MAYOR Beame had just started in on a campaign reelection speech to a standing room only crowd of five hundred at the Traditional Synagogue in Co-op City when the lights went out. After he continued on in the darkness for a couple of minutes, promising to do something about the putrid smell wafting over from the
Pelham Bay landfill and to close all the porn shops in the area, his aides ushered him out.
The mayor climbed into his Chrysler and was spirited down to Gracie Mansion, where a candlelight strategy session was already in progress. After taking an aide’s advice to lose the tie and roll up his sleeves—“it makes you look like a tireless worker”—Beame proceeded to a darkened City Hall. He invited a handful of newspapermen to lean over his shoulder and listen in as he grilled Con Ed’s chairman, Charles Luce, who assured him that the city’s power would be back soon.
Several hours later a bleary-eyed Beame officially declared war on the utility. Standing on a table outside the police commissioner’s office, where he and his staff had relocated to take advantage of the emergency generators, he accused Con Ed of “gross negligence—at the very least.” (Luce knew a scapegoat when he saw one, quipping, “If we didn’t have a Con Ed, we’d have to invent one.”)
Beame did not follow his predecessor Mayor Lindsay’s lead and take to the riot-torn streets himself. Such a tour, he explained to reporters, might just be a “stimulant” to more violence. Instead, he and his entourage visited the Upper East Side, where they stopped in on an empty fire station. Everyone was up in Harlem fighting the arson fires that had begun erupting shortly after the looting began. When he returned to police headquarters at a little after 5 a.m., Beame held another press conference in which he called on religious leaders to get into patrol cars and calm their communities. One of those who did, a priest in the Bronx, had his altar stolen while he was gone.
Some twenty-five hundred cops had been on the beat when darkness fell. Within minutes Police Commissioner Codd had ordered all officers to report for duty immediately, only instead of insisting that everyone try to find a way to get to his command, Codd told them to report to the nearest precincts.
This proved to be an enormous mistake. Ever since the 1962 repeal of the Lyons Law, which had required all cops to live in the city,
police officers had been moving to the suburbs in droves. Most of those who continued to reside in the city lived in Queens or on Staten Island, so in the early hours of the blackout, there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of idle cops hanging around quiet precincts. Many were eventually reassigned to neighborhoods in need, but when they arrived in civilian clothes, without flashlights, helmets, or nightsticks, they were as good as useless. One South Brooklyn commander was thrilled to see a load of Staten Island cops pull up at his station house and disappointed when they stepped off the bus looking like what he described as “a tennis team.”
Some cops simply ignored, or rather pretended not to have heard, Codd’s call-up order. Morale in the department had been on the skids ever since the ’75 layoffs. Mayor Beame’s recent threats to put one cop in each patrol car in half the city’s precincts as a further cost-cutting measure hadn’t helped matters any. It perhaps explains why, as the looting peaked between midnight and 4 a.m., some ten thousand cops, 40 percent of the force who were neither on vacation nor on sick leave, had yet to check in.