The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (21 page)

There were 212 cops in the district. I had worked with them, spent a lot of time riding around with them, and I felt I knew them. As a young cop, I always complained that we never were given any information and were not asked for our comments, so when I got into a position of some power, I shared information with my officers, and I asked what they were doing. It was a policy of inclusion, not exclusion.

I came to see that a lot of cops in that district were not averse to meeting with community groups; they liked it. They listened to the complaints and went about the business of handling them. Other cops were perfectly happy to take their regular calls but said, “Don't bother me with that other stuff, I don't want anything to do with it.” As a manager, I adjusted to the reality of my workforce. They're not all clones, they had different personalities and professional perspectives. I surveyed my cops and tried to match assignment with temperament. I had to understand what turns cops on.

Most cops want their patch, their own territory. They want to do the job. The basic idea is: Give me an area, and I'll take care of business. Others want to go all over the place. I was one of those. I would have chased calls all over the district. But a lot of the guys had grown up being beat cops, particularly the old-timers, and then in the sixties and seventies had been put into patrol cars. Many of the car teams in District 4 were made up of cops who had been on the job for thirty years, who missed their old beats. We'd find them, in their new two-man cars, gravitating back to their old haunts, where they knew everybody, where they got their cup of coffee, where they got their dry cleaning. They had their patch.

I surveyed the cops about the system I was planning to propose to the police commissioner and gave them the choice: “Pick what you'd like to do and where you'd like to do it.” I needed approximately 50 cops to staff up the rapid-response cars and 150 to staff up the neighborhood-service cars. We based the number of rapid-response cars on the previous year's Priority One emergency calls. If we had fifty calls on a Friday night from four to midnight, that meant three cars would be needed. If the numbers went down from midnight to eight, we might need only one car. We adjusted the manpower to the need. Similarly, the sectors for the neighborhood service cars were designed around identifiable neighborhoods and calls for service.

In exchange for service cars missing out on some action, accepting additional responsibilities to deal with neighborhood residents, and being held accountable for responding to their priorities, I offered those officers a carrot: “Very rarely,” I told them, “under the new system will I take you out of your neighborhood. We'll keep you on your beat. We'll try to reduce cross-sector dispatching to a minimum by holding nonemergency calls until you are free to handle them.” They liked that. South End cops didn't want to work in the Back Bay, and Back Bay cops didn't want to work in the South End. I tried to accommodate them all; if people are working jobs they want to work, it stands to reason they will do a better job. I also made a conscious effort to assign the same officers to the same beats on all shifts. I wanted to establish continuity within the neighborhood and create a sense of growing order and control in the streets.

Fortunately, the numbers worked out. I had around 60 cops who wanted to go around chasing calls, and 150 who wanted to stay in one area. Most of the cops got their choice.

The next hurdle was to alter the basic philosophy with which the Boston Police Department and every other police department in this country embraced 911. Clearly, the idea behind 911 was speed; the police
were supposed to dispatch a car to deal with a 911 call as fast as possible. You didn't stack calls. Robbery in progress, cat in a tree, didn't matter; if there was a car free, whether around the corner or three miles away, you sent him over. Psychologically, a dispatcher wanted to move the calls from “pending” to “dispatched” and get them off the screen.

We proposed a sea change in the use of 911. A robbery and a stranded cat were not equal in the public's need for service; why should we respond to them as if they were? Under our computer-aided dispatching system, the call taker would enter the 911 information into a computer, which would analyze and automatically classify it by priority, according to public risk. (The system was humanized by the dispatcher, who could look at the information and override these designations if he felt it was necessary.) Under our proposed system, instead of giving the next call in the stack to the first available unit, we authorized stacking of nonemergency calls to await the availability of cars assigned to the sector of the call. Rapid-response quadrant cars would zoom in from all over the quadrant for a Priority One call, but Priority Twos and Threes would be stacked in order of seriousness for the neighborhood service cars. This was a much more efficient use of our resources: It would get the job done, it would never leave any part of the district unpoliced, and it would satisfy both the civilians and the police.

To put this program into practice, I had to sell it to the police commissioner. Since Mickey MacDonald had helped develop it, he was enthusiastic. Bob Wasserman, who had come up with the idea, was naturally an ally. It was up to me to sell it.

The meeting took place in the commissioner's office with Commissioner Jordan and some of the top brass. As if they weren't enough, Wasserman had invited former New York City Police Commissioner Pat Murphy. Murphy was a policing icon. He had also been the head of police in Washington and Detroit. He had cleaned house as the reform commissioner in New York City and broken the old pattern of corruption. He was the guy everybody wrote about, the leader in our field. He had written a book. Now he was heading up the Ford Foundation–sponsored Police Foundation, a private organization that conducted research, studied police initiatives in cities around the country, and made recommendations about police practices.

So, don't you know, I woke up the morning of my presentation with laryngitis.

Wasserman and Dunleavy were in the room to back me up. Although
Dunleavy was still not happy about my leaving his staff to go to District 4, he understood that this initiative could make a difference. Mickey MacDonald also stood with me. Some superintendents in his position might have been offended, but he was an exception in those days, encouraging and supporting creativity. If he and I hadn't gotten along, it would have killed the plan.

This was radical change, and change wasn't readily accepted in the Boston police. Some naysayers, choosing conformity over creativity, said we couldn't make one district different from all the rest.

I had prepared. I'd developed flip charts with color maps of each newly defined geographical sector, and demonstrated where each car would go and how our manpower would be allocated. I had rehearsed the most persuasive ways of making my case, and I croaked my way through it.

Murphy thought it was great, the latest in police thinking! Jordan signed off on it. We were in business. I was twenty-nine years old and in charge. I was ecstatic.

Back at the District 4 station house, an old brick-and-stone Depression-era building on the corner of Berkeley and Warren streets in the South End, the walls of my office looked as if someone had splattered paint all over the city. I had requisitioned gigantic maps of the district from City Hall and papered all four walls with them. I covered the maps with acetate and assigned a young civilian employee named Tommy Santry to put up dots: red dots for burglaries, blue dots for robberies. Each dot got a date inside to note when the crime took place. We updated the wall every night. Once we got our information organized, you could see exactly where District 4 crime was clustered. We put duplicate maps in the guardroom where officers turned out for roll call, prepared their reports, and took their meals. That way, when my office was closed, the crime information would be available to them twenty-four hours a day. The maps were also right next to the paid-detail board where off-duty extra-money assignments and rosters were posted. This area of the guardroom was known as the Wailing Wall, and the linoleum had long ago been worn away by the shuffling of many feet as officers pored over the board.

At first, the officers laughed. They gave me the nickname Lord Dots. Cops couldn't be bothered with dots, they were out there on the real streets. What's a pin map going to give them? But it didn't take long to get their interest.

After the initial ribbing and sarcasm that is so much a part of policing, the cops began to use the information. They had the entire district in front
of them, and they checked out their own sectors and everybody else's. I made a point of being there as much as I could. I wanted to make contact.

I got the cops interested by giving them timely, accurate, easy-to-digest information. I didn't order them in and show them, I made it available, and the cops bought in. Then they went about solving some crimes and preventing others.

In each neighborhood sector, Julie Rossborough, now joined by her sister Cynthia Nichols, set up neighborhood panels and encouraged people in the community to work with their sector officers on a regular basis. When I brought neighborhood people into the office and they talked about their complaints, I had a visual to show them. That robbery on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Columbus? Right here. Their concerns were on my wall in blue and red; they could see we were on the case; they were recognized. It was a combination of acknowledgment and showmanship.

The Boston-Fenway Plan increasingly put me in the public eye, and I found I enjoyed it and was good at it. Back in the early days of VCRs, when one videotape cost twelve bucks, I taped my first television appearance off the local Channel 7 news announcing the beginning of this program. I got a big kick out of that. I began meeting notable and influential people at the various institutions that were a part of the Boston-Fenway Consortium. These were people I had read about in the newspapers, seen on the news and in the society pages. They were CEOs of corporations, academics, and patrons of the arts. Not only was I listening to their concerns and advice, they were listening in turn to me and taking my advice. For a Dorchester boy who didn't get hot water plumbing in his home until he was fourteen, this was heady stuff.

The Boston-Fenway Program worked. We targeted crime clusters in wealthy, middle-class, and working-class neighborhoods throughout the district, sent officers in, and an entire area of the city that had been threatened with decay and destruction rebounded. With crime declining, development could begin.

There was one notable weak link in the 911 system. We had approximately fifty police dispatchers working at headquarters, but they were rotated: Some were regulars, some floaters, but they weren't always working District 4. Despite our constant attention, they consistently took sector cars out of one quadrant and sent them to another on minor calls. I recognized our plan wasn't going to work unless I went up to operations and took control of the dispatch end as well. I spent time in what's called the
Turret, the 911 command center, and wasn't shy about getting on the air and telling a dispatcher, “That call's not on his beat. Find another car.” While I put together a training program for the dispatchers, gave them special maps showing the newly designed District 4 sectors, and told them, “We do it differently,” I couldn't break their psychology of getting rid of calls. I didn't have the consistency of control, and as a result some of our cars were still sent flying all over. Nevertheless, the program was judged a success.

I was not only running the Boston-Fenway Program, I was a manager within District 4, and I took that responsibility seriously. The things that drove me crazy when I was a beat cop, I now could take care of. For instance, in a patrol car, it made me completely nuts when I'd come to work and the lights wouldn't go on or the windshield wipers didn't work; I felt that no one was taking care of me, that my work was taken for granted. So every Sunday, I had all the District 4 cars brought in, and I personally inspected them. Then, during the week, we got them repaired. It made an impression on the cops that I took that much time on their behalf, and it forced the other supervisors in the station to respond. I was determined to be a new kind of boss.

Along that line, shortly after my arrival, Wasserman asked if I would be willing to assume additional duties as the Boston police's first liaison to the city's growing gay and lesbian population, many of whom lived in District 4. The relationship between the police and the gay community in the seventies was tenuous and had worsened when, in response to complaints from the Boston Public Library, District 4 undercover officers had arrested a large number of gay men for solicitation in the public restroom of the library's main branch at Copley Square.

Concerned that the gulf between the department and the gay community was widening, Wasserman responded to a request from David Brill, a gay reporter for the alternative
Real Paper
, for the department to meet confidentially with gays to hear their complaints. Since most of these complaints were being made against District 4 officers, Wasserman felt I would be the appropriate intermediary.

Mickey MacDonald was a conservative, church-bred Irish Catholic, and homosexual activities went against everything he believed in. If they were breaking the law, as they were in the library, he was going to enforce the law. But MacDonald was also a police officer, and he understood his obligation to protect that community under the law. We were able to find common ground. Solicitation at the library was clearly illegal and would
not be tolerated. At the same time, however, a gay cruising area in a park in the Fenway area was being plagued by a series of muggings and robberies. We put officers in the park and made several arrests but purposely didn't interrupt the other behavior.

It was a delicate balance. Society was changing, and there was a lot of tension between gays wanting to come out of the closet and flex their muscles and a general public still not fully prepared for these activities, whether in a public men's room or a nightclub or a park at night after dark. We police found ourselves very much in the middle. Laws were being broken by gays, and we had to enforce them. At the same time, we also had to protect gays against the homophobic attacks of gay-bashers.