Each police precinct, I kept discovering, had its unique culture and quirks. When you walked in the door the first day, you never knew who was really in charge. It might have been the previous commander—or maybe not. Sometimes the lead clerical person ran the place. Nothing got done without her blessing. Sometimes the union guys—the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association delegates—ran things. Or the administrative lieutenant. Or someone who used to work there and didn’t anymore, but still had a shadowy grip on everything. You couldn’t find any of this written anywhere, certainly not in the Patrol Guide or on some organizational chart. But many precincts and police commands had their own unofficial, permanent governments in place. These people stayed. The commanders came and went.
As I continued climbing the commanding officer’s ladder of the New York City Police Department—from cadet to recruit to patrolman to sergeant to lieutenant to captain to deputy inspector and beyond—I tried to stay alert to the real power dynamics, the ways things actually got done. Human organizations are run by human beings, and the NYPD was human to its core, in both the good and the bad senses of that term. By the time I was promoted to captain, in 1980, I had really come to appreciate that. After a year in the Emergency Service Unit, where the cops did an amazing job dealing with the deinstitutionalized mentally ill, among other things, I took over the Eighty-Eighth Precinct in central Brooklyn, which covered the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Clinton Hill neighborhoods. The Classon Avenue station house, built in 1890, was a creaky mess. It had serious roof leaks and a dank, musty smell. But as I soon learned, the precinct’s deterioration was more than physical. The Eighty-Eighth had become a destination for problem cops. I counted 25 administrative transfers, as disciplinary cases were called. That’s a huge number in a precinct of 120 officers or so. Some previous commander must have done something that really annoyed someone at headquarters.
Just before I arrived, there’d been a retirement party in the station house basement. When the partying cops got upstairs to the main room where the desk was, someone fired a shot at the clock. The bullet missed. When I got there, the bullet hole was still in the wall a couple of feet from the clock. After a long night of drinking, no one’s aim was very good. There might have been some shots fired on the street, as well. Nobody could prove it either way.
There was a back door that led into an alley next to the station. The cops had held barbecues out there. You could see the area from DeKalb Avenue. “We won’t be holding any more backyard barbecues,” I said as I put a padlock on the door.
In the months to come, we transferred out many of the twenty-five disciplinary cases. A lot of them, I knew, could and did become good cops with a change of scenery. They had to put in a UF-57 form, a transfer request. They didn’t want to be in that mess of a precinct either. With the help of the personnel bureau, we just expedited the transfers.
I instituted a lot of other changes. Charlie DiRienzo, a lieutenant who worked closely with me, was a valuable ally in making the place run like a professional precinct. This wasn’t brain surgery. It was basic police practice and leadership psychology: elevated expectations, clear responsibilities, an orderly work environment, objective performance measurements, praise for those who succeeded, and closer supervision for those who did not. I’m sure some officers grumbled about my moves. But I was the commander, so I was in charge.
After two years, the changes we’d made earned the Eighty-Eighth Precinct a unit citation, recognizing it as being one of the best precincts in the city.
* * *
As I moved from precinct to precinct, I discovered, you could make things better by being collaborative. Other times you had to take a firmer approach. Almost without fail, there was the challenge of dealing with the unions—that’s right, unions, plural. Every rank had its own union. The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. The Sergeants Benevolent Association. The Lieutenants Benevolent Association. The Detectives’ Endowment Association. Even the captains had a union. I had been a member of four of the five unions and realized that if it wasn’t for the unions, cops—myself included—would probably all be earning minimum wage. Unions did lots of good things. But relationships among all these ranks weren’t like in the military, where officers and enlisted personnel spend their entire careers on separate tracks. In the police department, everyone started together at the bottom, and some worked their way up. This meant that supervisors were overseeing their buddies from all the way back in the police academy. This structure tended to keep the department somewhat inward-looking and resistant to change.
My next post was the Seventy-First Precinct, which covered Crown Heights, one of Brooklyn’s most interesting and challenging neighborhoods—perhaps a hundred thousand Caribbean and African Americans and fifteen thousand Eastern European Lubavitch Hasidic Jews. The relationship between the two groups was tense, and some of that tension spilled into the precinct. There were strong feelings—in the community and inside the Empire Boulevard station house—mostly around the belief that city hall was pressuring the police to do special favors for the Hasidic community. Long before I got there, a radio car was stationed twenty-four hours a day at 770 Eastern Parkway, the Lubavitcher headquarters and the office of Grand Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and at the mikvah, where Hasidic women went to ritually cleanse themselves. There was a term for these assignments. It was a house-of-worship car. I had a lot of interaction with the Hasidim and also the black community. That’s where I first got to know a charismatic young minister named Al Sharpton, who was beginning to gain a following in the neighborhood.
In those days Crown Heights had a serious violent crime problem. Hasidim were being attacked on the street. They formed their own vigilante groups for self-defense. One day, someone poured five gallons of gasoline against the side of the Lubavitcher headquarters and tried to ignite it. For some reason, it didn’t catch. Officers from the Seventy-Seventh Precinct who happened to be passing by grabbed the arsonist. The growing drug epidemic was a big problem, too. It produced vicious gun battles for street-sale turf. I could hear the gunfire from my office. There were almost one hundred murders that year in our precinct alone. The crime numbers were rising fast. We were out on the streets protecting all segments of the diverse community. If a police officer was involved in a shooting, it meant my tour would be extended another twelve hours because of the extra investigation involved. I remember some very long nights in the office.
* * *
I left Crown Heights temporarily for Harvard University, where I spent the 1983–84 academic year earning a master’s degree in public administration in the Mid-Career MPA Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. As I had moved up in the police department, I had learned a lot about the NYPD and about law enforcement in general. But I thought a broader view might be helpful, too. I figured that top people from other disciplines might have some fresh ideas worth considering. How to structure large organizations. How to use data to guide good decisions. How to select the right people for the right jobs. We had our ways of doing all these things, but police departments, I knew, could be insular places. I really wanted to hear what other smart people thought. Harvard was hugely impressive. There were senators, authors, CEOs, and heads of state just walking down the hall. In the course work, there was a great emphasis on collaborative problem solving, an approach that runs counter to the sometimes hierarchical business of policing. I worked with some brilliant professors and fellow students from around the world. At Harvard I got a chance to step out of the cauldron of daily policing and into an environment that encouraged deeper thought. I was especially impressed with Dean Graham Allison, who also taught classes. I found him to be thoughtful and deep but very approachable. The same could be said of Professor Mark Moore, who had great insights on how to lead public agencies into the modern age. With the guidance of those two and others, I came to understand how police departments were first and foremost organizations composed of human beings who could be developed, encouraged, and motivated in ways that few police executives had ever thought of before.
After earning my master’s degree, I returned to New York and, for a short time, to the Seventy-First Precinct and to the streets of Crown Heights, where not much had changed. Then I got a call from Commissioner Benjamin Ward.
“I want you to go to the 106th,” he told me.
I knew immediately what that meant: another troubled command. This time I was being assigned to the notorious stun gun precinct. I had never met Commissioner Ward, who’d been sworn in by Mayor Ed Koch sixteen months earlier as the city’s first African American police commissioner. Apparently he’d heard about a captain in Brooklyn who was a marine, a lawyer, and a recent Harvard graduate. “I think you’d be right for this,” he said on the phone. “We need your help.”
On April 17, 1985, an eighteen-year-old high school senior named Mark Davidson was arrested for selling a ten-dollar bag of marijuana to an undercover officer on a quiet street in Ozone Park, Queens, not far from John F. Kennedy International Airport. What happened after that minor arrest was something more than minor corruption or major sloppiness. It was torture.
Davidson was the first of four suspects to step forward and charge that, during interrogation at the 106th Precinct, he had been tortured with electric shocks from a handheld stun gun. Davidson allegedly gave a confession after one of the officers threatened to use the stun gun on his genitals. The story was all over the papers. Outside investigations were soon under way. An angry Mayor Koch asked U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese to open a civil rights inquiry.
By week’s end, four officers had been arrested on assault charges. Commissioner Ward ordered the transfer of all nineteen of the precinct’s top command. More than fifty uniformed officers were questioned by the Queens district attorney’s office. Declaring a “crisis of confidence,” Commissioner Ward also removed the borough commander in Queens.
The assumption was that the command was out of control. In reality, what I found was a few cops guilty of horrendous acts. Sergeant Richard Pike and Officer Jeffrey Gilbert, and Officer Loren MacCary, the officers accused of stun-gunning Davidson and the others, were ultimately convicted of assault and sent off to prison.
The vast majority of police officers had no idea what was going on, nor did they countenance it when they found out. My message to them was, “The whole world is watching. You guys have to perform to the highest standards.” We had to repair relations with the community, which had been badly strained. We tried to show that the police were there for them. And we did.
Commissioner Ward seemed pleased with the precinct’s turnaround. He pulled me into headquarters several months later to run the police cadet program. In the time since I’d left the program nearly a quarter century earlier, it had veered away from its innovative purpose, becoming a “trainee” program with no college requirement. Ward wanted to get the program back to Adam Walinsky’s original intent. Jeremy Travis, who was counsel to Commissioner Ward and would later become president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, oversaw the process. It was my job to design the new program—the training, the assignments, the uniforms, the logos, everything. The cadet program, we decided, should be the start of a professional career path in policing. We recruited students from top private and public universities. I felt like we really were recruiting the department’s next generation of top leaders.
After I finished rebooting the cadet program, Ward asked me to take over the Office of Management Analysis and Planning, which meant reporting directly to him. He and I began working closely together. Ben Ward was a terrific role model for me. He was an excellent police official—period. He had the self-confidence to make tough decisions. He didn’t need to please everyone all the time—a quick road to mediocrity. He really didn’t care whether you liked him or not. Like other commissioners before him, however, he had his quirks. Even before the New York police officially traded their old six-shot revolvers for semiautomatics, Ward kept a Glock on the credenza behind his desk in the commissioner’s office. “Kelly, don’t walk behind me,” he’d say when I came in the door. “Don’t walk behind me.” He always thought he was going to be attacked somehow. Before he retired, he sent me back as commanding officer of the Special Operations Division, which encompassed the Harbor Unit, the Aviation Unit, and some of the department’s other shiniest assets. I’m not sure if he did this purposely, but the commissioner was broadening my experience in ways that would prove highly useful. I was an assistant chief by then.
When David Dinkins took office in January 1990 as New York’s first African American mayor, he appointed Lee Brown as police commissioner. Brown wasn’t a New Yorker, but he had run police departments in Atlanta and Houston. He had what I would call a professorial demeanor and was known as a big booster of community policing: the concept that police officers shouldn’t see themselves merely as crime fighters, but as social problem solvers as well. The new mayor certainly believed in that. Ben Ward urged Lee Brown to appoint me as first deputy commissioner, the department’s number two job, and Brown did. Robert Johnston Jr., Ward’s chief of department, the top uniformed position, stayed on in that job.
I knew Bob Johnston well. He’d been an assistant chief when I was a captain in Brooklyn and Queens. He could be a bit tart, but he had great knowledge of the department and the city. He and I actually got along fairly well. Lee Brown was cautioned that he shouldn’t have Johnston reporting to me, a former subordinate. So the new commissioner made clear to both of us that we had very different areas of responsibility—Johnston handling day-to-day police operations, I overseeing longer-term and strategic issues. We both reported directly to Brown. That sounds like bureaucratic trivia. But this internal structure remained in place even after Johnston retired, and its limitations ultimately hurt the department when Crown Heights blew up.