he’d later say. “Watkins’s murder became a cause célèbre; his death the face of crime in New York City.”

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

A twenty-year veteran of the Boston Police Department, Bill Bratton was not a man who would catch your eye as he entered a room. Slender and just a bit below average height, he wasn’t big on laughing or smiling. But charm never was what Bratton had to sell. Nor was warmth or flattery. As he himself once pointed out: “Some people are
great back-slappers, quick with an embrace, a peck on the cheek or a pat on the butt. I didn’t grow up with that.” Instead, Bratton’s strength lay in his head-down, no-nonsense manner, exceptional problem-solving and conceptual skills, and keen intellectual curiosity. At times he’d hold his chin in an upward tilt, the tilt of the supremely confident—a confidence best reflected in his actively seeking out smart, existentially alive people to generate ideas and serve as his trusted eyes and ears.

When he spoke, there was no flare, no smugness in his delivery. Rather, his attitude said: “I have the facts, I know what I’m doing and what talking I’m about, and I have too much regard for myself to try to bullshit you.”

Which was not to say that Bratton wasn’t an extraordinarily ambitious and calculating self-promoter. In fact, among the reasons Bratton had taken the job as chief of the New York City Transit Police, as he himself would later point out, was because those subways cars were running under the
media capital of the world
, and success there would be noticed when the job of New York City police commissioner became available. And if that didn’t pan out, well, the LAPD had an aging, controversial police chief, and that job paid $175,000 a year—then the highest in the country.

He saw and billed himself as a “change agent,” and that was the criterion on which he desired to be judged. In just the ten-year span from 1983 to 1993 he would head the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Police, the New York City Transit Police, the Boston Police Department, and the NYPD. “Did I not come in, do what I said I’d do, and get the long-term crime reduction job started?” he’d essentially ask when criticized for jumping from one police department to another. “Yes, I did” was his answer. “Look at the numbers—there’s your proof.”

Above all, Bratton was a realist wearing a visionary’s clothes. Big-city policing circa 1990 was a world mired in corruption and racism, proudly scornful of social science and data-driven policy. He loved his profession more than most, but saw it for what it was while understanding just how essential, how vital good policing could be to a city’s well-being.

He was, in short, a new guy to the old-time religion, ready to preach a new, more effective gospel. One that was desperately needed. And that would prove his greatest gift.

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

A working-class Bostonian from the
all-white Irish district known as Dorchester, Bratton was the son of
high school sweethearts who’d met growing up in the Charlestown housing projects. They were of Scottish,
Irish, and French-Canadian descent. His mother, June, was a housewife, and his father, “Big Bill,” worked two full-time jobs, one in a
chrome-plating factory and one as a mail sorter for the U.S. Postal Service. He was, by Bratton’s account, deeply respected by all who knew him, and adored by his son. A lot of Bratton’s exceptional self-confidence came from his father, whom Bratton later described as “slight of build but just tough as nails.” “
Somewhere along the line,” Bratton wrote in his autobiography,
Turnaround,
“my father developed the confidence that he could handle whatever came along. You could tell in the way he carried himself. When he felt that somebody was misusing authority, he didn’t care who it was, and I picked up his temper to react to unjust treatment. Throughout my life I’ve never been shy about professing my point of view against authority. It’s ironic that I went into policing because so often I took on authority figures—teachers and others.”

As a boy Bratton had been smart enough to be accepted into
Boston Latin, the city’s most prestigious public school, but not smart enough to master foreign languages, especially the required Latin, and was consequently asked to leave.

In 1966, he entered the United States Army, was assigned to the military police, and wound up in a
sentry dog unit in Vietnam. Discharged two years later, he joined the
Boston PD in 1970 at the age of twenty-three. The department at the time was poorly paid, listlessly corrupt, intensely, proudly inbred, and reflexively provincial, with a leadership cadre, as Bratton later put it, “steeped in Boston Irish culture [and]
Irish Alzheimer’s: You forget everything except the grudges.”

In short, the
2,800 cops on the Boston PD were rarely the best and the brightest, or the most diverse. In 1970 there were only
fifty-five minority officers in the entire department, and not one woman. Given the lack of first-rate competition, it initially proved a good place for a smart, ambitious young cop to shine.
Fewer than twenty-five officers had college degrees, and when part-time scholarships were offered to officers at
Boston State University, Bratton leapt at the opportunity.

The sixties were not a decade that had excited Bratton. He didn’t like their flavor—their hedonism, anarchy, and drugs—nor did he like the radical politics of the counterculture. “I always loved my country and
loved our system of government,” he would later say. “When it became fashionable to be anti, I never bought into that.”

BSU, consequently, would prove a kind of saving-grace finishing school for a provincial young cop, providing him a wider intellectual experience that enabled him to think beyond the closed world of the Boston PD, where “all your friends are cops, all your talk is cop talk, and all you hear are cop ideas.” Listening to liberal, antiwar classmates and professors allowed him to break out of what he’d later call the “
Blue Cocoon.”

By 1980, at the age of thirty-two, he’d risen through the ranks to become the department’s second in command, its executive superintendent. Not only had he become the Boston PD’s wonder boy, he also became its media man, its face, and its chief spokesman.

It wasn’t long, however, before he ran into trouble. Profiled in
Boston Magazine
, he let it be known that his goal was to become Boston’s police commissioner. The comment was immediately deemed unseemly and self-aggrandizing by the department’s old guard, and as he was unceremoniously being transferred out of the chief’s office, he began looking around for a new opportunity.

He found it in 1983 when a corruption scandal arose at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, and he replaced its police chief. The MBTAP was a small, underfunded department, haphazardly led and badly equipped, but the scandal brought attention, and with it significant money from the state to change the situation. And Bratton did. He was then invited to join a select group of police executives, public officials, and academics developing innovative community policing strategies at the Executive Session on Policing at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Around the same time, he was honored with a prestigious award by a newly formed organization of law enforcement professionals and prominent social scientists known as the Police Executive Research Forum. The award got him noticed, and in 1990—one year before the Rodney King beating—he accepted the job of chief of the NYTP. By then, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers had come to view their subways as a series of dark holes—each one submerged in air so dank and foul you felt the need to hold your breath
when you entered; each desecrated by discordant Magic Marker graffiti and encrusted in a coat of grime that sapped your soul; and many so unsafe that you feared mugging or harassment every time you stepped into them. That was the feeling. And there was truth to all of it.

But it was not necessarily the whole story. As Bratton later wrote in
Turnaround
, by 1990 the Transit Authority “had virtually
wiped out graffiti on the trains.” In
TA focus groups, women interviewed believed that 30 percent of the city’s crimes were committed on subways, and 40 to 50 percent of its murders. In fact, only
3 percent of felonies occurred in subways and only between 1 and 2 percent of homicides. But people felt trapped in subways, where there was no place to run.

Other focus groups found that many
transit officers were deeply demoralized and hated their jobs. Many were assigned to stand by a subway station’s turnstyles and make sure nobody evaded paying a fare. It was security guard work, and essentially fruitless. There weren’t enough subway cops on any work shift to cover all the subway entrances, so someone determined not to pay could just walk a few blocks down to the next station. What they wanted to do, the officers said, was to protect the public.