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Criminal Justice

Criminal Justice

Crime Still Declines, But Why, And Will It Continue?


In 1993 Mayor Giuliani's first police commissioner, William Bratton, announced their determination to take back the city: "We will fight for every street. We will fight for every borough." They fought and they won. Having last month hammered down temporary crime spikes one final time, Mayor Giuliani left office triumphantly on January 1, saluting his people like an exiting Roman general.

His parting gifts included yet another record decrease in violent crime--down 12.4 percent through mid-December 2001 from last year. All categories (murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny, and auto theft) declined, ranging from fie percent for murder to 16 percent for auto theft. In mid-December, the city had recorded 617 murders, compared with 651 through mid-December last year, and 672 for all of 2000. And despite several notorious killings, 2001 is expected to set yet another record low in police shootings of civilians.

MAYOR GLOATS

In his farewell speech, Mayor Giuliani took a moment to refute the conclusions of a March 4, 2000, New York Times story that heralded Boston's and San Diego's police strategies as "national models" for combining the crime reductions of New York with the community involvement that was lacking here. Many police chiefs and criminologists, said the Times, felt "a sense of sadness that a great opportunity has been squandered" here.

Over the last six months, said Giuliani, crime jumped 3.9 percent in San Diego while declining 7.6 percent in New York; the murder rate increased 67 percent in Boston while dropping 12 percent here. Overall Boston has 82 percent more crime and San Diego 16 percent than New York, the mayor calculated. "Which policing policy would you want to follow?" he asked. Or as the New York Post said, "It would be a crime not to gloat a little."

DO POLICE MATTER?

Exactly why so many people have stopped committing crimes remains a matter of contentious dispute, say George L. Kelling, Senior Fellow at The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and William H. Sousa, Jr., Director of Evaluation, Police Institute, Rutgers University. In a recently released report, "Do Police Matter? An Analysis of the Impact of New York City's Police Reforms," Kelling and Sousa argue that there has been no systematic attempt to statistically parse out the relative contributions of police actions, the economy, demographics, and changing drug use patterns on crime. This they set out to do.

By measuring crime trends in individual precincts, they conclude that the decline in violent crime correlates with arrests for misdemeanors--and that for every 28 misdemeanor arrests, the city had a decline of one violent crime. In other words, they conclude that what's called "broken windows" policing--the strategy of policing minor disorderly behavior like graffiti or fare beating in the subways--is strongly associated with the decline in violent crime. They also argue that at least on a precinct-by-precinct basis there is no association with the major competing explanations for crime reduction, such as the improved economy and labor market that created opportunities for youths previously tempted by drug dealing, the declining use of crack cocaine, the changing values of at-risk youth, and the increased legitimacy of social institutions such as the family.

While commending broken windows policing, Kelling and Sousa argue that an overlooked key to New York's crime reduction rests in a specific problem-solving strategy: accurate and timely intelligence, rapid deployment, effective tactics, and relentless follow-up and assessment. Precinct commanding officers are able to address and correct current crime problems immediately by combining timely analysis with proven and innovative crime-reduction techniques, including the ability to deploy patrol, detective, and specialized precinct units for crime control, rather than having to rely on centralized special units.

BUT PROBLEMS REMAIN

Still, the new police commissioner, Ray Kelly, has his work cut out for him. As George Kelling says, "The big drops--15 percent and more--have taken place. Now we're working on the margins."

And that's not all. Despite its many achievements, the Giuliani administration has left minefields for the Bloomberg administration.

Right before Christmas Commissioner Bernard Kerik announced 227 last-minute and generous promotions in the police department. Not only do the promotions entail immediate budgetary implications, they increase the likelihood of expensive retirements since police pensions are based on the last year's salary.

Meanwhile, an organization called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, representing black police officers, announced it was suing the city, saying the Police Department had secretly and illegally monitored its political activities by reviewing telephone records and following members in order to intimidate officers who had been critical of the department.

A Giuliani-appointed commission, the Commission to Combat Police Corruption, found that increasing numbers of rookie cops have faced disciplinary problems. Disproportionate numbers have also been flunking out of the Police Academy--the failure rate of the September 2000 class was twice that of the 1997 class. The cause of both problems may be lower recruiting standards.

Kelling, for one, is hopeful, however. He makes three points about the future. First, if Giuliani is right--and Kelling thinks he is--he has shown that crime reduction doesn't have to be held hostage to economic change or, indeed, any holistic societal reform.

Second, in his first term as police commissioner Ray Kelly devised the plan for dealing with squeegee men that subsequently became the cornerstone of the Giuliani-Bratton assault on quality-of-life offenses. "There's every reason to assume," says Kelling, "that we're going to be fortunate in having Kelly. He will maintain, even intensify, the quality-of-life campaign."

Third, the critical policing problem is going to be balancing vigilance against terrorism with the needs of street policing. But even here Kelling is hopeful, arguing that under Commissioner Kerik the police department had started developing good relationships with neighborhoods and communities. "The same vigilance we're going to need in the frontline battle against terrorism," says Kelling, "is the vigilance that helps the police become aware of bad things happening in neighborhoods." In other words, the collaboration with neighborhoods will be crucial both to the war on crime and the war against terrorism.

And since Ray Kelly made his reputation the first time round by working well with neighborhoods, Bloomberg probably has the right man for the job.

Julia Vitullo-Martin, a long-time editor and writer on urban affairs, is the former director of the Citizens Jury Project at the Vera Institute of Justice. She is now writing a book entitled The Conscience of the American Jury. 

New And Old Police Commissioner Ray Kelly


"Crime spikes," headlined the New York Post in late November. "Crime spurt," said the New York Times. Spike or spurt, crime is suddenly up. The four weeks ending Nov. 25 saw a 36.7 percent jump in shootings and a 25 percent increase in murders compared with the same period a year ago.

So even though the Giuliani administration is about to exit with yet another record yearly decline in violent crime, the last few weeks have not been good. It's clear that we're going to need a great police commissioner. Do we have him?

BEST-QUALIFIED EVER

By just about any criterion, Ray Kelly is almost surely the best-qualified police commissioner in New York City history. He had the job once before--from October 1992 until January 1994 under Mayor David Dinkins--and he was well qualified then. A former Marine colonel who had served in Vietnam, he graduated first in his class in the Police Academy in 1960, and then worked his way through 25 different commands over the next 31 years.

He went on from the NYPD commissionership to important jobs in the federal government and the private sector. He served as director of the International Police Monitors struggling to modernize the police force in the Republic of Haiti from 1994 to 1995. From 1996 to 1998 he was undersecretary for enforcement at the U.S. Treasury Department, and from 1998 to 2001 he was commissioner of the U.S. Customs Service.

Today he oversees the New York State commission that regulates boxing, and is global head of corporate security at Bear Stearns, the investment banking firm. (In accepting the police commissionership he gives up $450,000 a year in salary and generous benefits, for a job that pays a little more than a third of that.)

He has strong educational credentials--a bachelor's degree from Manhattan College, a law degree from St. John's University School of Law, a Masters in Law from New York University, and a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard.

He even looks like a cop.

So with the exception of a few churlish talk radio hosts who called him "Jelly Kelly," saying he was weak on crime--which nobody else really believes--most commentators were quick with lavish praise. Newsday's Robert Reno, for example, wrote that the choice of Kelly "was a Periclean act because there are people who regard Ray Kelly as someone as close as we come to a secular saint in this city, the man responsible for the decline in crime that has made it a more livable place, a figure who never confused histrionics with good police work and who served loyally in the Clinton administration." Pericles and sainthood in one sentence. The guy looks good.

THE FIRST TIME

Still, most New Yorkers want an answer to a simple question: How did he do the last time?

The answer is pretty well. For one thing he had a bit of luck. The national decline in both violent crime and property crime began in 1993 in the early months of his commissionership. He helped spur the decline in New York by instituting the Safe Streets, Safe City program and putting thousands more cops on the streets. (In 1990, after the shocking murder of a tourist in the subway, Mayor Dinkins got funding for an additional 6000 cops with an income tax surcharge.) Kelly believed in Broken Windows policing--taking care of minor signs of disorder so they don't become major. He initiated the campaign against the squeegee men, according to former commissioner William Bratton's biography, which subsequently became the linchpin of Giuliani's crime-fighting strategy.

Chris Stone, executive director of the Vera Institute of Justice, says every police commissioner faces a double bind. To succeed, a commissioner has to be both accountable for crime and accountable for the conduct of his officers.

Kelly staved off failure on both without fully succeeding on either the first time. In his first term, Kelly demonstrated his interest in the details of crime prevention, in particular getting the murder rate down from its 1990 mid-Dinkins administration historic high of 2,254. When Kelly left in 1994, the crime data showed 1,927 murders for the previous year. This pales before subsequent Giuliani administration achievements--including Commissioner Kerik's correct prediction last year that the city's murder rate would dip below 500--but it was a ray of hope at the time.

Kelly also staved off failure on police conduct. After a corruption scandal erupted in the Internal Affairs Bureau he successfully restructured it--or at least restructured it enough to hold critics at bay.

But this is a decade later. How is he likely to do now?

KNOWING THE NYPD

Kelly knows the NYPD well. Chris Stone recalls that Lee Brown (Kelly's predecessor as police commissioner) once said that you can't learn the department on the job. The cocoon of the commissionership is so complete that anyone who doesn't know the department already will have a very hard time getting a hold on it.

And New Yorkers want a commissioner who has hold of the department. Kelly's history has been to take charge while maintaining the loyalty of those who work for him. Paul Browne, an assistant police commissioner under Kelly who went on to work with him in Washington and Haiti, told the New York Times about his many hairy experiences alongside his chief: "You just knew he was there. He didn't, like, wait in the jeep, you know."

Kelly was a Marine before he was a cop, and Marine officers don't wait in the jeep. Marine officers stay with their men, says J. Robert Moskin, author of The U.S. Marine Corps Story. "The Marine officer," notes Moskin, "says 'follow me,' not 'go there.'" While this is the ethic of the New York Fire Department, it hasn't been the ethic of the NYPD, whose officers tend to be more of the go-there school of management. Kelly's ethic should be helpful.

A SAFE CITY

There is no mystery about what New Yorkers want. They want a safe city without ugly police-civilian incidents -- a safe city in which citizens are treated well. Will Kelly be able to deliver?

Certainly he knows how to say the right things. At the announcement of his appointment he promised: "There'll be no letup in the Police Department's aggressive suppression of crime and disorder. That means we will use proactive policing policies and practices to ensure that the law-abiding people of this city are not robbed of their sense of security by panhandlers and minor quality-of-life offenses."

But what about race?

RACE REARS ITS HEAD

As commissioner, Kelly demonstrated substantial sensitivity on racial issues, and was well-known for spending Sunday mornings travelling to black churches to recruit black NYPD candidates. Since only 10 percent of police officers today are black in a city that is 28 percent black, he is going to need that sensitivity over the next few years.

Race, however, is also the source of the one persistent criticism of Kelly--his handling, as deputy commissioner under Lee Brown, of the 1991 Crown Heights riots. A 1993 state commission investigating the riots gently criticized Kelly for not seeking "an active role" until three days after the trouble started. Cops stood by, and the higher-ups did nothing. Eventually Kelly ordered cops to take control of the Brooklyn streets, but well after enormous damage had been done. In a 1993 television interview, Kelly blamed Brown, saying the "buck stops at the top of the department." Brown should have given specific orders to commanders, he said.

Now the buck will stop with Kelly.

THE FEDERAL CREDENTIAL

Ray Kelly has federal credentials in spades, far more than has any other commissioner in history. He is going to need them as the NYPD jockeys with the FBI and the federal Department of Justice over jurisdiction. Terrorism is uppermost in everyone's mind even as low-level crime is making its way back to local streets. Cooper Union historian Fred Siegel argues, "In a time in which the distinction between war and crime has narrowed, Kelly has already worked in positions in which he had to deal with this reality. Given that we're a target in New York, it's a huge asset that he's in a good position to make a difference."

Still, says Siegel, the real test of Kelly's commissionership is likely to be local: how will he react when the first ugly racial confrontation between police officer and citizen occurs?

If he is really lucky and really good, that may not happen for a very long time.

Julia Vitullo-Martin, a long-time editor and writer on urban affairs, is the former director of the Citizens Jury Project at the Vera Institute of Justice. She is now writing a book entitled The Conscience of the American Jury.

Police Vs. Fire


The bodies of 250 firefighters still lie beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center. The sadness of the Bravest seems nearly unendurable. So when New York firefighters attacked New York cops at Ground Zero on November 2, injuring five of them, their assault was covered by newspapers and television around the world--but with restraint. The media chose to be subdued about what would have been a sensational front-page tabloid story at any other time.

But what's going on?

Firefighters had mounted a peaceful mid-morning march to protest City Hall's decision to reduce the fire, police, and emergency crew members who spot possible human remains in the debris. When the spotters identify remains, construction crews halt their work and rescue teams come in. Firefighters drape the remains in mourning and pray before carrying them out. The debris with no known remains is shipped off to the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.

You can see the problem immediately: remains that are not identified are dumped on one of the most infamous garbage heaps in the world--no mourning, no prayers, no mass. The drive of firefighters to keep that from happening to the bodies of their brothers is unrelenting. The fire union called the site sacred ground. And of course it is--New York's own Gettysburg.

City Hall had said the unstable site was dangerous. The 200 firefighters on the site were in harm's way--and impeding the clean-up. City Hall is almost surely right, but emotions are raw.

Chanting "Bring our brothers home," firefighters broke through police barriers and started fighting with cops. Cops called in reinforcements, and mounted officers and cops in riot gear appeared. The photos were shocking.

The sorrow of the times, however, should not keep city officials from pondering what this event means or its origin in earlier times.

HISTORIC ANTAGONISMS

The fire and police departments have been historic antagonists. Both are uniformed services engaged in dangerous work, though the firefighters have always held a glamour edge. Both have elite units that are sent into the most difficult situations. And both have long been over-staffed for everyday work though under-staffed for emergencies.

Indeed, the routine over-staffing of the fire department was one of the most serious management problems facing the incoming Giuliani administration in 1994. Fires of all kinds had been decreasing locally and nationally, due to a combination of technology (including sprinklers, smoke detectors and fire-resistant products), revived neighborhoods, regulation, and stringent codes. Superior prevention has forestalled much of the need for traditional fire fighting everywhere in the country. No city needed as many firefighters as before--and certainly not New York.

Mayor Giuliani could have simply closed fire houses, as many budget experts urged. But some mixture of gut instinct and a romantic attachment to the Bravest prompted him to look for other solutions. The most obvious was to find new work for firefighters to justify their numbers.

In many jurisdictions, including New York, firefighters found it in emergency services--ambulance work. The rationale was that the fire department would be in charge of rescues and emergencies, including medical ones. In February 1998, City Hall worked out a generous deal with the Uniformed Firefighters Association by which engine-company firefighters who became certified to respond to medical emergencies would earn an additional $1,500 a year.

The police union, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, was furious, charging that the historic police-fire pay parity had been breached by a hostile mayor. The mayor responded contemptuously that the PBA had refused all incentive discussions.

But incentive pay was not the end of the dispute.

Firefighters also argued for jurisdiction over the rescue work that had historically been handled by the police department's special services unit. They urged that the fire department be in charge of rescues, with the police having a secondary role subject to fire command.

Something close to this argument was implemented in the resolution of another bitter fire-police dispute on the scene: the protocol for police helicopter rescues drawn up by the Giuliani administration in 1994. The protocol directs police pilots to land at designated Manhattan heliports and await firefighters, who would then be flown to burning buildings. This cumbersome procedure has never actually been implemented. It may never have even been tried.

This is a shame. In many respects the protocol is a good one. The police need helicopters beyond emergency use, and therefore can manage a unit of skilled pilots and maintain a fleet. The fire department has little routine use for helicopters, and therefore cannot easily maintain a fleet. Better all around for the fire department to draw on the police in an emergency. Neither department has seemed prepared to allow that to happen.

This entire questionable scenario recently made the front page of the Wall Street Journal in a piece suggesting that the inter-agency dispute may have cost some New Yorkers their lives on September 11.

HELICOPTER RESCUES

Grandstanding. An ugly word. But that, according to a front-page Oct. 23 Wall Street Journal story, is exactly how the daring February 1993 police helicopter rescue of 28 people from the top of the World Trade Center was characterized at the time by officials of the fire department.

A bomb that exploded in the garage beneath the towers, killing 6 people and injuring 1,042, had sent smoke up through both towers. People who fled up the towers, rather than down, were successfully rescued after police helicopter crewmen chopped up roof-top antennae and broke through locked doors.

Yet instead of becoming a model for rooftop rescues, the police helicopter rescue was dismissed as dangerous and unnecessary, says the journal. The Association of Fire Chiefs harshly denounced the rescue as a "cheap publicity stunt" in a letter to the mayor.

Standard firefighting rationale is with the chiefs. Whenever possible, firefighters fight up to a fire, while always securing a line of retreat. The most dangerous fire is the one that is below the firefighter, such as a basement fire. Thus in normal firefighting experience, encouraging people to move to the roof--especially one reachable only by helicopter--is directing them in exactly the wrong direction. And the firefighters below would be concerned that a helicopter, caught in the wild updrafts of an intense fire, might itself crash, compounding the danger to anyone below.

Officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, then-owner of the World Trade Center, agreed with fire chiefs and officials not to plan for future helicopter rescues. Indeed, for security reasons the Port Authority chose to lock the two sets of heavy metal doors leading to the building's only roof exit--a violation of city building codes. As a state agency, the Port Authority is exempt from code.

Could some people have been rescued from the roof of the north tower on September 11? (The south tower held no hope. It was hidden in a 100-foot layer of dense smoke.) No one knows for sure. Fire department officials are certainly right that smoke and flames usually rise, and that people are generally best off going down rather than up. But 700 people were trapped above the 93rd floor, the point of impact where the jet hit the tower. They had no prospect of being rescued by going down.

Veteran helicopter-rescue pilots quoted by the journal say a rescue of a few dozen people would have been difficult but possible. Police helicopters hovered nearby, but were ordered away.

Fire Commissioner Thomas Van Essen called the Wall Street Journal story--and its implication that some people might have been rescued--"hurtful."

New York's refusal to plan for helicopter rescues is not unusual. Among American cities, only Los Angeles--whose fire department owns six helicopters--requires high-rise buildings to build helipads. Conventional wisdom says people are better off heading down and not up.

And conventional wisdom may well be right. But September 11 should be forcing all uniformed services to rethink their procedures. Bureaucratic wrangling is unseemly in terrible times, and both police and fire officials have been careful to refrain from criticizing one another. Yet serious issues of command and authority underlie some of the historic tensions between the two departments. The next mayor is going to have to resolve them.

A NEW FEDERAL INTEREST IN NEW YORK

Even as the police and fire departments work out their procedures, a third party looms on the horizon--the federal government. Bush administration rhetoric about downsizing and decentralizing government has disappeared as new money and powers are distributed among federal agencies. The new cabinet office of homeland security has been given enormous but vague authority to combat terrorism. The Immigration and Naturalization Service is expanding its reach and reactivating latent powers. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is asserting its authority over many investigations in New York. Federal agencies are not by nature inclined to share. The FBI garnered unwanted headlines when it failed to inform the mayor's office of the anthrax threat at NBC News, headquartered in New York.

Meanwhile, Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik set up a counterterrorism committee of federal and local law enforcement officials to strengthen security in New York. Called the New York Metropolitan Committee on Counter-Terrorism, its mandate is to enlist counterterrorism experts from Israel and Europe to help develop training programs for police officers.

That's fine, but it doesn't address the real problem: What agency is responsible for keeping us safe? That has always been the NYPD. Is it still the NYPD's job or is it the federal government's?

What seems clear is that there are far too few federal agents to carry out an effective national anti-terrorism response--and ludicrously few to fight the two-front war of bio-terrorism and bombing. It is also clear from ongoing national news stories that the FBI has not engaged local authorities in any effective cooperative effort. The NYPD remains New York's front-line of defense.

Julia Vitullo-Martin, a long-time editor and writer on urban affairs, is the former director of the Citizens Jury Project at the Vera Institute of Justice. She is now writing a book entitled The Conscience of the American Jury.



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