Crime numbers can be slippery.
Prior to 1928, the New York City Police Department did not keep citywide crime statistics. No one even bothered to try. Then Mayor Jimmy Walker ordered his police commissioner, Grover Aloysius Whalen, to start keeping records on the frequency of murders, robberies, and other kinds of crime. Commissioner Whalen, a ruthless enforcer of Prohibition laws, was rigid in other ways as well. He was famous for saying, “There is plenty of law at the end of a nightstick.” Whalen also said, “The fundamental weakness of police service is lack of scientific knowledge and training.” He went on to create the New York Police College, a precursor to today’s Police Academy, promising that “in the course of time, virtually every member of the New York department—and there are upward of 19,000—will have taken courses in the College.” But perhaps one of his most lasting contributions to modern policing was his role as the city’s first number-crunching police commissioner.
For the next four decades, New York usually recorded four hundred to six hundred murders a year.
The numbers jumped around a little, and their trustworthiness was at times a subject of hot debate. But by crime-stat standards, homicide numbers were generally considered the most reliable. That was for one simple reason: it was a whole lot easier to recast a robbery as a larceny—or to slip a simple-assault report into the circular file—than it was to hide the bodies at the city morgue.
Like many other things, the homicide figures started to change in the 1960s. Racial tensions were rising. Guns were easier to find. Violent crime was getting more violent everywhere, not just in New York City, and more people were being killed. In 1967, John Lindsay’s second year as mayor, the city logged 746 murders. By 1970, Lindsay’s fifth year, the total hit 1,117. It was 1,680 in 1973, his last. Lindsay’s one-term successor, Mayor Abraham Beame, managed to stabilize the numbers. They went from 1,554 murders in 1974 to 1,557 in 1977, even with the pressures of the city’s fiscal crisis and police layoffs.
The numbers remained fairly stable through the first seven years of the Koch administration. Then came crack cocaine.
The drug arrived from the West Coast in 1985. I’d never heard of crack before. But one day that summer, I was out with the narcotics unit of the 106th Precinct in Ozone Park, Queens, when I felt something crunching between the sidewalk and my shoes.
“What’s that?” I asked.
The cops explained that those were crack vials. Suddenly they seemed to be everywhere. Crack, I learned, was created by heating small pinches of cut, powdered cocaine until it formed into tiny rocks, which could then be smoked in a glass pipe. The drug was cheap, fast acting, and highly addictive. In a matter of months, the city had an enormous crack problem.
New York had been through many drug waves over the decades. The city had absorbed opium addicts, pot smokers, acid trippers, heroin junkies, and pill heads. But we’d never experienced the fast and brutal ravages of a drug like crack cocaine.
Nineteen eighty-five saw 1,384 homicides. Two years later, the city had 1,672 murders. Then 1,896. Followed by 1,905 in Koch’s final year in office.
Oddly, Mayor Koch didn’t suffer much politically. No one really seemed to blame him. He had been a reliable booster of the police department. The police unions generally supported him. The city’s tabloids—New York Newsday had recently joined the Daily News and the New York Post—gave extensive coverage to the crack wars and all the resulting violence. But responsibility was rarely placed at Mayor Koch’s feet.
The Koch-era crime momentum was so tenacious, it spilled into the first year of the Dinkins administration, 1990, when New York City murders would hit an all-time high of 2,245. But David Dinkins didn’t get off nearly as easily as Ed Koch had. Even before the first-year totals were in, when Dinkins had been on the job less than nine months, the New York Post came at the city’s new African American mayor with a pounding front-page headline.
DAVE, DO SOMETHING!, the headline demanded.
Just in case anyone missed the point, Post editor-in-chief Jerry Nachman penned his own personal slam titled “Do-Nothing Dave Dinkins,” which followed up on the previous day’s editorial, “Where Are the Voices of Outrage?”
Koch, who’d been in office for twelve years, had gotten a pass. Now, after eight months, Mayor Dinkins was being pilloried as the crime wave crashed in on him. And the new mayor didn’t like it one bit. He decided to do something.
Dinkins summoned Commissioner Brown to city hall and demanded, with obvious frustration in his voice, “Tell us how many people you need.”
It was a remarkable request. Many of the people around Mayor Dinkins in city hall, including former city budget director Paul Dickstein, had argued for years that the precise number of police officers really didn’t have much of a correlation with the level of crime. Crime, they were convinced, was a product of large socioeconomic forces like poverty, unemployment, family disintegration, and substance abuse—not the number of cops on the beat. The police couldn’t possibly be everywhere. All they could hope to do was respond after crimes were committed. Police staffing was just a political number, fine for pacifying community leaders and police union bosses but largely meaningless in the battle to reduce urban violence and crime. But Dinkins felt cornered, I believe. He thought the attacks were unfair, but he also felt like he couldn’t just ignore them. Dave had to “do something”—now.
Commissioner Brown, who’d been in New York for only the same eight and a half months Dinkins had been mayor, had no independent view of how many police officers the city of New York might need. At his previous job in Houston, he had overseen approximately five thousand officers, a force barely one-fifth the size of the NYPD. I, on the other hand, had now been in the NYPD for more than a quarter century. So he turned to me, his first deputy commissioner, and asked me to come up with a number and a plan.
I knew we had to move quickly, and we couldn’t afford to miss anything. I assembled a task force of eighty people. I brought in experts from the department’s Office of Management Analysis and Planning, where I had once worked, who knew the police bureaucracy better than anyone.
In forty days—lightning speed for a city bureaucracy—we assembled a report that advocated an aggressive staffing plan coupled with dozens of practical ways to make the department more efficient. For instance, we used to send a squad car to every fire. The fire department didn’t want us there and, in most cases, didn’t need us there. They already had large red trucks to block the traffic. We discovered we could save 250,000 radio runs a year if we quit responding to fires except when the FDNY asked us to come. Load shedding, we called that. It freed up police resources for actually fighting crime.
We devised formulas (based on caseload and types of cases) for determining how many detectives should be assigned to each precinct.
We estimated that the average radio call should take thirty minutes. With that average and a count of how many calls went to each precinct, we came up with more efficient ways of managing the radio-car assignments. Our goal was to free up patrol officers so they could be engaged in community-policing tasks for 30 percent of their tours.
We reviewed practical strategies for community policing, a concept to which the mayor and the police commissioner were both committed.
In the end, we settled on a number, the data point everyone was waiting to hear. The NYPD needed five thousand more cops, we declared. Along with the many new efficiencies, it would be enough to make a difference and still seemed doable in a city the size of New York. In addition, we proposed adding a few hundred new officers each to the city’s housing and transit forces, which were still separate agencies back then. On October 2, 1990, Mayor Dinkins announced a plan we called Safe Streets, Safe City.
We still had to pay for this somehow, which would mean a new city surtax and an increase of some city property taxes. But even though most of the money would come from city residents and businesses, under New York law, the state legislature would have to approve the tax hikes. Some of the money, city hall suggested, could be raised with a new two-dollar scratch-off lottery ticket. It took almost a year of tough negotiations in Albany and sometimes with the city’s own representatives in the state legislature. But city council speaker Peter Vallone helped us rally support in important Democratic and Republican circles, and both the state assembly and the state senate ultimately supported the plan.
I likened Safe Streets, Safe City to the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes’s oversize prototype for a military transport plane. It was large. It was impressive. Many thought it would never fly. But it finally got off the ground—and what a difference it made.
There was turbulence to come. The great diversity—economic, racial, ethnic, religious—that made the city vibrant also delivered fresh challenges every day. But Safe Streets, Safe City gave us a map into the future, which turned out to be vitally important in pulling the city back from one of its most frustrating and damaging challenges, the scourge of violent crime.
* * *
It was always something in New York, where a tragic traffic accident could assume huge symbolic potency and burst overnight into major social conflict. At 8:20 p.m. on Monday, August 19, 1991, Yosef Lifsh, age twenty-two, was driving a station wagon west on President Street in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. His car was the last of three in the motorcade of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, grand rebbe of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic sect. The rabbi was returning from his weekly visit to the grave of his late wife. The procession was led by an unmarked police car with its lights flashing.
Crossing Utica Avenue, where the light was yellow or red, depending on whom you believe, Lifsh’s station wagon struck another car and careened onto the sidewalk, toppling a six-hundred-pound stone pillar and pinning two children against an iron grate. One of the children was seven-year-old Gavin Cato. The son of Guyanese immigrants, he was on the sidewalk near his apartment on President Street, repairing his bicycle chain. The other child, Gavin’s seven-year-old cousin, Angela Cato, was also hurt.
By the time an EMS ambulance crew arrived at 8:23, Lifsh was being pulled out of the station wagon and beaten by three or four men. A crew from the Hatzolah ambulance corps, a volunteer service that operates in Jewish communities around the world, also arrived on the scene, as did a police car. The Hatzolah crew drove Lifsh from the scene while the EMS crew worked to pull Gavin and his cousin from the wreckage. Once EMS freed Gavin, they drove him to Kings County Hospital, arriving at 8:32. Gavin was pronounced dead soon after that. Volunteers from a second Hatzolah ambulance treated Angela Cato until a second city ambulance arrived and took her to the same hospital.
Rumors, most of which turned out not to be true, spread quickly through the neighborhood. That Lifsh was intoxicated. That Gavin Cato died because the Hatzolah ambulance crew refused to help non-Jews. That Lifsh was on a cell phone. That Lifsh lacked a valid driver’s license. That police prevented people, including Gavin’s father, from assisting with the rescue. Regardless of the truth, the rumors spread. Over the next couple of hours, the crowds grew. Soon several hundred young people were on the streets. Some rocks and bottles were thrown. Around 11:00 p.m., someone reportedly shouted, “Let’s go to Kingston Avenue and get a Jew!” A group of black teenagers set off toward Kingston Avenue, a predominantly Jewish street several blocks west, vandalizing cars and tossing rocks and bottles as they went.
Shortly before midnight, a few blocks away on President Street, about twenty black teenagers surrounded Yankel Rosenbaum, a twenty-nine-year-old doctoral student from the University of Melbourne in Australia conducting research in the United States. The teens stabbed him several times in the back and beat him severely enough to fracture his skull. Before being taken to the hospital, Rosenbaum was able to identify one of his assailants, sixteen-year-old Lemrick Nelson Jr.
Mayor Dinkins and Commissioner Brown went to Crown Heights seeking to dispel some of the tension on the street. Their presence had no noticeable effect on the rioters, who rampaged late into the night. Rosenbaum died before dawn at Kings County Hospital. The New York State Health Department later decided that his death was a result of inadequate treatment by doctors in the hospital’s emergency department, though the stab wounds, including one the doctors missed entirely, certainly didn’t help his prognosis.
As the violence was erupting on the streets, I was at the home of Jeremy Travis, the police department’s general counsel. The New York media were surprisingly slow to jump on the story, but we got a couple of reports from headquarters about what was going on.
The timing was especially unfortunate—and not just because of the steamy August heat. Friday, August 16, three days before Gavin Cato and Yankel Rosenbaum were killed, the NYPD’s highly experienced, well-respected chief of department, Robert Johnston, had retired. His successor, David Scott, had gone on vacation, leaving Chief of Detectives Joseph Borelli as the acting chief of department.
I was available to help. I’d been precinct commander in Crown Heights. I knew the neighborhood. I had relationships with people on both sides of the uproar. But I had my orders: Commissioner Brown had told me directly that my responsibility as his first deputy commissioner did not include dealing with operational matters like this. That was the chief of department’s job. Lee Brown made clear to me that those orders still applied even after Johnston handed over the position to Scott.
The first night of rioting led to a second night of rioting, which seemed to be hurtling toward a third. By Wednesday afternoon, the media were all over the story, emphasizing the senseless violence of it all. The Crown Heights riot was news around the world. People in the Jewish community were outraged. They called it a pogrom. People in the black community were outraged. The police, who had turned out in large numbers by then, seemed to lack a plan.
Joe Borelli did his best. David Scott was still vacationing. But Crown Heights was still teeming with gangs of young people running around, grabbing random victims, setting cars on fire, throwing rocks and bottles at police, and ripping open the occasional storefront and grabbing armloads of merchandise. Much of this was caught on camera and ended up on TV. Most of the rioters looked very young, thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds, with a few hardened adults in the mix. People on the street were shouting vile things: “Kill the Jews…. Hitler didn’t do his job…. Get the cops.”
The police appeared to be holding back. They were not moving aggressively into the crowds. When the police did act, their response seemed haphazard and poorly organized. They just looked lumpy out there. You had thirty-five-year-old uniformed officers carrying ten pounds of gear chasing teenagers in Nikes who knew the neighborhood better than the cops did. That’s a losing footrace every time. If there was a clear strategy for crowd control, no one could seem to articulate it. The people running the operation seemed like captives of political paralysis. Timidity, I knew from my own experience with street disorder going back to the scarecrow days, was never a good way to regain control of out-of-control streets.
I think the police officials were all trying to second-guess the city’s racial politics. This was a new time in New York. There was a black chief of department, David Scott. There was a black police commissioner, Lee Brown. There was a black mayor, David Dinkins. Some people said the police commanders were trying to read the political risks to their own careers. The biggest danger, police commanders may have calculated, was overreacting on the street. So they hardly reacted at all. No reality on the ground seemed to cut through this fog. Newsday columnist Murray Kempton summed it up like this: “Higher public office in New York is a bastion of ignorance that no fact can penetrate except as a rock thrown through your windshield.”
At 4:45 p.m. on Wednesday, as the media was setting up for a third night of violence, Commissioner Brown was announcing that the streets of Crown Heights were finally under control. This turned out to be wishful thinking. After the press conference he was driven to P.S. 167, an elementary school on Eastern Parkway in the heart of Crown Heights, for a meeting with Mayor Dinkins. As the commissioner’s car arrived at the elementary school, a group of young people broke away from the crowd, surrounded the vehicle, and began pelting it with rocks.
A 10-13, assist police officer, call for “Car One” was broadcast over the radio, and police came rushing to the scene. At least nine officers were injured in the melee. I heard that call come over, and I could hardly believe my ears. The police commissioner’s car was under attack on the streets of Brooklyn? Regardless of my instructions, I thought I really had to act. I got in my car, and I drove out to Crown Heights.
I went to the school on Eastern Parkway where the mayor and the police commissioner were. I heard the commissioner exasperatedly telling someone in uniform, “These are kids! These are kids! Why can’t we handle them?”
A good question, I thought.
After the meeting at P.S. 167, Mayor Dinkins visited the home of Gavin Cato, the young boy who had died. Outside the house, Dinkins used a bullhorn, trying unsuccessfully to calm the gathered crowd. Later that evening, the mayor visited eight of the injured officers at Kings County Hospital. At the hospital, the mayor and Milton Mollen, the deputy mayor for public safety, had a tense conversation with Lee Brown, questioning the effectiveness of his tactics and directing him to “take all steps necessary to end the violence.”
“Do you want me to get involved in this?” I asked Commissioner Brown when we finally had a chance to speak privately.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
I called a meeting of chiefs and commanders for the next morning at seven o’clock in the first deputy commissioner’s office at 1 Police Plaza.
“What the hell is going on here?” I asked quite pointedly. The vagueness and equivocation that I got in response were more than a little disturbing—though hardly surprising, given what had just occurred.
As far as I could tell, the mayor had made the previous day’s visit to the Cato home with thoroughly inadequate security. I didn’t want the mayor’s detail to be the next one calling a 10-13. “Why didn’t you put any cops on the roofs?” I asked the supervisors in the meeting.
“It’s very dangerous,” one of the chiefs answered.
“Too dangerous to protect the mayor?” I asked. “That’s what we get paid for.”
We quickly drew up a plan and put it into action that day. This was a basic take-back-the-streets operation. We brought fifty horses to the streets of Crown Heights. These are impressive animals, and the police mounted unit knew how to handle them. They generally do not get spooked.
We had two rows of patrol wagons as well. We moved the wagons and horses to wherever the disturbances were brewing. We would seal off one end of the street. By the time the kids ran in the opposite direction, we would have that end sealed off, too. At that point, we could pick them up one by one.
The streets were calm again in a matter of hours—and they stayed that way.
* * *
For years, people would debate what happened in Crown Heights and why. The good news was that we learned something there. And we didn’t have to wait around for the two years it took Richard Girgenti, the state’s criminal justice director, to complete his six-hundred-page report. Girgenti had some perfectly good insights about the senselessness of the violence and inadequacy of the police response, though his report did read like a bit of a political hit on the Dinkins administration. His biggest complaint about my performance was that I showed up too late to the riot. That was certainly true. But my hands were tied.
“Mayor Dinkins later acknowledged that the police had been using techniques for a peaceful demonstration, but not for violent civil unrest,” the report concluded. “First Deputy Commissioner Raymond Kelly, not previously involved, assumed responsibility for devising more appropriate tactics.”
Waiting for Girgenti to draw his conclusions would have been a waste of valuable time. After the riots, I asked Deputy Chief Louis Anemone to help put together an NYPD disorder-control guide so every officer on the scene of a disturbance would know exactly what to do. The plan included specific street formations and manpower charts and other nuts and bolts of urban riot control. The message was a practical one: instead of just swarming a neighborhood with cops, think strategically. Going forward, we would emphasize teamwork and mobility. The department acquired a new fleet of police vans that could carry one sergeant and eight officers to the scene of a disturbance and move them around as a team once they got there.
That technique and our mobile-team approach got its first serious test less than a year after Crown Heights and one full year before the Girgenti report. It happened on Monday, July 6, 1992, a week before the Democratic National Convention was set to open in New York. Three days earlier, in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, police officer Michael O’Keefe and two plainclothes partners surrounded and attempted to disarm a suspected drug dealer named Jose “Kiko” Garcia, who was carrying a fully loaded .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. After a struggle in the lobby of an apartment building at 505 West 162nd Street, Officer O’Keefe shot Garcia twice, killing him.
The shooting appeared to be justified, but some people in Washington Heights were clearly upset. Dinkins went to the neighborhood to calm the rising tensions. He paid for Garcia’s funeral. None of that seemed to have much effect. That Monday, a large part of the neighborhood erupted in violence around 7:30 p.m., when an angry crowd of about two hundred people was blocked from approaching the Thirty-Fourth Precinct station house, where O’Keefe was assigned. It was a scary night.
Lee Brown was out of town. I was acting commissioner. I went up there immediately. I could see fires burning on Broadway all the way from 135th Street to 160th Street. People shot out the streetlights. Others rushed into a sneaker store and came out with as many pairs as they could carry. Many other stores were looted as well. Teenagers on the streets were throwing bottles. Someone fired on a radio car. A police helicopter was hit by gunfire and had to return to base. An NYPD Emergency Service truck came along, spraying water on the burning cars. The whole neighborhood was in chaos.
The lessons of Crown Heights proved invaluable. Officers dispersed into vans and moved around the neighborhood, jumping out at the scene of any disturbances. The violence didn’t stop instantly. It took several hours for things to calm down. One man died when he fell five stories from a rooftop at Audubon Avenue and 172nd Street while officers were chasing him. By dawn, dozens of people were in custody on charges ranging from disorderly conduct to arson. But our new methods proved themselves unmistakably on the streets of Washington Heights that night and became standard NYPD procedure from then on.
The rioting lasted one night—not three. I stayed in the area until dawn. What was surprising to me was how clean the streets were by 8:00 a.m. The Sanitation Department did a terrific job. Only in New York could you have a seventy-block riot at night and still have clean streets the next morning. I met with Mayor Dinkins at 8:00 a.m. at city hall and gave him a report.
Kiko Garcia wasn’t the only police controversy that summer. The papers were also filled with reports of disgraced officer Michael Dowd, who’d spent the past six years robbing drug dealers in East New York with a crew of corrupt cops in Brooklyn’s Seventy-Fifth Precinct. He then dealt some of the stolen cocaine in middle-class neighborhoods on Long Island.
It was a major embarrassment, and Mayor Dinkins felt he had to do something, which I understood. Lee Brown also asked me to do an investigation of the Dowd case. I produced a comprehensive report on the subject that we would later use as a guide for reforming our internal investigative processes. Dinkins created a group called the City of New York Commission to Investigate Allegations of Police Corruption and the Anticorruption Procedures of the Police Department. Chaired by deputy mayor and close Dinkins friend Milton Mollen, the group became known as the Mollen Commission. The panel was being described as the most extensive outside review of the police since the Knapp Commission of the 1970s. I later ended up testifying before the Mollen Commission as police commissioner. Dinkins also asked the city council to establish the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which I opposed. I testified against its creation, which to his credit Dinkins permitted me to do. I wasn’t against oversight. I just didn’t believe this model would work because the panel didn’t have police department personnel involved in the investigations. I knew that such a structure would set up an adversarial relationship that would become more a political platform than any search for objective truth.
On August 3, 1992, Lee Brown announced he was stepping down as New York police commissioner. This wasn’t because of rising crime or growing disorder. The crime numbers still weren’t good, but they weren’t quite as bad as they had been. Murders, which had peaked at 2,245 in 1990, dipped to 2,154 in 1991 and were on pace toward another decline for 1992.And for the first four months of the year, overall crime reports fell by 6.7 percent compared to the same period the previous year. People were crediting Safe Streets, Safe City for boosting the number of officers on foot patrol to 3,000 from 750, even though the program’s big wave of new hiring wouldn’t happen for another two years.
At a news conference at city hall, Brown announced he would be returning to Houston on September 1 to care for his wife, Yvonne, who was ill. “My family comes first,” the outgoing commissioner said. That day, Dinkins announced that David Scott, the chief of department who’d stayed on vacation during the week of the Crown Heights riots, was retiring as well. He cited health reasons.
The mayor named me acting police commissioner. Scott, whose relationship with Brown apparently was not great, suddenly changed his mind and decided to stay.
* * *
I got the job for real on October 16, 1992, two years and nine months into the Dinkins administration, making me the thirty-seventh police commissioner of New York. I was fifty-one years old.
By any measure, the job was historic and enormous. I oversaw twenty-five thousand police officers in the largest department serving the largest city in the United States. My predecessors included such towering figures as Theodore Roosevelt—though, technically, the job title back then was “president of the police commission.” Like many commissioners before me, I sat at what I was told was Roosevelt’s desk, although I have to say I have never seen a picture of him sitting at it.
In his two years running the department, 1895 and 1896, the man who would become governor, acting secretary of the navy, vice president, and finally president made radical changes on the job. He appointed recruits based on their physical and mental qualifications—not their ethnic backgrounds, political affiliations, or social connections. He reorganized the Detective Bureau. He started a bicycle squad to ease traffic congestion. He opened a pistol-training school. He adopted the Bertillon system, a precursor of fingerprint identification. He instituted annual physical exams and regular inspections of firearms. He hired the first woman to work in police headquarters, Minnie Gertrude Kelly. He had telephones installed in the station houses. He invited big-time newspaper writers like Jacob Riis and Lincoln Steffens to tag along with him. Roosevelt even popped up on officers’ late-night beats to make sure they were on duty, a stunt that produced glowing write-ups for him in the press.
Not bad for a two-year term.
But I didn’t have much time for dwelling on history. We had some pressing issues staring us right in the face. One of them was making the NYPD more diverse. When I took over, the department was 11.5 percent black in a city with a black population of 25 percent. I knew we had to do better than that. My first full day as commissioner I went on WLIB radio, popular in the African American community, and spent forty minutes on The Breakfast Club with Art Whaley, taking calls from listeners and talking up police recruitment.
Fighting crime would always be our top priority, I said. But I was also committed to having a department as diverse as the city it served. “This is the first day, the first official day that I am police commissioner,” I said. “It’s nine o’clock in the morning. I think it shows my level of commitment and my level of concern…. My goal is to see if for once we can break the back of this 11.5 percent African American representation that has been our maximum representation level for nine years.”
New York wasn’t alone in facing this challenge. Police departments across the country were having trouble diversifying, either because the departments weren’t welcoming to minority candidates, because the candidates weren’t interested in the job, or because of lingering historical legacies of prejudice and discrimination. Clearly the effort would require real leadership from the top.
The applications started coming in.
At the same time, we were doing better with the crime numbers. The murder rate continued to dip, going down to 1,995 in 1992. We targeted subway beggars and squeegee men, homing in on quality-of-life offenses.
Back-loaded as it was, Safe Streets, Safe City still hadn’t delivered the truly big burst of hiring it promised, but we put more and more of the cops we had out on the street, engaging with the community in a wider variety of ways. Crack never fully went away, but the epidemic did show its first signs of easing, which was fortunate and sad at the same time. Part of the explanation was that so many addicts were dead or in prison, but I also think the drug had lost some of its allure on the street. Crackheads had become a subject of ridicule and derision. They were seen as the lowest people on the block—physically violent, mentally deranged, and so desperate they would do anything to get high. “I may be a whore,” you’d hear someone say on an especially ragged street. “But I’m no crack whore.”
By comparison, “a bong and a forty” were suddenly gaining popularity again.
* * *
On Friday, February 26, 1993, when I’d been police commissioner a little more than four months, something happened that no one was remotely prepared for—not the city, not the police department, not the FBI or the CIA.
The modern age of Islamic jihadist terrorism came to New York.
An explosion occurred in the parking garage below the World Trade Center at 12:18 p.m. I was in my office at 1 Police Plaza when the call came in. I jumped in my car and reached the Trade Center by 12:25. The initial reports said, “Likely transformer explosion.”
That must be a mighty big transformer, I thought when I saw how much smoke was already in the air on West Street. I was impressed by how quickly the first responders were on the scene. This was less than ten minutes after the explosion, and scores of police, firefighters, and paramedics were already out of their vehicles and rushing toward the center’s twin towers, the underground concourse, and the parking garage. Five minutes later, that number was well into the hundreds. The whole neighborhood was filled with sirens and flashing red lights.
We set up a temporary command center in a ballroom at the Vista International Hotel, which was connected to the twin towers in 3 World Trade Center. I was standing on a chair directing people when someone said sharply, “We have to evacuate now. The engineers say the building could collapse.”
I wasn’t waiting to hear that twice. We left the ballroom immediately. It was cold outside. There was a light snow falling. But we walked out to the sidewalk, where I led a multiagency meeting to assemble an initial strategy. The city’s Office of Emergency Management was within the NYPD at the time. As we spoke, the tenants were streaming down from the towers on their own. We had reports of stairways filled with thick, dark smoke. Other people were stuck in elevators. Our Aviation Unit plucked some people off the roof. As the people were escaping the buildings, firefighters and police officers were heading up the north and south towers, aiding with the evacuation, directing people down, trying to pry open some of the stuck elevator doors.
In all, six people were killed in the attack. Bob Kirkpatrick, Steven Knapp, Bill Macko, and Monica Rodriguez Smith, who was pregnant, were having lunch in their basement Port Authority office. John DiGiovanni was a salesman who happened to be in the parking garage when the bomb exploded. Wilfredo Mercado was at his desk checking in food deliveries for Windows on the World restaurant. His body was found by police seventeen days later in the rubble. He was still in his chair. One thousand and forty-two people were injured that day, including eighty-eight firefighters, thirty-five police officers, and one EMS worker. Most of the injuries to first responders were from smoke inhalation and falling broken glass, but others were more serious. The terrain was difficult, causing broken kneecaps, ankles, and facial bones. One firefighter, Kevin Shea, was attempting to reach trapped victims when he fell into a massive crater, badly injuring himself.
Fairly quickly, the investigators discounted the whole transformer idea, mostly because of the size of the explosion and the fact that there was no electrical machinery nearby that seemed capable of producing such a blast. I went down and looked at the hole on level B-2 of the parking garage myself. The crater measured nearly one hundred feet wide and went three levels up. A far more disturbing narrative gradually took shape. No credible group claimed immediate responsibility, but as the investigators began combing through the wreckage and debris that afternoon, the explosion looked more and more intentional. No perpetrators waited around. The scene bore some similarities to recent terror attacks in the Middle East, where zealots would enter a bus or a marketplace and blow themselves up. We didn’t yet know exactly what we were facing, but I immediately called for tighter security around the region’s airports, hotels, business centers, and major tourist attractions, putting the city on a level of alert higher than at any time since the Persian Gulf War. We put extra people on the bridges and tunnels and in the subway.
That evening, I had a conversation with a building engineer who’d been trapped in an elevator and had managed after several hours to cut himself out with a key. By then people were asking whether someone might have intended to knock one building into the other, toppling both of them. The engineer was adamant. “It can’t happen,” he told me without an ounce of doubt in his voice. “The way those buildings are constructed, there is just no way. Those buildings could never come down.”
Later that night, Veronica and I walked outside our apartment in Battery Park City, a few hundred yards from the towers, and stared at the darkened World Trade Center from several different angles. It was eerie. Those towers were never dark. We were still looking when the lights came back on.
I knew not to read too much into that, but it was encouraging nonetheless.
We held a press conference the following afternoon, Saturday, with Governor Mario Cuomo, New York FBI chief James Fox, and other officials from the fire department, police department, and FBI, whose agents took immediate charge of the investigation. Mayor Dinkins was on a trade mission in Japan, but the first deputy mayor, Norman Steisel, was there. It was Cuomo who first shook off the investigators’ natural hedging and caveats. “There is an immense crater,” the governor said. The damage, he continued, “looks like a bomb. It smells like a bomb. It’s probably a bomb.”
We were already working on the theory that the bomb had been brought into the garage in a vehicle that then exploded. The first big break in the investigation came on Sunday. I was standing outside the Trade Center in my leather jacket when I saw a group of city police detectives and FBI agents walking out of the garage with what looked like a piece of scrap metal.
“A differential from a truck engine,” someone explained to me. I’m not an expert on truck engines. I learned that the differential is the part of the transmission that allows the outer drive wheel to rotate faster than the inner drive wheel during a turn. Whatever. What made this differential so important was what was imprinted on it.
NYPD bomb squad detective Donald Sadowy, who had graduated from Brooklyn’s Automotive High School, was sifting through the debris when he found this engine part and knew it might contain a vehicle identification number. With that number, investigators were able to trace a yellow Ryder truck back to a rental agency in Jersey City. The renter, a young man named Mohammed Salameh, had reported the truck stolen and returned for his $400 deposit. He was taken into custody at the rental agency. Finding and identifying the blown-up truck part, then tracking down the driver—that was the key step in cracking the case.
At the center of the plot, investigators determined, were a militant Islamic organization called al-Qaeda and a young man named Ramzi Yousef. Born in Kuwait, he had spent time in an al-Qaeda terror training camp in Pakistan, where in 1991 he began planning an attack in the United States. This seemed like an utterly unique story when we first heard it. At that time we were completely unaware of how other, similar stories of Islamic fundamentalism and violent radicalism would come to affect the future of New York.
Ramzi Yousef recruited his uncle, senior al-Qaeda member Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to help finance and organize the plot. Yousef arrived illegally at John F. Kennedy International Airport on September 1, 1992. He carried a false Iraqi passport and claimed political asylum. He was allowed into the country and given a hearing date. He rented an apartment in Jersey City and began scoping out locations to attack, settling on the World Trade Center as an iconic symbol of capitalism and the West. He phoned Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a fiery blind cleric who preached at the Al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn. With the blind sheikh’s blessing, Yousef began gathering the ingredients for a 1,500-pound urea-nitrate, hydrogen-gas-enhanced explosive device. A bomb that large, placed just right, he believed, could topple the north tower into the south tower, bringing both towers crashing to the ground.
On the morning of the bombing, a Friday, Yousef and a Jordanian friend, Eyad Ismail, drove the rented Ryder truck into the World Trade Center parking garage. They arrived around noon and parked on the B-2 level. They got out of the truck. Yousef ignited a twenty-foot fuse. He and Ismail fled. Later that day, Yousef got a ride to Kennedy Airport, where he used falsified travel documents and escaped on a flight to Pakistan.
One by one, suspects were captured, mostly from abroad. In October 1993, Salameh, Nidal Ayyad, Mahmud Abouhalima, and Ahmad Ajaj went on trial at U.S. District Court in Manhattan on charges of conspiracy, explosive destruction of property, and interstate transportation of explosives. All four were convicted in March 1994 and sentenced to life in prison.
Back in Pakistan, Ramzi Yousef continued planning terror attacks, including the bombing of Philippine Airlines Flight 434 and, with his uncle Khalid, the so-called Bojinka plot. This was an elaborate three-phase plan that included assassinating Pope John Paul II, bombing eleven airliners flying from Asia to the United States, and crashing a plane into CIA headquarters in Fairfax County, Virginia. In 1995, a tip from a South African Muslim man named Ishtiaq Parker led agents from the Pakistani intelligence service and the U.S. Bureau of Diplomatic Security to Yousef. They went to the Su-Casa Guest House in Islamabad, which was owned by Osama bin Laden, where Yousef was arrested while trying to set a bomb inside a child’s doll.
Yousef was extradited to the United States. In two separate trials at U.S. District Court in Manhattan, he was convicted of being involved in the Flight 434, Bojinka, and World Trade Center plots.
“Yes,” he declared in court, “I am a terrorist, and I am proud of it. And I support terrorism as long as it was against the U.S. government and against Israel, because you are more than terrorists. You are the one who invented terrorism.” He was sentenced to three life sentences, one for each plot.
His uncle Khalid wasn’t captured until 2003. In the intervening years, Khalid would remain an active plotter and funder of international terrorist attacks, including 9/11.
* * *
I learned some larger lessons from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Everyone did.
We learned how dangerous the threat of radical Islamic terrorism could be. We learned that these weren’t random individuals in solo acts of violence. This was a network. It might be loosely organized. It might have many tentacles. But it did have some kind of organizational structure and an impressive ability to plan. We had no idea yet how well funded the organization was or how extensive it might become or how grand its aspirations were. But it was capable of training operatives in far-off countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan and slipping the attackers into America and other countries of the West. I also learned how little information the New York City Police Department had about these and similar threats. With the FBI running the investigation, we knew only what they told us, and they didn’t tell us much. There was a Joint Terrorism Task Force at the center of the investigation, and a handful of NYPD detectives were part of that. But the FBI was very much in charge. They held the information closely, and they seemed to like it that way. That grated on me more than a little. I was the police commissioner of New York City. New York City was the site of the attack. I wanted daily reports, hourly reports—I wanted to know everything that was happening in this important investigation. I wanted a strong voice when major decisions were being made. I’m not sure anyone was purposely trying to hide things from us, but they certainly weren’t too forthcoming. I didn’t like the arrangement, but that was how cases like this one were handled in that era, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it yet.
* * *
In the spring of 1993, I got a call from the White House. It was Bernard Nussbaum, counsel to President Clinton. He had a question for me. “You have any interest in being FBI director?”
It was not a call I had expected or a question I had a ready answer to. I knew the Clinton administration was trying to replace FBI director William Sessions, who’d been appointed by President Ronald Reagan and had been criticized in a scathing internal ethics report that was prepared in the final days of George H. W. Bush’s administration. The report questioned Sessions’s use of perks like FBI aircraft and armored limousines.
Though I’d never worked in the FBI—or anywhere else in the federal government outside of the Marine Corps—I was certainly flattered by the call. I was also floored by it.
“Let me think about it,” I told Nussbaum.
I’d had regular contact with Jim Fox in the FBI’s New York office and with the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which the FBI controlled, about the World Trade Center attack. I’m not sure whether that’s what sparked the call. Nussbaum left me with the impression that people in the Clinton administration had been impressed by how I responded to the bombing.
But I felt like I was just getting started as New York police commissioner. I had a heaping pile of issues on my plate—the terror aftermath, the Mollen Commission, a big debate over what kind of firearms police should carry, the need to keep pushing the crime numbers down. David Dinkins was running for reelection. He’d put a lot of faith in me.
I retuned Nussbaum’s call. I told him how much I appreciated the inquiry—but no, thanks. I had too much to do in New York. I had to follow through on my commitment. I wasn’t ready to leave yet. Louis Freeh, who was a federal judge in Manhattan and a friend of mine, became FBI director.
* * *
For years, New York police officers had been complaining that they were outgunned in the urban arms race. With drug gangs carrying Uzis and terrorists packing who knew what, the cops sometimes felt like they were showing up with peashooters and cap guns. Many were eager to trade their standard-issue six-shot .38-caliber service revolvers for 9-millimeter semiautomatic handguns.
At the same time, New York state assemblyman Joseph Lentol of Brooklyn was pushing a bill in Albany that would essentially have allowed police officers to carry whatever weapons they liked. Such a law would have been disastrous. A police department is not a mob of self-armed vigilantes. It should be a professional law enforcement agency with standards, balance, and rules. By 1993, I was ready to take a comprehensive look at the issue.
There was some resistance to the idea of changing to semiautomatics from the old-timers. They argued that revolvers were more reliable, easier to keep clean, and less likely to jam. They weren’t entirely wrong about that. Critics in other cities had also found that some officers had a tendency to overshoot when they were given faster-acting weapons that held at least twice as many rounds.
We conducted extensive testing at the Rodman’s Neck shooting range. We tried a 9-millimeter pilot program in the Organized Crime Control Bureau and the Emergency Service Unit and found there was no overshooting. I became convinced. We had to bring our weaponry into the modern era. With proper training, the police could deal with the jamming issue and learn to shoot only as many times as needed. In August 1993, three 9-millimeter automatics were approved—the Glock 19, the SIG Sauer P226, and the Smith & Wesson 5946. We also limited the ammunition to ten-round magazines.
When we made the announcement about the new firearm regulations, I explained that the reasoning behind the change was both ballistic and psychological. “Officers feel more secure, and that’s something that can’t be discounted.”
I wouldn’t say the new guns arrived with no negative repercussions. But on balance, making the switch was the right thing to do.
* * *
Mayor Dinkins faced a very tough reelection campaign in 1993. Republican Rudolph Giuliani, the former United States attorney who’d been beaten by Dinkins four years earlier, was running again. With a strong assist from New York’s tabloid newspapers, the Daily News and the Post, Giuliani succeeded in portraying Dinkins as passive, unfocused, and vain. I didn’t agree with Mayor Dinkins on everything. His core constituents were not always the police department’s strongest supporters—nor were some of the mayor’s closest aides, for that matter. But on the important issues related to policing, Mayor Dinkins supported the department. I believe he got a bum rap. As commissioner, I felt supported by him.
He started Safe Streets, Safe City, ultimately putting thousands of new police officers on the streets of New York. In the final thirty-six months of his term, he ushered in a crime decline that ended a violent thirty-year spiral and lasted for decades to come. During that period, crime dropped more swiftly, in actual numbers and by percentage, than at any point in modern New York history up until then.
Throughout the reelection campaign and even later, Mayor Dinkins never got proper credit for this. Most of the benefits of Safe Streets, Safe City, his signature law enforcement achievement, didn’t happen during that term. The new police hiring wasn’t scheduled to take root until the latter part of 1993 and 1994. Some of the mayor’s advisers thought he might even back away from hiring extra police after he won a second term.
When the New York Times endorsed Dinkins for reelection, the paper’s editorial board made a positive comment about his selection of me as police commissioner. But Dinkins never got the chance to reap the rewards of the policies he helped create. On Tuesday, November 2, 1993, Giuliani beat him by two percentage points, becoming the city’s first Republican mayor in a generation.
It was a hard-fought race, and Giuliani ran an impressive, disciplined campaign. However, much of what happened next was set in motion by David Dinkins. Murders were down again in 1993, dropping to 1,946. When 2,800 new police officers hit the streets in January 1994, he wasn’t mayor anymore. Giuliani was. Others, many others, took the credit.
The new mayor appointed his own police commissioner, William Bratton.