The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (12 page)

My partner, a kid named Olson, and I were sent out one evening with one of the longtime sergeants, a guy I'll call Jones. Jones was from the old school; he still carried a claw. A claw is a “come along,” one of those devices that is designed to encourage a prisoner to move. It looks like a rowboat oarlock, but when you slap a claw on a prisoner's wrist and turn it,
you can snap bones. The claw was not issued by the department, but Jones still carried one.

It was a Friday evening tour, four to midnight, and right after roll call, Jones told me and my partner, “Come with me, we're going up to Franklin Field.” This was an all-black public-housing project, a tough part of a tough district.

It turned out that a friend of Jones's owned a riding stable at the Franklin Park Zoo, adjacent to the projects, and evidently a saddle had been stolen. A kid had rented a horse and stolen the saddle, and now we were going up to retrieve it.

Franklin Field was a typical cinderblock and glazed-stone housing development of three-story multiunit buildings. We banged on the door of the boy's home, and inside were the mother, the son, and other family members. The son was a big kid, and he was visibly nervous. The saddle was there, and we moved to arrest him for possession of stolen property. The kid didn't want to go, the family was all excited, words were exchanged, and we ended up in a real donnybrook. We were wrestling around with this kid, falling on the floor, Jones got his hat knocked off and his glasses sent flying. It was a real good scuffle.

Finally, we got the kid out into the hall, and Jones was going to get his licks in. He had the claw out and wrapped around the kid's wrist. He was twisting it, and the kid was screaming in pain. I grabbed Jones and pushed him away.

“Stop!”

“What do you mean, ‘stop’?” Jones came after me. “Who the hell do you think you're talking to?”

“Hey, he's under arrest!” I shouted. “You can't do this.”

“Get the hell out of my way.”

“The kid's out. It's over!”

That little break in the action stopped Jones for the moment. The boy was subdued. People were sticking their heads out into the corridor to see what all the ruckus was. To turn the screw again in public would have been too obvious. Jones backed off.

From that time on, Jones absolutely hated me. He went out of his way to make my life miserable. He gave me the worst fixed-post assignments, rotten areas where I would have to stay for long periods of time. He went back to his colleagues and pretty soon word got around about me: Watch this kid, he's not part of the program.

The Boston Police Department was perceived as brutal, but as hard to
believe as it might be, with the exception of that incident, I never witnessed wanton brutality. In the old days, legend had it, it was kind of a tradition in the department that if you fought with a cop, you paid for it; once they got you back at the station, you had to run the gauntlet, with everybody giving you a whack. Talk like that used to disturb me, all the clerks—station house warriors—taking whacks at the prisoners. They were clerks because they couldn't handle it in the street, but they were going to get their licks in. But I never witnessed any of this.

Certainly, I had donnybrooks in which both sides exchanged a lot of blows. The worst always seemed to revolve around family fights. In the seventies, the cops were called increasingly to referee domestic disputes, and one of the reasons Mattapan was considered such a lousy house to work was that you had so many domestic-violence runs. We were continually being brought in to deal with husbands and wives fighting or kids fighting with their parents.

One night, my partner Henry Berlo and I got called to a husband-and-wife disturbance on the top floor of a three-decker, which was itself built on a ledge; there were three flights of stairs to climb before you got to the front porch. The fellow was all bulked up. I was no power lifter at five foot ten, 160 pounds; Berlo was two inches shorter and the same weight. We got to the top floor and asked the guy to leave the house, which was the common practice. He refused. After some discussion and more heated refusals, we grabbed him by the arm and tried to move him along. It ended in an incredible fight, all of us tumbling down three flights of stairs.

Neighbors heard the disturbance and called the cops. We couldn't have done so; we had no radios and no time. When we fell out onto the porch, the backup had run the three flights to assist us. It took about a half dozen cops to subdue him, but once he was cuffed and tossed in the back of the wagon that was the end of it. We didn't take him back to the station house and whack him around.

I was riding with a fellow cop, Billy Celester, one hot Friday night when another domestic-disturbance call came in, again on the third floor. They always seemed to be on the third floor. A seventy-year-old Haitian grandmother and a whole passel of kids were in the house, and she wanted her grandson out; he was wanted on a warrant, and she was fed up with him. He wasn't going, we started rolling around with him, and the next thing we knew, the grandmother had changed her mind. “Leave him alone! Leave him alone!” She came roaring out of the kitchen swinging a machete over her head.

Celester and I hit the door at the same time. He was pretty rotund, and neither of us made it on the first pass. We stepped back in a flash, and then crashed through the storm door, smashing it to smithereens. We rolled down the stairs and ran like crazy, with her in pursuit.

Another time, a cop named Bob Crowley and I were called to a disturbance, a problem with a grandfather. When we got there, the old man started acting up and took a swing at us, so we moved in to arrest him. The whole family got in on it. Crowley was a good-sized kid who worked out, but here was this sixty-something guy bouncing both of us all over the living room. When the public reads newspaper stories about grandfathers and grandmothers giving cops a hard time, they never believe it, but it's true. In times of crisis, some people get superhuman strength. I lived it.

Mattapan was tough duty. At a little past midnight, on January 1, 1974, someone called the station house and said there was a baby lying out in the middle of the street. Happy New Year. My partner Paul Griffin and I found a six-month-old boy with foam coming out of his mouth. His drug-addicted mother had poured Drāno down the baby's throat because, she said, voices were telling her that the devil possessed him. Griffin scooped the boy up, wrapped him in his coat, and cradled him in the backseat while I raced to the hospital. We were both crying; we couldn't believe what people did to each other. The baby died. It was the first murder of the new year.

Next January 1, the first call concerned a fight over a twenty-five-cent pot at a poker game. One guy had chased another out into the hallway and shot him dead. I was standing over the body with a couple of other cops when we felt something falling on our heads. With one of his neighbors dead on the floor, some character three floors above was looking down the stairwell and shoveling Chinese food in his mouth. The rice spilled over the rail.

I was called to a scene where a mother had killed her two mentally retarded teenage girls because she was ill and didn't know who would take care of her girls after she was gone. The teenagers were propped up against the wall. There was blood everywhere because she had stabbed them to death. It looked like there had been quite a struggle. I stood guard over these two young girls for a full tour of duty, waiting for the medical examiner.

All cops have these stories. The good ones don't forget, when they read crime reports, that there are people involved.

The corruption in District 3 and the city, both rumored and real, was very troubling. Most of us sought out and worked with partners we had confidence in, who were not corrupt and wanted to work. I was fortunate to find two: Henry Berlo and Paul Baker. Berlo and I had come on the job and gone through the academy together, so we knew and liked each other. Baker was in his thirties, had been a cop for about ten years, and had spent several years in Mattapan. His partner had recently gotten a transfer out of District 3, and I was lucky to be assigned to work with him my first summer. I had been bouncing from partner to partner for a while before he and I were assigned fairly steadily.

Baker knew the ropes. The best word to describe him was “conscientious.” He was as quick with a sardonic comment as anyone, but he took his job seriously.

We were sitting in Dunkin’ Donuts once when a breaking and entering call came in. “Put the cover on your coffee,” he told me. “Let's go.”

“It's just a report,” I said. “We can finish the coffee.”

“When a call comes in,” he said firmly, “you go.”

That had not been the practice with some other cops I'd ridden with. If it wasn't an emergency, you basically took your time getting there. Baker was a different breed. “When somebody calls, they want us. That's what we're getting paid to do, and that's what we're gonna do.” He was a straight shooter. He handled the issues of corruption, treatment of prisoners, and everything the same way. At a very critical time in my career and life, Baker was the perfect partner.

Not everyone treated the job with such respect. I was riding once with an old-timer down Blue Hill Avenue, Mattapan's main thoroughfare, and passed the Blue Hill Cleaners. Cops got a discount at the Blue Hill, so it tended to get a little extra attention. As we rode by, the place looked different. Nothing I could put my finger on, just a feeling. I said to my partner, “It doesn't look right in there.”

The last thing this old-timer wanted to do was get involved. “Nah, nah. Nothing, kid. Nothing, kid.” We kept on rolling.

We got down to Mattapan Square and in came the 911 call: robbery at the Blue Hill Cleaners.

It was my own fault for listening to him. Putting aside the fact that I was a young cop who would have loved a robbery pinch, I should never have accepted the attitude. Don't get involved? Why else would we do this job?

Mattapan had gone rapidly from a largely Jewish to a largely black neighborhood, but some of the elderly Jewish people either couldn't or
wouldn't move and were, unfortunately, subject to a lot of harassment and intimidation. One woman's home had its windows broken repeatedly, and one of my partners and I were assigned to guard the property. One day, a young black kid came walking up the street, and my partner wouldn't let him pass in front of the house. “You can't walk here,” the cop said. “You'll have to cross the street.”

“What do you mean, I can't walk here? Why can't I walk here?”

“Cause I told you you couldn't walk here, that's why. Get the fuck out of here.” It didn't end up well, but finally the kid left.

A little later that evening, my partner was on a break, and I was standing in front of the house when the same kid came walking on the same side of the street. I didn't say anything to him, just let him walk by. He came up to me and said, “Why'd that cop do that? What was that all about? I wasn't doing anything.” I didn't have an answer. It was such an unnecessary altercation, so verbally abusive. The kid was very upset about being treated badly, and he had every right to be. I suspect he didn't grow up liking or respecting the police. I learned early on the importance of respect, and the great damage a cop can do with his mouth and his attitude.

One of the more enlightened innovations the Boston Police Department did have in the early seventies was a program that encouraged police officers to go to college. The department had done a search and found that fewer than twenty-five cops had college degrees. The benefits of an education are obvious, and so the BPD offered scholarships to Boston State College. It was quite a deal. During the school year, an officer worked four nights a week from six to midnight and had the rest of his time free for classes and study. Twenty-five scholarships were available that year. I took the exam, got accepted to the program, and in 1971 started college. I had dropped out of Boston State six years before. Now I was back.

One of the things that happens to cops when they go into the police business is that they very quickly get wrapped up in the “blue cocoon.” All your friends are cops, all your talk is cop talk about cop issues, all the war stories are cop stories, all you hear are cop ideas. Outsiders are not allowed in; they haven't been through your life, they can't speak your language, they can't understand the stress you live with every day of your life, and because they don't understand and you can't make them understand, you can't respect them. Police officers had a very insular view of the world; from the moment we entered the academy, we were taught that it's
us cops against the rest of the world. Everything about the police culture reinforces the idea that we are different. We drink in cop bars, we go to cop parties, we dance at cop weddings and cry at cop funerals. Being a cop is all you know, and because it is a potentially life-threatening job every day, it becomes all you care about. I was very lucky. Early in my career I was given other options.

At Boston State College, I took some law-enforcement courses, but I also studied urban geography and began to learn the importance of cities and how they develop. I took an American government course and met Michael Dukakis when he spoke as a guest lecturer. I took two semesters of art appreciation with a Professor Arvinites and went on field trips to the nearby Gardiner Museum and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Personally, I was more drawn to the realism of Norman Rockwell than the wilder side of Pablo Picasso, but I came to understand what was so compelling about Picasso's colors and bold strokes. Arvinites taught us to see art not only for its individual beauty but also in the context of the society in which it was created. I was not attracted to Renaissance art, for instance, but I was fascinated to learn of the political significance of a painting's lighting or use of objects. We were also taught to explore what might have been in the artist's mind, which was not something we had been encouraged to consider at the police academy. College taught me to look at things differently than my contemporaries did and to really appreciate what I was looking at. It's good for cops to go to college.