Nobody wants to go back to the bad old days when the very name New York City was associated with crimes so brutal they entered the American lexicon. The Central Park Jogger. The Diana Ross concert. The March of Dimes Walkathon. Yet the past month saw shootings, assaults, and rapes shocking enough to provoke nine different articles in newspapers and magazines citing New York City's bad old days. A grandmother was shot on her way home from church, a young girl was raped in the elevator of her apartment building, a five-year old child was shot in the cheek while standing with her mother. After noting the reminiscent ugliness, most of the articles argued that we were not back in the bad old days yet.
All the papers covered the story of the young engineer, Kirill Nekrasov, who was walking on April 13 with his girlfriend on West Houston Street, when he was accosted by muggers. They demanded his money; he refused and pushed one of them; they shot him in the face. He is in critical condition in intensive care, and has not awakened from a coma. The young men since arrested are said by the police to be members of the Bloods street gang.
Nekrasov's carefree attitude, noted the New York Daily News, had been "shared by a growing legion of New Yorkers and tourists" and "reflected how far the city had come from the early 1990s, when there were an average of six murders per day."
During last November's mayoral election, many New Yorkers listened apprehensively for any unguarded phrase or gesture that might indicate a candidate wasn't that serious about keeping crime down. Michael Bloomberg was elected in part because he made no mis-step on crime. But if violent crime goes up--or if the random violent assaults New Yorkers most fear continue--he will be held accountable, fair or not. Answering a press conference question about rising violence, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said, "When you get eight million people together you're going to have crimes of violence and robberies--these sorts of tragedies--no question about it."
Pointing out the overall seven percent decline in crime and the steep 25 percent drop in the murder rate from last year, he added, "So things are certainly moving in the right direction. It doesn't mean we're not going to have crime and it doesn't mean we're not going to have instances of violence like this." Kelly has a point. After all, savage crimes have always been a part of big city life, even during the crime-fighting heyday of the Giuliani administration. Two sets of murder that will long be remembered for their depravity occurred in Giuliani's second term--the May 2000 murder of a Chinese deliveryman by teenagers who wanted free food, and the May 2001 Carnegie Deli slayings of three friends by a disgruntled small-time dealer.
Nonetheless, after listening to Commissioner Kelly one New Yorker muttered, "You know, I'd feel better if the police commissioner talked tough like one of those old sheriffs in the West. I want to hear him say that this is my town, and that nobody gets away with bad stuff in my town."
CRIME MAY BE DOWN, BUT SHOOTINGS ARE UP
The fact is, for whatever reason--and some blame the dismantling of the Street Crime Unit--people are getting away with more shootings than before. Murders through mid-April were a record low at 128, but shootings are way up. Since January the city has seen a 27 percent jump to 463 shooting victims or 405 incidents. The same period last year, which may have been a record low, saw 366 shooting victims and 341 incidents. The first week of April this year was particularly bad, with 41 people wounded by gunfire, up from 12 during the same period in 2001. The most troubled areas are Manhattan North, Brooklyn South, and the Bronx.
City Hall and Commissioner Kelly announced a doubling in the reward--to $1,000--that Operation Gun-Stop gives to tipsters turning in anyone who is successfully arrested for carrying an illegal gun. Kelly also said the police are making record numbers of gun arrests--some 1,200 arrests this year, up about 25 percent from last year.
So why is Kelly dismantling the elite Street Crime Unit that had been widely credited with reducing crime, drugs, and guns in once violent neighborhoods? Some conservatives think he's giving into community agitators; it was Street Crime Unit cops that killed the unarmed Amadou Diallo in February 1999. But Kelly offered legitimate reasons for this reorganization. For one thing, the department is low on officers. Kelly has only 37,680 police officers, down from 40,710 in late 2000. The number of detectives in neighborhood squads is the lowest it has been since 1997.
Further, his redeployment of the unit's remaining 180 detectives to precinct-run plainclothes anticrime teams and to understaffed neighborhood detective squads throughout the five boroughs is part of his strategy to return authority to precinct commanders. Some two-thirds of the detectives will be doing the same intensive, anti-drug and anti-gun work, but they will be doing it under precinct command instead of the centralized Street Unit's command.
The police department always suffers from tension between the police commissioner's downtown vision and the implementation of-- or resistance to--that vision by the department's 76 precincts. As George Kelling pointed out in a recent report for the Manhattan Institute, Commissioner William Bratton invested enormous authority in precinct commanders, devolving both resources and decision-making to the precinct level. Bratton used mandated weekly planning meetings to force precinct commanders to identify problems and discuss their plans for dealing with them. Once occupied with traditional bureaucratic politics at central headquarters, precinct commanders were reoriented by Bratton to focus on their precincts. These changes also reoriented borough chiefs and top commanders. As Kelling wrote, "If precinct commanders looked bad, it reflected on the borough chiefs, and so on up the line."
But centralized departmental politics--and the clout of elite central units--were gradually regaining an upper hand over the precincts. Kelly is signaling that his administration will be one of precinct command. And that's good.
He is also moving 150 detectives from the department's warrant division and nearly 100 police officers (one from each of the 76 precincts and 20 from the housing and transit bureau commands) into neighborhood detective squads.
Of course, for many civil libertarians, the bad old days were during the Giuliani administration, when the city refused to release records under the Freedom of Information Act, routinely strip-searched people arrested for misdemeanors, jailed protestors overnight instead of issuing desk appearance tickets, and set up check-points to stop all people entering certain neighborhood, even low-crime neighborhoods. The city has been sued on all of these policies.
So civil libertarians welcomed the recent news that the Bloomberg administration is quietly settling contentious suits with the citizenry. The New York Times reported that the settling of lawsuits over city policies fulfills a pledge Mayor Bloomberg made shortly after he was elected. Last year the city paid out a stunning $582 million in lawsuit settlements and court awards, mostly for civil cases, an unspecified chunk of which were for police brutality.
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.
It was Tuesday afternoon at the Red Hook Community Justice Center and a teenage girl accused of robbing a classmate at school stood before judge Alex Calabrese. She had one arm around her mother's waist and the other dangling at her side. The youngster, whose purple hair hung straight down her back, intended to plead guilty, but first the judge had some questions. He wanted to know if her grades had improved, whether she was keeping her 8:15 p.m. curfew and how she was getting along with her mother these days.
These questions are not unusual in a juvenile delinquency case. But the mother's responses were. She beamed as she told the court her daughter recently received a grade of "100" in one class and now comes home on time.
In court, mother and daughter both thanked the probation officer, who arranged several programs for them, including parent-child mediation.
In Red Hook's juvenile court -- unlike family court in downtown Brooklyn -- parents and children can avail themselves of a vast array of services right in the courthouse. Counseling, mentoring and mediation programs take place at the center, making it convenient for families to use the services. An on-site social worker also meets with each youngster to help determine what services are needed.
The availability of programs also means Judge Calabrese can feel confident about sending a child home to his parents, instead of to juvenile jail.
The Red Hook court began for adults in June 2000 and started taking juvenile cases in April 2001. Now, any youngsters under age 16 who are arrested in Red Hook, Sunset Park, Park Slope, South Slope, Gowanus, Cobble Hill or Wyckoff and released to their parents by the police are sent to the community justice center. The probation department then decides whether to refer the case for prosecution or resolve it out of court. The out-of-court resolution can involve counseling or mediation between the parties, something that is frequently used with altercations that began as disputes between students at school and then escalated to the point of arrest. So far, approximately 45 percent of the cases in Red Hook have been successfully resolved out of court, compared to 10 percent citywide, according to Alfred Siegal of the Center for Court Innovation, a joint venture of the state court system and the non-profit agency, the Fund for the City of New York.
If the case is flagged for prosecution, the prosecutor's office can decide whether to file charges in Red Hook or a more conventional court downtown. Only 10 cases have been filed in Red Hook in the last year, which is fewer than authorities had expected. Arrest statistics for the neighborhood indicated the court would receive up to 50 cases per year.
Several people involved with the court said this was probably due to the reluctance of Peter Reinharz, the chief prosecutor for family court, to bring cases there. Reinharz, who was nationally known for his tough-on-crime approach, resigned effective Feb. 22.
The staff at the alternative court is hopeful that the Bloomberg administration will name a new prosecutor friendly to the court's goals. One sign that Bloomberg endorses the court's approach is that he tapped Center for Court Innovation director John Feinblatt to join the city administration as criminal justice coordinator.
The Center for Court Innovation, which started the nation's first community court in midtown Manhattan in 1993, has led the way in creating alternative courts nationwide. But, while alternative courts for adults have become accepted in the last decade, alternative courts for juveniles are still very much works in progress.
In addition to the court in Red Hook, the city is also experimenting with a juvenile court in Central Harlem that works on the same principle as drug-treatment court: a system of frequent court appearances, monitoring and graduated sanctions for non-compliance. "In Harlem, there was a specific grant from the federal government to create a juvenile intake court based on a drug court model" said Alfred Siegal of the Center for Court Innovation.
The youngsters who go through the Harlem court will receive "intensive contact and monitoring," said program director Jimena Martinez. In addition, drug-treatment provider Phoenix House will run on-site programs geared towards adolescent marijuana users.
The juvenile court in Harlem opened this January and has so far arraigned just one youngster, with seven more cases "in the pipeline," according to Martinez. As with the court in Red Hook, those numbers might increase with a personnel change in the prosecutor's office.
In the last year, Calabrese has sent to juvenile jail only one child out of the 10 youngsters who have come before him. By contrast, judges in regular family court sent more than 5,000 adolescents to detention out of some 9,000 cases -- although some of that difference comes from the fact that Red Hook doesn't handle the most serious cases.
The juvenile court in Red Hook only accepts cases where the police have released the child to a guardian after arrest, which happens roughly 80 percent of the time. In the other 20 percent of the cases, police take the youngsters directly to a juvenile jail, either because of the seriousness of the charges or because the parents don't come to the precinct to pick up their children.
Still, many juveniles eligible for the court in Red Hook are not prosecuted there as of yet -- a situation the court's acting director Robert Feldstein is hoping will soon change. Red Hook offers juveniles and the judge, "better information, better options, better accountability," said Feldstein. "We can do things better."
The police department has become famous worldwide for its successful, computer-driven assault on crime, but when detectives file their investigative reports, they do so in triplicate, using carbon paper. In its daily work, as Police Commissioner Ray Kelly sums it up, his department has no internal email, no computer network, no access to sophisticated outside data bases. It is like a Porsche with the engine of a Volkswagen.
The whole system is inadequate, said Kelly, speaking at a lunch sponsored by the Manhattan Institute at the Yale Club. Those triplicate files that detectives create, DD5 forms, are sent to three separate offices--precinct, command, and borough--where they are stored in standard file cabinets to be retrieved manually when needed. Kelly paused for a moment to let it sink in that the data contained in those cabinets is essentially inaccessible.
The drive of analytic policing today, particularly in combating terrorists, is to connect the dotted lines, to pick up the relationships among seemingly disparate occurrences. Terrorist cells, noted Kelly, often finance crimes through petty crime, such as breaking into cars, identity theft, burglary. Since September 11 the details of certain petty crimes have developed an importance out of all proportion to the individual crime itself.
Kelly knows what technology can do for routine productivity because he had it in his last few jobs, including as head of the U.S. Customs Service. The New York Police Department needs a computer system, he argues, that allows "all case information to be entered in one data base for cross checking." Customs uses the Treasury Department's Treasury Enforcement Communication System (TECS), which links all the Treasury enforcement bureaus with one another, including Customs, the Secret Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. TECS may still be 1980s technology, says Kelly, but it is leagues ahead of the New York Police Department. Customs is now exploring an Internet-driven investigative database that would permit the storage of surveillance footage, wiretaps, and interviews together in a digital file.
The other half of the technology problem is, as always, personnel: "We need our senior people to have the basic tools and technologies needed to lead any organization today."
There's no easy fix for this, but one route is more sophisticated recruitment.
Interest in police work is at an all-time high, and the NYPD is at the top of the food chain. Mayor Bloomberg's 2003 budget calls for a reduction of 1600 police officers, though Kelly seems to regard that as something of a phantom number. He says that 40,110 officers is the "preferred head count," and that the NYPD is now down to 38,000 through attrition. Its target is to have 39,000 officers on July 1 of this year.
The department is trying to make it easy to apply. The application form is online and it's free. Kelly thinks New York is the only major metropolitan police force in the nation to do this.
They are also sending recruiters to schools that have never seen NYPD recruiters before, such as Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. According to the New York Times, the effort was not very successful ("Police Recruiters Draw Little Interest, Good or Bad") at Columbia. Himself a graduate of the JFK School of Government at Harvard, Commissioner Kelly says the recruitment campaign is as much symbolic as substantive. Which is a judicious position to take since, as the Times points out, the NYPD's starting salary of $31,305 is less than the annual cost of attending Columbia. Rather like trying to buy a Porsche at a Volkswagen price.
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.
In the post-September 11 world, the New York Police Department has already lost hundreds of experienced officers to death, retirement, and private sector jobs. Now Mayor Bloomberg comes along and, facing a $4.7 billion budget gap, proposes reducing the force by 1,600 officers to save money. He intends to do this by not replacing the officers who have left the department in the last few months. There are, of course, many objections to using attrition alone to reduce a labor force, not the least of which is that attrition deprives management of discretion. As Bloomberg himself has noted repeatedly, the private sector's demand for good New York cops is likely to go up, not down. Meanwhile, the department's low starting salary of $31,305 impedes recruitment.
This would not be a bad time for Commissioner Raymond Kelly to bring back zero-based budgeting--the budgeting theory from the 1970s that urged policy makers to return to zero each year, building up their budgets and management structures completely fresh. Many expenditures should now be reconsidered. For example, how many former city officials have police protection? Former Police Commissioner Howard Safir had round-the-clock protection from two detectives until he was quietly asked to relinquish this perk by the Bloomberg administration. Who else, no longer on a government payroll, is protected? Every such expenditure should be scrutinized.
Similarly, all deployment of police officers to caretaker jobs should be examined. Should police officers patrol street fairs, for example? Parades? Community events? And if they are on duty, should they simply stand around, as was the custom under previous administrations?
Should another push toward civilianization be undertaken? Are there NYPD jobs--receptionists, clerks, phone operators--now held by police officers that would be more suitably handled by civilians?
Former prosecutor that he was, Mayor Rudy Giuliani regularly used the courts as a second front in his war against crime. Even when he lost, his litigiousness bought him time.
Among his most controversial tactics were his traffic checkpoints, which he used for all sorts of purposes--stopping drug traffic, checking for seat-belt use, looking for unlicensed or drunk drivers. Now a state judge has ruled that police checkpoints set up to screen traffic on high-crime blocks are unlawful because cops are subjecting citizens to illegal searches and seizures. The decision specifically declares unconstitutional the NYPD's Model Block Program, by which the police barricaded the ends of target blocks and stopped vehicles, asking to see driver's license, registration, and proof of insurance. Only drivers who lived on the block, had business there, or who were visiting family were allowed to enter.
In People v. April Pope, Acting Bronx Supreme Court Justice Robert Cohen ruled unconstitutional an NYPD stop of a vehicle at the corner of West 174th Street and Grand Avenue, where a checkpoint had been set up to counter prostitution and drug dealing. When an officer was unable to find April Pope's licence number in computer records, she admitted that the license was fake and that her license had been suspended. She was arrested.
Citing a November 2000 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Indianapolis v. Edmond, Judge Cohen said the New York program was similar to the Indianapolis checkpoint program, whose primary purpose was to find illegal narcotics. This, said the Supreme Court, was an infringement of a motorist's Fourth Amendment rights because the vehicle stops were not based on individualized suspicion of criminal activity.
Judge Cohen wrote that, "Although laudable in purpose, the checkpoint program at issue is ultimately for the purpose of crime control." Crime control did not meet the limited exceptions set forth in by the Supreme Court.
Commissioner Kelly said the NYPD was still reviewing the decision, which would not "immediately affect" the program. He added that checkpoints are nearly always set up at the request of the community.
Judge Cohen apparently thinks he's speaking for the community in his decision since he wrote that, "The impact of this program upon all citizens in this neighborhood is egregious and violates the Fourth Amendment." Who's right, Kelly or Cohen, about what the neighborhood wants?
In a second U.S. Supreme Court case cited by Judge Cohen, Delaware v. Prouse (1979), the court virtually invited state and local governments to introduce another kind of checkpoint--one that questions "all oncoming traffic at roadblock-type stops." This case proved useful to the Giuliani administration when model block checkpoints were criticized by some neighborhood activists in 1999 just as issues of racial profiling by police were heating up. Deflecting criticism that checkpoints were only used in minority neighborhoods, Giuliani quietly instituted a new kind of checkpoint--one that blocked, stopped, and questioned all incoming traffic in neighborhoods without high-crime rates. The East Side's Third Avenue, for example, became a frequent checkpoint in which cops said they were looking for things like seat belt violations. This in effect had been pre-approved by the Supreme Court.
Drivers caught in such checkpoints--which caused massive traffic jams and hour-long delays--were often furious by the time they reached the front of the lines and were casually waved on by the cops. Doubtless such New Yorkers would enjoy the Delaware v. Prouse dissent written by Chief Justice Rehnquist: "Because motorists, apparently like sheep, are much less likely to be 'frightened' or 'annoyed' when stopped en masse, a highway patrolman needs neither probable cause nor articulable suspicion to stop all motorists on a particular thoroughfare, but he cannot without articulable suspicion stop less than all motorists. The Court thus elevates the adage 'misery loves company' to a novel role in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence."
The New York Police Department now faces the odd situation of having had its crime-related checkpoint--the Model Block Program--declared unconstitutional, while the checkpoint concerned with trivial matters like seat belt violations is just fine with the courts.
What Kelly will do with this is anyone's guess. It was never clear that the general checkpoints, like the ones on Third Avenue, served any legitimate police purpose. Such checkpoints should be relegated to the past. The checkpoints in high-crime areas are more difficult. The city will surely appeal Judge Cohen's decision, but the question is ultimately as much a policy issue as a legal one. Were these checkpoints effective in reducing drug traffic and violent crime? Were they supported in their neighborhoods? Did residents feel their rights were infringed? Is this intense use of police personnel efficient?
Since the legal distinction drawn by the court is one of universality--you can set up a checkpoint and stop absolutely everybody constitutionally--the city can keep the Model Block Program if it chooses. It just has to make sure that absolutely everyone coming into the neighborhood is stopped--and inconvenienced.
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.
When Ray Kelly was sworn in as police commissioner the first time on Nov. 10, 1992, his new job was darkened by the horror of Crown Heights. Barely two weeks before, a Brooklyn jury had handed down a verdict acquitting Lemrick Nelson, a young black man, of the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum, a young Hasidic student. The jury concluded that Nelson had been framed by a racist police force.
The terrible story still shocks. A car in an unofficial motorcade to a rabbi's gravesite ran a red light on Aug. 19, 1999, went out of control, and struck two black children, killing one and seriously injuring the other. A black mob formed and rampaged through the streets, assaulting people, burning cars, and looting stores. During the riot, a visiting Hasidic scholar, Yankel Rosenbaum, was pulled from his car, beaten, and stabbed. He identified his attacker, and died at the hospital.
Despite the victim's identification and his own confession, Lemrick Nelson was acquitted of murder by a jury of six blacks, four Latinos, and two whites in a New York State Supreme Court trial in Brooklyn. (The jury held no Jews.) Nelson's lawyer had hammered away at small discrepancies in the stories of the nine cops, eight of whom were white. He put the justice system on trial, and the jury went with his theory that a racist police force had framed the nice-looking young man. The identification was disregarded as prompted, and the confession as coerced--the defense theory.
At the urging of New York officials, including Brooklyn prosecutor Charles Hynes, the federal government brought charges of civil rights violations against Nelson and another man, Charles Price, who was accused of inciting the mob to violence. The federal trial after the state acquittal raised some hackles about double jeopardy, but was not controversial for long. Under the Reconstruction-era Civil Rights Act of 1870, the federal government can on its own try cases in which a federal interest--such as a civil rights violation--has not been vindicated in court due to a nonexistent, cursory, or bungled state prosecution.
In 1996 both Nelson and Price were convicted by a racially mixed jury in federal court of violating Rosenbaum's civil rights by singling him out for his religion.
On Jan. 7, 2002, a week after Ray Kelly was sworn in as police commissioner a second time, the U.S. Court of Appeals (2nd Circuit) vacated the Lemrick and Price convictions. At first glance, this looks like one of those nightmare American legal situations in which a procedural error has undermined a just verdict. Two violent men, convicted of heinous crimes, may be released from prison because a judge made a mistake during trial.
Pretty much everyone seems to agree that the defendants were guilty of the crimes charged, and that the verdict was substantively correct. The Court of Appeals itself said "The evidence was sufficient" and "overwhelming" that Nelson stabbed Rosenbaum, and that Price "transformed" the mob "into an explosive mass" to hunt down Jewish victims. (Price was seen on videotape yelling, "Let's get the Jews" and "Eye for an eye. No justice, no peace.")
And everyone also agrees that a serious procedural error occurred during the trial. The error was that federal Judge David Trager "jurymandered," that is that he deliberately and systematically empanelled a jury according to his standards of the proper racial and religious composition. He was straightforward about his goals. "I have an agenda here," he said, "which I have made clear from the very beginning, to end up with a jury that represents the community [and] that will have moral validity." He went so far as to warn that if there were a hung jury, "that itself will be a statement to both sides about both what is the process and [what] the problems are with our society."
But in the words of the Court of Appeals, Judge Trager manipulated jury selection "to prevent the final jury from containing too many African Americans and too few Jews." He did this for the best of reasons--to ensure, in his words, "a moral jury that renders a verdict that has moral integrity." This high motive is consistent with the Constitution, whose framers saw the jury as both a protector of individual rights and a means of ensuring communal support for judicial procedures. The jury trial is the nation's chief means of ensuring that the morals and standards of the community will be heeded in criminal proceedings.
So Judge Trager was not wrong in seeking a moral jury that would render a moral verdict and satisfy community standards. Where he went wrong was in choosing jurors by race and religion, including a Jewish juror who warned repeatedly that he wasn't sure he could be fair. This, said the Court of Appeals, was evidence of "actual bias," that simply could not be permitted to stand.
What is to be done? Two men were convicted by a jury selected for race and religion, improper under constitutional principles. As remedy, the Court of Appeals has remanded the case to the district court for a new trial before a "properly selected, impartial jury." Lawyers for Nelson and Price are now preparing legal arguments that their clients should be released from prison while awaiting new trial.
But Justice Charles Straubb, who dissented, has a better idea: affirm the convictions both because they were correct and because the defendants and their lawyers repeatedly acquiesced in the composition of the jury, trading black jurors for Jewish jurors. "The Constitution does not require," says Justice Straubb, "that we reward defendants for constitutional violations in which they themselves participated."
He points out that the courts do not permit defendants to challenge evidence which they themselves introduced, or challenge the admissibility of hearsay statements of a non-appearing witness when the defendants themselves prevented the witness from appearing. These defendants, argues Straubb, do not deserve a second trial given their own conduct.
What will the Justice Department do? It can appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. It can prepare for a new trial, 11 years later. The practical problems of witnesses and evidence would be enormous.
Or it can return to the Court of Appeals, asking that all 12 justices hear the case, and arguing that Justice Straubb's dissent was right. The prosecutors will be reluctant to do this because it is bound to annoy the court. Though seldom taken, this route is the right one.
Meanwhile, Commissioner Kelly faces the same problem in 2002 he faced ten years ago: building a racially and ethnically diverse police force to serve and protect his racially diverse city.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.Â
"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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As the symbolic capital of the globalized economy, New York will loom as a target of those with grievances against the new order for a long time to come. New York can do little to ease those grievances, though it can do a great deal to protect itself. But there must be a balance: Enough security to stop further attacks, but no unnecessary measures that weaken the city.
The problem is that every increment in security will come at a cost. Worse, the costs will be more than financial. They will be social and political--and will threaten to undermine the city's very being and sense of itself as free-wheeling, entrepreneurial, and invincible. New York's strategic problem will be safeguarding itself as effectively but as unobtrusively as possible.
For better or worse, it will not be alone in this crisis. Its new partner, the federal government, showed a fairly light hand in past criminal events, treating the city and its police department with the respect normally due a sovereign. While touring the ruins of the World Trade Center President Bush seemed to defer to Mayor Giuliani as guest to host.
But the days of federal deference to New York may be over. A safe America requires a safe New York--no president can permit New York to remain an island. Will this be good or bad for New Yorkers? The answer will depend in part on how strong the next police commissioner is, how capably he leads his department, and how effectively he negotiates with federal agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice.
No one thinks that the FBI, based in Washington with a staff drawn from around the country, can direct security in New York better than the New York police. But the bombing of the Trade Center shows that ensuring New York's safety cannot be an exclusively local function. The FBI and the New York Police Department will have to work these matters through--and it probably won't be pretty.
Thus the NYPD commissionership may become the most important job in New York. Luckily for him, the next commissioner will start with a revitalized department. Today the New York Police Department stands strong, resilient and respected. Most pre-September 11 arguments about police issues--even serious ones like racial profiling--now seem petty and distant, as if that was a different department in a different city. In these days of crisis, the police have performed heroically and professionally. They have been on duty round the clock, a reassuring, protective presence.
As fire Captain Kennenth Erb told Larry King, "They had a recall for all police officers and fire officers as soon as the news struck. And we all, one way or the other, got in, through hitchhiking, get in your car or whatever." Crime was down 34 percent last week over the same week last year--a tribute to the cops and perhaps to some decency even among criminals.
At least 23 police officers are missing, most from the elite Emergency Service Unit. All were (presumed) killed while trying to rescue others.
One practical consequence will be the end of the police department's recruitment crisis. The department's recruitment poster that had offered a "career of heroism and public service" now rings true.
Here's the background. While the department had been trying to maintain a head count of 41,440 officers, its numbers had fallen to about 39,800 in August. Part of the problem was retirement. About 3,000 cops were expected to retire this year, or about a third more than last year. That number may now shrink.
But the other part of the problem had been the department's unsuccessful recruitment efforts. It did not fill its last graduating class at the Police Academy in September 2000, and had been unlikely to fill this year's class despite strenuous recruiting efforts and incentives, like eliminating the $35 fee for the civil service exam.
In a New York Times op-ed former Police Commissioner William Bratton summarized the problem in a national context: "From Los Angeles to New York City, from Cincinnati to Miami, many of the nation's police forces face intense scrutiny and criticism for corruption, racial profiling, racial insensitivity, brutality, unresponsiveness to community concerns and professional incompetence." Declining public respect for cops, justified or unjustified, was taking its toll.
Bratton went on to say that the causes of the recruitment crisis, "both at the entry level and at the top of the profession," were fairly clear. Starting pay is relatively low. (New York City's is $31,305.) Policing is less a family tradition than it was a generation ago. Young people have little appreciation of the complexity and variety of police work.
Much of this will change for the better. City officials had been prepared to raise police pay substantially, and public opinion will agree. The complexity and variety of police work has been on display for all to see--and the police department is likely to have its pick of excellent young recruits for the first time in years.
The police department--and to some extent New Yorkers--will have to think through the right balance of security and efficiency in everyday life.
The public had already become accustomed to the measures deterring the common thug--metal detectors, photo IDs, bag searches, checks of electronic equipment. The devices are often primitive and the training of the personnel poor, but routine security checks prevent at least some crime and perhaps some terrorism. At their most effective, such as in the eight New York criminal courthouses, they prevent a lot of crime. In a Labor Day piece, the New York Times said the 631 criminal court officers had confiscated a "staggering collection of 20 boxes of weapons" this year alone. Violent incidents in the courthouses are few--and not for want of trying by criminals.
The future, however, lies with high-tech solutions that are independent of human judgment, such as the X-ray machines that reveal weapons. The cutting-edge versions do so at a distance.
Accustomed as they may be to routine security lines, New Yorkers are far less comfortable with what the security trade calls Israeli tactics--traffic-stopping checkpoints, intrusive questioning, random identification checks, intimate searches, and racial profiling. These are ostensibly meant to deter crime, but they are also meant to remind the public often and aggressively of the presence of terrorists and to get the public to accept the authority of the police and military. The inconvenience that accompanies these tactics is deliberate.
Daniel Williams recently gave an excellent summary in the Washington Post of how this routinely works in Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside: "Control-through-engineering has become a major activity under Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Soldiers periodically cut off large towns from one another. Commerce comes to a virtual standstill. Even when traffic is permitted, the wait to get in and out of major urban centers can be time-consuming. Not only do the Israeli soldiers generally provide only one exit from town, they also keep military inspectors to a minimum, so vehicles pass only one by one."
Former Police Commissioner Safir actually introduced a few of these ideas to New York, and Commissioner Kerik has continued them. Traffic-stopping checkpoints ostensibly for drunk-driving or seat-belt use were first used in Upper Manhattan and minority neighborhoods. After an outcry about racial profiling, Safir expanded the checkpoints to Manhattan neighborhoods below 96th Street.
The pedestrian-controlling concrete barriers introduced by Mayor Giuliani and Commissioner Safir in 1998 also represent an Israeli tactic, a re-engineering to encourage people to go only where they are directed and to accustom the public to accepting restrictions on their movements.
Were these Israeli tactics introduced by the city because they appealed to Mayor Giuliani's sense of order, or because the city had been alerted by Washington about serious terrorist threats? No one is saying, although former commissioner Bratton said on television that there had been two serious unreported terrorist threats during his term.
The most important question among all these tactics is, however, what works?
Much as it will seek to protect itself, New York will only be safe insofar as others protect it as well. The plane that flew into the World Trade Center took off from Logan Airport in Boston, an airport that the Federal Aviation Administration has repeatedly cited for safety violations.
Everyone wants whatever went wrong at Logan Airport in Boston fixed. But what was it that failed? And will the FAA's new proposals and restrictions on passengers work?
Arthur Wolk, an aviation safety expert, argues that the new FAA rules, such as the ban on steak knives in first class or the abolition of curbside checking, are ineffective and would have in no way prevented the hijackings. He proposes instead that sky marshals fly on most flights, that pilots be armed--most are former military officers--and that flight attendants be trained in martial arts.
Mary Schiavo, former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation, argues that aviation security is a law enforcement function, and belongs with a law enforcement agency, not the FAA. Law enforcement officials would be far less ready to listen to concerns about the weight of new cockpit doors (additional weight would affect the cost of every flight), or the extra costs of sky marshals or deputized pilots.
New York has an acute interest in these issues, and in all matters having to do with its air space. All but three private helicopters have been grounded, and those three have been given mandated flight plans. The FAA's previous ridiculous policy of refusing to regulate helicopters and small planes over New York has been reversed.
New York can do little about Third World grievances but it can and should protect its Arab-American residents with a full police presence. Attacks on Lebanese stores on Atlantic Avenue are not only despicable, some of the attackers have been in this country for a far shorter time than the owners of, say, Sahadi's, who are on their third generation. As James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, said: "We are in the midst of a national nightmare of unimaginable proportions." Arab-Americans were among those killed in the Trade Center.
Arab-Americans should feel as fully welcome as the many groups that have come before them. This crisis will only be eased by the help of Arabic-speaking Americans using their language and contacts in the Arab world to track down terrorists and set the world back on course. This is not a time to drive loyal Arab-Americans away. New Yorkers should patronize Arab businesses as they always have, including the restaurants that now stand empty, showing support for decent, hard-working immigrants who came here for a better life. It's the New York way.
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.
Protesters arrested for minor offenses will no longer be held overnight in jail, the Police Department informed Judge William Pauley III of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan in mid-July. This is excellent news. Let's back up.
After the killing of Amadou Diallo--the young, unarmed, African street vendor--by four police officers on February 4, 1999, thousands of New Yorkers poured into the streets of Lower Manhattan to protest what some saw as police brutality and others as police incompetence. Hundreds were arrested for minor offenses--disorderly conduct, obstructing government, disobeying an order to disperse.
The Police Department followed its time-honored procedures in arresting and releasing demonstrators. Those who showed identification and who had no other criminal complication--such as drugs, weapons, or outstanding warrants--were given desk appearance tickets (DATs). DATs are routinely issued to minor offenders to ensure their appearance in court on a specified date, while allowing them to go home in the meantime.
DATs make eminent sense. An arrest is not a punishment, just as the police are not judge and jury. The sole point of an arrest is to secure the appearance of the person before a judge. Those arrested on minor charges are usually jailed only if the police fear flight or violence.
During the Diallo demonstrations, then-Police Commissioner Howard Safir decided that protesters should be jailed rather than released. The police began to hold demonstrators for a few hours in the precinct, and then transfer them to a central booking facility. Here they were held--usually overnight--until arraigned before a judge. Judges routinely dismissed almost all charges.
Until May 1, this policy of jailing some demonstrators had been informally enforced. On May 1, for reasons that "remain unclear," according to the New York Times, the Chief of Department (the NYPD's highest-ranking uniformed officer) formalized the policy. He issued a directive forbidding desk appearance tickets for offenses committed at demonstrations of 20 people or more. All demonstrators, he ordered, were to be, in police terminology, "processed on-line," meaning detained for arraignment. You and I would call it jailed.
Daniel Connolly, the lawyer in charge of this for the city's Corporation Counsel, defended the new police policy. He argued that the policy was intended to discourage crime and to process offenders (i.e., protesters) efficiently. In a June interview Connolly said, "The police department has many exceptions in which desk appearance tickets are not given--in cases of assault, for example, or cases involving alcohol, or when people are from out of town. No DATs. This is just another exception."
Connolly also mentioned what he called "the recidivist threat," the problem that demonstrators committed to civil disobedience will reappear at the rally if they are released with a desk appearance ticket. Meanwhile, minor offenses committed by anyone but demonstrators--littering, for example, or walking a dog off leash--would still generally be handled with desk appearance tickets. Only demonstrators were to be jailed.
This, of course, raised serious constitutional issues, as the New York Civil Liberties Union argued in a law suit in federal court. NYCLU lawyer Christopher Dunn argued that "singling out demonstrators to be `put through the system' specifically retaliates against citizens exercising their First and Fourth Amendment rights." The point of the arrests was to remove people from the scene of constitutionally protected political activity.
From the nation's founding forward, American courts have had to grapple with balancing the people's right to peace and order with rights of free speech and assembly. Disturbances of the peace that involve noisy parties or public vandalism present no constitutional problems. But disturbances that result from what people say or from public demonstrations quickly invoke the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.
During the 1960s the Supreme Court became increasingly reluctant to permit local police to forbid or halt civil rights demonstrations. As Justice Potter Stewart wrote in 1963, the state may not "make criminal the peaceful expression of unpopular views." The court has cast a cold eye ever since on local regulations that threaten freedom of speech and the right to assembly.
While the government may, under its police power, legitimately regulate the "Time, Place, and Manner" of demonstrations, it may not use the guise of regulation to interfere unduly with the people's right to assemble. In practice, this is a difficult area, requiring good judgment and sensitivity from local officials.
New York often lacks both. The problem is that the people wishing to exercise their right to assemble and demonstrate mainly wish to protest against Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his Police Department--the very officials asserting the right to jail the protesters. Do protesters often embarrass the mayor and the police? Yes, but that is their constitutional right.
In July the Police Department and the Corporation Counsel decided to back off jailing protesters overnight. Some sense of balance and order has been restored.
Desk appearance tickets served the people and the police of the City of New York well for years--and now they will again. Jailing protesters on minor--sometimes trumped-up--charges before they see a judge has been consigned to a brief, unfortunate moment in the dustbin of New York City history.
Commissioner Kerik and the Police Department can return to what they do best: fighting real crime, not legitimate protest.
After a few months in office, police commissioner Bernard Kerik announced in January that one of his top priorities would be improving police-community relations. High-ranking officers would attend community meetings in person, precincts would be more welcoming to the public, officers on the street would be encouraged to be polite and attentive.
A report by the Citizens Crime Commission, which calls itself an independent criminal justice research organization, concludes that the police department is not yet courteous enough for many New Yorkers--even though the vast majority feel safe in their neighborhoods. Indeed, 91 percent of the 834 New Yorkers surveyed from October 2000 through February 2001 said they feel safe in their neighborhoods during the day, 77 percent feel safe at night, and 84 percent regard their neighborhoods as safer than a year ago.
But the problem of race continues to raise its ugly head: 67 percent of surveyed New Yorkers said that the police were tougher on blacks than on whites, and 59 percent said that brutality was a serious problem in the department.
Meanwhile, civilian complaints against the police jumped 12 percent in the first six months of 2001, according to the Civilian Complaint Review Board. It logged 2,418 complaints through June 30, or 264 more than in the six months last year. Charges of abuse of authority were up 12 percent, and charges of excessive force up 9 percent.
The Citizens Crime Commission has a suggestion. They believe that CompStat, the police department's renowned computerized crime-tracking system, could be "helpful in breaking down divisions between police and citizens." They urge the department to begin an "expanded information-sharing effort" with neighborhoods to provide crime data while enlisting the help of residents in planning crime-fighting strategies that would be both effective and "not offensive to the community." Worth a try perhaps.
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.