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The South Bronx

Hey, kid, to get a locker here it's gonna cost you five dollars.

—“HOLLYWOOD” SID CERILE, POLICE OFFICER

In July 1969, I turned twenty-one years of age, was sworn in as a full-fledged police officer, and was assigned to the 44th Precinct in the Highbridge section of the South Bronx. I had actually gone to Cardinal Hayes High School in that part of the Bronx, so I was somewhat familiar with the neighborhood. I also lived just across the Harlem River in Washington Heights, so I could see my apartment building from the front steps of the 44th Precinct Station House. The precinct house, located on Sedgwick Avenue, which ran along the Harlem River on the Bronx side, was affectionately referred to as “Sedgwick by the Sea,” a sobriquet replaced in 1975 by the more damning name, the “Murder House,” after a prisoner was beaten to death inside a holding cell.

The 44th Precinct was one of eleven precincts in the borough of the Bronx (there are now twelve). While New York City is composed of five boroughs—the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Manhattan—NYPD is made up of seven police boroughs, with Manhattan and Brooklyn both divided into “North” and “South” boroughs. The borough commander is a two-star assistant chief, with a one-deputy chief as his executive officer.

The 44th Precinct covered a large land area, stretching from 149th Street in the south to Burnside Avenue (or 180th Street) in the north, and from the Harlem River to the Grand Concourse. In 1969, it was a neighborhood in transition, as poorer residents began to move into the area, replacing the largely Jewish population along the Grand Concourse. Within a few short years the transition was almost complete. The 44th Precinct went from a “sleeper” house to one of the busiest precincts in the city, and by the mid-to late seventies it was the busiest.

I arrived in the 44th Precinct in mid-July 1969 at the height of the mayoral campaign. Mayor John Lindsay was running for reelection against the Republican John Marchi from Staten Island. During the 1960s, the issue of crime and social order had become the number one concern nationally. It had also become a huge issue locally, and Marchi was running on a law-and-order platform. Clearly, Mayor Lindsay felt vulnerable in this area and believed it threatened his reelection, which would have brought to a halt his ultimate intention of running for president. As a result, he sent a clear message to the NYPD as to how it could contribute to his reelection campaign: make arrests, and lots of them—especially narcotics arrests.

Traditionally, a police officer could earn a day off on the books as a result of a good arrest—for example, an armed robbery of a liquor store or a burglary arrest. However, during the mayoral campaign, the criteria for a good arrest/earned day off became watered down. I learned this from my two childhood friends, Pete Dunne and Tommy Hyland, who had been assigned to the 44th Precinct a few months prior to my arrival. “Timoney, you're not going to believe this. They're giving us a day off for bullshit narcotics arrests,” bragged Tommy, who was only ten months out of the police academy but carried himself as if he were a ten-year veteran. “As a matter of fact, they'll give you four hours off if you bring in an asshole with a hypo!” It seemed incredible to me, but who was I to argue? So I jumped on the gravy train and accumulated as many days as I could in my “time bank.”

Once the mayor was reelected, the generosity ceased and the qualifying standards were raised once again. By the early 1970s, police managers began to realize that giving police officers time off for doing their job was bizarre and wasteful. The qualifications for earned time off were then restricted to special categories like those who were named Officer of the Month or individuals who had performed some genuinely heroic act. Nonetheless, I had managed over the prior three years to accumulate a great deal of earned time on the books. In fact, I had so much time accumulated, I was almost able to take off the entire summer that year.

I must admit that earning a day off for a good arrest did create an incentive above and beyond the call of duty. Sometimes, you took unnecessary risks to get to the scene first. One day, I was filling in for Mel Pincus, whose partner was Tom Fitzgerald. Pincus was a tall, good-looking Jewish guy who looked Irish. Fitzgerald was a five-foot-nine Irish guy with a rotund figure who looked Jewish. In fact, the old Jewish residents on the Grand Concourse would refer to Fitzgerald as Officer Pincus and vice versa.

While on routine patrol, Fitzgerald and I were directed to an address on Woodycrest Avenue regarding “shots fired” on the roof of an apartment building. The buildings along Woodycrest were generally five-or six-story walk-ups. We raced to the location. I was the driver, and my heart was pounding in anticipation of my pending “gun collar.” Before the police car had even come to a stop, I jumped out, ran into the building, ran up six flights of stairs, and emerged onto the rooftop by myself. After a cursory search, I found nothing. I then started to catch my breath as Tommy Fitzgerald emerged onto the rooftop, holding out the keys to the police car. He said, “Hey, kid. This is the South Bronx. You leave the keys in the car, when you come back, there's no car. Oh, and by the way, there's an elevator in the building. Look at you! You're huffing and puffing. What if there had been somebody on the roof? What the hell could you have done in your condition? Wait for your partner, asshole.”

Deadly Stereotypes

During my first year in the 44th Precinct, I learned another lesson: stereotypes can fuel crime. The predominantly Jewish area of the 44th included the Grand Concourse and its surrounding streets. By 1970, the Jews who remained there were largely elderly, many of them Holocaust survivors. Unfortunately, young thugs in the area believed that “the old Jews had lots of money.” For a three-or four-year period, a number of these elderly Jews were the victims of nasty crimes, including push-in robberies, where the elderly person would be followed to his door and then pushed into his apartment, where he was then robbed and sometimes gratuitously assaulted, especially if he said he had no money. As a detective explained, “One group of thugs used to remove the shoes of their elderly victims because it was a known fact that is where they hid their money.”

The borough commander of the Bronx at the time was a two-star chief who happened to be Jewish. He devised a Borough Robbery Report mimeograph form that all reporting officers had to complete, in addition to the regular crime report, whenever a robbery was committed. The Borough Robbery Report asked for the age, race, and, more important, the religious identity of the victim. To the best of my knowledge, nobody ever asked why we were required to fill out the additional borough report. We were cops and did what we were told.

The rationale behind the Borough Robbery Report became clear one Saturday morning while I was walking my assigned foot beat along 170th Street. I received a call from the desk officer of the precinct directing me to report to the borough headquarters, which was located on the second floor of the 46th Precinct, just north of the 44th. When I arrived, I joined a group of more than a half dozen young officers who had come from the other precincts in the borough. We were there to meet with the borough commander—a two-star chief! This was unusual, to say the least.

The borough commander instructed us to go through our precincts’ Borough Robbery Reports and compile a chart, by religion, of the victims of the robberies. Once I finished the chart for the 44th Precinct, the numbers spoke for themselves: Jews had made up a disproportionate share of all robbery victims for the prior three years. From speaking with the other young officers, it was my sense that all of the precincts with significant elderly Jewish populations were similar. Once we finished, we were directed to return to our various precincts. Nothing more was said. Nothing more needed to be said. It was apparent that the Jewish two-star chief was just trying to confirm his suspicion that the old Jews around the Grand Concourse neighborhoods were disproportionately the victims of certain violent crimes.

Two years later, I was assigned to the 44th Precinct Anti-Crime Unit. This was a select group of officers in civilian clothes assigned to make robbery arrests on the streets of the South Bronx. While I was in this unit, the borough chief's suspicions were corroborated. Sometimes after we made a robbery arrest, while debriefing the prisoner, we would ask him, out of curiosity, why he had committed the crime. At times these young men would be quite honest in their rationale. The reason they targeted their victim was because he/she was Jewish and “you know the Jews have money!”

Another lesson I learned while patrolling the South Bronx was just how powerful individual police officers are and how they often don't even realize it. As a young police officer in 1969, like other young officers in the city, I was given the less desirable assignments: watching over a DOA (dead on arrival), taking an emotionally disturbed person—an EDP—to the hospital, or guarding the broken window of a store that had been burgled. Every once in a while, on the day or evening shifts, I would get to ride in a car with a partner, and it was like being a “real cop.”

However, due to personnel shortages on the overnight shift (midnight to 8:00 A.M.), I almost always got to ride in a police car with a partner. After a few months of riding on the late shift, a few things became apparent. First, after about 1:00 A.M., just one hour into the shift, the radio went dead. There were very few calls for service, and thus the next seven hours were often boring, with nothing to do. Idle hands are the devil's handiwork, my mother used to tell us. Second, one night I was riding with another young officer (he was probably the same age as me, twenty-one). Sometime during the shift he turned to me and said, “Can you believe this? Here we are, just the two of us, and WE ARE IN CHARGE. Jesus!” It was true. While there was a sergeant working with us, we rarely saw him or knew where he was at any given moment. Thus, two young men, still wet behind the ears, were in charge of a rather large geographical area. We could take a life or make an arrest or just make someone's life miserable. What power!

This notion of the power of the officers working the graveyard shift took on more sinister and damaging implications as the NYPD moved to the practice of “steady tours” of duty. As I mentioned earlier, when I first entered the NYPD, police officers assigned to police precincts worked rotating shifts, three in all, around the clock, each week a different shift. Thus, an officer never became “too comfortable” in any one shift. Clearly, however, working weekly rotating shifts was difficult, and some officers would take almost a week to recover from the graveyard shift.

In the mid-1970s, police human resources experts began to make arguments for “steady shifts,” particularly in reference to the graveyard shift. The NYPD responded by creating a “steady late shift” (graveyard shift), and a second rotating shift for 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. and four P.M. to midnight. In other words, a police officer would work one week of 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., followed by a week of 4:00 P.M. to midnight. These new working “charts” seemed to please most. Now you had individuals who worked the graveyard shift because they chose to.

However, the unintended consequences of a good idea were realized some years later as scandal after scandal erupted within the NYPD. The vast majority of times these scandals involved officers working the steady graveyard shifts. Not only did these officers have the power to do good, they also had the power to do bad. And there was plenty of time to do either, since the police radio became quiet after 1:00 or 2:00 A.M. Additionally, there was less supervision on these shifts. While sergeants and sometimes a lieutenant were assigned to these shifts, it was very unlikely that a police officer would run across a captain or other high-ranking official at 3:00 in the morning. At 3:00 in the afternoon it was, however, always possible to encounter a high-boss, even one from another precinct or headquarters unit.

With this power and lack of supervision, some of the officers on the graveyard shift began to fall into cliques. Often, they seemed to develop a Lord of the Flies mentality with their own mores and code of conduct, with informal leaders and followers. It sometimes appeared to me that these officers even looked “different” from the regular officers who worked during the daytime hours. They seemed pale and tired, either from working their second job during the daylight hours or, more likely, from spending hours sitting in a courtroom waiting for their case from the previous night to be called.

Some years later, in the mid-1980s, police human resources began to argue for “steady shifts” for all shifts. Thus, a police officer would work steady 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., or 4:00 P.M. to midnight, or midnight to 8:00 A.M. Human resources argued that such a system would be beneficial. Productivity would increase. Morale would increase. Sick time would go down. These arguments were bought hook, line, and sinker, and the “steady shifts” were implemented.

A few years later, in 1990, Inspector Mike Julian, assigned to the Research and Planning Division, conducted a short study on the benefits of these shifts. None of the supposed benefits was evident. In fact, it could be argued that the direct opposite happened. Productivity, in terms of arrests, went down. You started to find police officers who were scheduled to get off work at 4:00 P.M. going home to watch their children while their wives went to work at night. Stories were legend of police officers not getting “involved” in anything near the end of their shift (from about 2:00 P.M. on) for fear they would get “stuck” with an arrest that would interfere with their babysitting responsibilities. Other police officers found second jobs that they worked prior to coming in for the 4:00 P.M. to midnight shift. And so it went. In some instances, the police job became the “second job.”

The most detrimental effect of the “steady shifts” was a loss of camaraderie. Officers on one shift literally did not know officers who worked an opposite shift. In addition, there was a loss of familiarity with the ways in which the character of a specific geographical area could vary depending on the time of day or the day of the week.

Take, for example, the 47th Precinct. This was a mainly residential precinct with a large working and middle-class African American population. There was also an Irish section in the northwest part of the precinct called Woodlawn. During the day, the precinct was a typical quiet residential area. However, at night, when people were home from work, it looked quite different. Then on the weekends, there were bars and clubs that were very active in the evening and early-morning hours. Finally, two large hospitals brought outsiders into the area either as patients or visitors. At night, the air was permeated by the sound of ambulance sirens as they raced to and from the hospital carrying shooting and stabbing victims. Depending on the time of day or the day of the week, an officer might find himself investigating a stolen trash can cover or questioning a person with multiple gunshot wounds in the hospital emergency room.

Years later, in 1994, when I was the chief of department, I was conducting roll call at the 47th Precinct. The difficulty with the steady shift was well illustrated when a very young officer informed me that he had been out of the police academy for only one year and was working a steady shift of 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., with weekends off. There were two immediate problems with this. First, the notion of a new police officer working banker's hours seemed incredible to me. In the past, a police officer would have had to have ten years under his belt before ever being considered for a steady day shift. Second, and more important, when I asked the police officer if he had ever been in the precinct at 11:00 P.M. on a Friday or Saturday night, he replied that he had not. That was an eye-opener. Here we had a police officer whose training was one dimensional. He knew only how to deal with a quiet residential precinct; his most serious encounter during the course of a shift was to issue tickets to parked cars for not obeying the alternate side parking regulations so the sanitation workers could clean the streets.

The Strike

In January 1971, a court ruled against the police union, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (PBA), in a case regarding pay and work conditions. The ruling led to an immediate wildcat strike that began in the 43rd Precinct and spread to other precincts in the Bronx and then to all of the precincts throughout the city. Police officers refused to go out on the streets for a full five days. Normally, such an action might have been effective in persuading the city to come to the bargaining table and do the right thing. Unfortunately, this strike was one of the great lessons of all time for most police officers. When things that can go wrong do go wrong, it is referred to as Murphy's Law. In the case of this police strike, another law was at work—“O'toole's Law”—which stated that Murphy was an optimist!

A few things made the 1971 strike a complete disaster and affected the way police officers would react in future labor disputes, all to the benefit of the city. First, the PBA is one of five police unions, and it represents only uniformed police officers. Another union represents detectives; another, sergeants; another, lieutenants; and another, captains and those with higher ranks. Thus, the additional four unions’ membership was available to fill in for the striking police officers. Second, uniformed police officers who were still on probation, over a thousand in all, did not have to take part in the strike or job action since they could have and would have been fired. Third, there were some police officers (a few very brave officers) whose conscience did not allow them to take part in the job action.

When we began the job action, the city reacted immediately and put all the detectives, sergeants, lieutenants, and nonparticipating police officers on twelve-hour shifts, with no days off. Under normal conditions, the 44th Precinct put on the streets about ten two-officer cars, a few foot beats, and a few special posts. During the strike, they were able to deploy about twelve sector cars and fill all the foot patrols and special posts, which meant more officers than normal were working the streets. At the same time, the temperature for that week never went above twenty degrees. Not only was there no crime, there were no people on the streets to “miss” their regular police officers.

The job action lasted five days, and we returned to work with our tails between our collective legs. But the city was not finished with us. The city invoked the New York State Taylor Law, which forbids police officers from striking. We responded that it hadn't really been a strike, since all officers had shown up for work, stood roll call, and then merely stayed in their station houses during their shifts. The city's position that it was a strike was upheld, and we were docked two days’ pay for every day we did not hit the streets. For police officers, most of whom live payday to payday, it was a hard, expensive lesson that would affect us the rest of our time on the job. For me, it was particularly hard. I was to be married a few weeks later to Noreen Carroll, whose father was a sergeant in the 28th Precinct in Harlem.

In addition to loosing two weeks’ pay, the job action caused huge friction between those officers who, out of conscience, refused to participate and those who did. There was some ugliness and some vandalism to the conscientious officers’ lockers. That ugliness remained my most significant memory and proved quite valuable when I had to handle another police “job action” in 1986, when I was the commander of the 5th Precinct in Chinatown.

Stopping the Dougie Walshes

In 1971, Patrick Murphy, the new reform police commissioner, put together a group of top police executives that included his deputy commissioner for community affairs, Benjamin Ward. The group was asked to study the issue of police use of deadly physical force, specifically when police officers discharge their weapons in the line of duty. Police shootings were the matches that lit the fuses of much of the civil unrest that occurred in city after city throughout the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s. The committee came up with a series of recommendations, which were then put into a police directive.

The directive set up the procedures for how and who would conduct an investigation whenever a police officer discharged his weapon, regardless of whether or not he wounded/killed someone, and whether or not it was intentional or accidental. The directive also listed certain situations in which an officer was forbidden from discharging his weapon. The most controversial of these new guidelines prohibited a police officer from “discharging his weapon at or from a moving vehicle, unless the occupants of the other vehicle are using deadly physical force against the officer or another person, by means other than the vehicle.” In other words, a police officer could not shoot at a vehicle that was coming toward him unless the occupants of the vehicle were using deadly physical force (shooting at the officer). If the officer felt his life was in danger from the approaching car, then he should get out of the way!

While the policy was crafted and ready to go, it was never implemented for fear of a backlash from the police union. Into the early 1970s, police officers were being gunned down in the streets on an almost regular basis. Therefore, the union would have had little problem rallying the public, press, and politicians to support their cause. Six years earlier, the police union had roundly defeated a voter referendum on the establishment of a civilian complaint review board.

It is important to note that there is never a good time to implement a controversial policy. However, implementing controversial policies after a controversy is sure to generate more controversy.

In August 1972, an eleven-year-old African American boy was shot and killed by an NYPD officer while he was fleeing a stolen car in Staten Island. The media ran with the story, and as a result, racial tensions reached a boiling point. The police commissioner directed Ben Ward to go to Staten Island to gauge the temperature of the community. Ward spent two days listening to and speaking with community residents and leaders, assuring them that an appropriate investigation would follow.

In 1985, while discussing the issue of police shootings with Ward, who was now police commissioner, he informed me that upon his return to headquarters from those two days in Staten Island, he reported his findings to the police commissioner and recommended the implementation of the deadly physical force policy that had been developed a year prior. The police commissioner, looking to relieve the public pressure, concurred. In less than two weeks, the policy was announced to the public, and it went a long way to assuage the concerns of the black community. Meanwhile, the police union objected strenuously, feeling that the NYPD had caved in to community pressure and, as a result, was jeopardizing the ability of police officers to defend themselves. They also feared that the top brass had “rushed through” the creation of a radical policy in the days following the shooting of the eleven-year-old boy.

The irony was that the policy had actually been developed in 1971, a full year prior to the shooting. But because the top brass feared that then was not the right time to institute the policy, they sat on it, waiting for the right time to arrive. There is almost never a right time to institute radical policy change: you just institute it. However, there can always be a wrong time—such as immediately following the shooting of an eleven-year-old boy. In situations like that, people are invariably going to allow their own ideas and prejudices to influence their opinion of the change.

The development and implementation of the deadly physical force policy has two final lessons: First, if you've taken the time to study and discuss a new, radical policy change then decide not to implement it, that needs to be explained. Second, when you implement radical policy change without explanation and rationale, do not be surprised if the recipients of that information (police officers, the public, and the press) all come to entirely different conclusions concerning that policy.

Many in the black community felt that the policy would help reduce the number of African Americans killed by police; many in the white community felt that the police department was succumbing to community pressure and jeopardizing the safety of its officers. The media, depending upon their political leaning, came up with their own understanding of the policy.

The “don't shoot at a vehicle” part of the new directive was discussed ad nauseam among the officers in the 44th Precinct. The one thing we all agreed upon was that the cause of the policy was Dougie Walsh. Dougie had a habit of shooting at cars that drove toward him. Also at cars that drove away from him. What we didn't realize is that every precinct in the city had a Dougie Walsh who shot at cars on a pretty regular basis.

The other much-discussed part of the directive dealt with forbidding officers to shoot at fleeing felons. The wisdom of this particular section was upheld in 1985 when the Supreme Court of the United States, in the landmark decision Garner v. Tennessee, forbade shooting at unarmed fleeing felons. The court justices used the NYPD policy as part of their legal rationale.

I did not appreciate how effective the policy was until the early 1980s, when I was assigned as a young lieutenant to the Chief of Operations Office at police headquarters. In l983, there was a series of congressional hearings on police brutality regarding deadly shootings by members of the NYPD. The hearings were racially charged, and my boss, the chief of operations, asked me to do some research on the recent history of police shootings in the city. When I looked at the numbers, they were startling, especially the effect of the deadly physical force directive that was sent out in August 1972.

In 1971, the last year before the firearms directive was issued, the NYPD recorded more than eight hundred incidents of a police officer discharging his weapon, whether a person was wounded/killed or not, whether the discharge was intentional or accidental. Ninety to one hundred people were killed as a result of police bullets.

The firearms discharges for the first eight months of 1972 (about two-thirds of the year) look similar to the numbers for 1971. However, when you track the firearms discharge numbers for the last four months of 1972 (after the directive was implemented), there is an immediate and dramatic decline of somewhere around 40 percent. For 1973, the first full year of the firearms directive, overall shootings were reduced to between five hundred and six hundred, with about sixty-six civilians killed as a result.

Over the next thirty-five years, the shooting numbers continued to decline to the point where the number of civilians killed by police officers is around 12 per year and the number of overall shootings has dropped to fewer than 150. The bottom line is that when an organization produces a good, sound policy on a critical matter—in this case, deadly physical force—and combines the policy with other changes such as training, the results can be remarkable.

I am sure there are some who would argue that the restrictive shooting policy implemented by the NYPD was specific to New York City and that the policy may not work in other police departments. Some years later, I would get to test that theory as the commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department and later still as the chief of the Miami Police Department. The policy worked as intended; it reduced police shootings and killings dramatically.

Fourth Platoon

When the new shooting policy hit the streets, I was a member of the 44th Precinct's Fourth Platoon. The Fourth Platoon was started two years earlier as an effort to address the increase in violent crime in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Up until that point, police officers worked three rotating platoons: 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., 4:00 P.M. to midnight, and midnight to 8:00 A.M. (the “late tour”). There were equal numbers of officers in all three platoons, so the same number of officers were on at 2:00 in the afternoon as were on at 2:00 in the morning, even though the workload and demand for police service was completely different at those two times.

The Fourth Platoon consisted of about forty volunteers from the three rotating shifts. This platoon worked from 6:00 P.M. to 2:00 A.M., as an overlap shift, to get additional police officers on the street during the peak crime hours. On the first day of the Fourth Platoon, TV cameras showed up at precincts throughout the city to film the roll calls to great fanfare and public interest. The Fourth Platoon was going to be the silver bullet that drove down crime and assuaged people's fears. How many times over the next thirty years did I participate in unveiling new anticrime initiatives that were hailed as the silver bullet to end this or start that? The reality is that in policing there is no silver bullet. What is required to reduce crime is hard work and creative thinking.

In any event, after joining the Fourth Platoon it became clear to me that while we looked very good in uniform out on the streets, I was not so sure we were very effective as “crime fighters.” Twenty to thirty of us would attend roll call, get our assignments, and then drive our private cars to our foot beat, sometimes as far as a mile away from the precinct. (By the way, riding in a private vehicle while in uniform was a violation of the NYPD's policy and procedures that everyone engaged in.) There were no handheld, portable radios at that time, so you walked your beat and checked in with the station once an hour using the police call box at your post. For example, I was given patrol post 27, with a ten ring and a 2100 meal. That meant I walked 170th Street from Jerome Avenue to the Grand Concourse. I would ring the station house at ten past every hour. And at nine o’clock (2100 hours, military time), I would take a meal. You were expected to be on your post for the entire eight hours (except during the meal period). However, your supervising sergeant would let you know when he would be coming around to see you. He would say, “Timoney, I'll give you a ‘see’ at 8:30 P.M., so you had better be on your post.”

Since there were no portable radios, the only crime you could fight was what you saw in front of you or what a resident of the neighborhood brought to your attention. I often found myself noticing three or four police cars (which were equipped with radios) speeding past with sirens blaring and lights flashing, responding to a robbery in progress at, say, 169th Street and Walton Avenue, one block from my post. But it could have been thirty blocks since there was no communication. Nonetheless, the appearance of police officers in uniform on foot had a greatly reassuring effect on the general public.

The lack of portable radios and the danger that entailed became quite evident in 1970 and 1971 when a number of police officers were shot and killed by members of the Black Liberation Army (BLA). The BLA was determined to overthrow the government of the United States and used the killing of police officers as a means to its end. As a result of these shootings, the police department rushed to acquire portable, handheld radios, and within a year or so they became part of our daily equipment. Although the 44th Precinct received a supply of portable radios, we never had enough to go around. The allocation of the radios was not based on priority or danger, but rather the idiosyncratic nature of the various police officers. Those who were lazy and didn't want to be bothered refused the radios for fear of being assigned “jobs” during the course of their eight-hour shifts. The younger officers, me included, were eager to get the portable radios so that we could fight crime, not just on our beat but on the adjoining beat as well.

For management, portable radios had a downside, since they compromised beat integrity. Police officers could hear what was going on around their beat and away from their beat. This created in some the temptation to leave their beat for greener pastures, where they felt they could make an arrest. If 170th Street was quiet after 9:00 P.M. when the stores closed, an officer could always drift over to 167th or 168th Street to make a narcotics arrest. In some cases, officers became really creative by using their private cars to drive to locations, sometimes ten or fifteen blocks from their beat, to answer a call in progress. Beat integrity went to hell in a handbasket. But that was the upside for police officers like me; we were able to use a high number of arrests to get into the newly established Anti-Crime Units and work in plainclothes.

The Knapp Commission

One of the advantages of working the Fourth Platoon was that it allowed me to go to school during the daytime. Another unintended advantage was that I was able to watch the live television coverage of the Knapp Commission hearings on police corruption. Witness after witness testified to the ubiquitous corruption within the NYPD. The stories were gripping, but the picture they created was ugly. After watching the hearings during the day, my partners and I would patrol the streets of the South Bronx at night, often hearing derogatory comments and sometimes outright cursing about the NYPD and its officers. It was not a good feeling, and it certainly was a hard lesson—the notion that when a few cops screw up, everybody pays. One night, one of the veteran sergeants, Nick Sforza, was conducting roll call, and he tried to explain to us what we could expect in terms of the public's attitude and demeanor as we patrolled the streets. He told us we would be angry and would want to strike out at the civilians, but he explained that we had to take it. It was the nature of the business. We had to have thick skin. To prove his point, he told us that when a lawyer or a doctor screws up, you never hear the public condemning the entire profession and those within it. The idea that everyone pays for the mistakes of the few is one I was to hear repeated far too often over the next thirty-plus years of my career.

I've heard all sorts of rationalizations and justifications trying to explain the phenomenon. One long-time cop explained to me, “You see, kid, we're always in the business of telling people to their face when they've done wrong. Whether it's some junkie we arrest for a burglary or some housewife we issue a citation to for rolling through a stop sign, there are lots of people with pent-up frustration and anger toward the cops. When they get the chance to vent, they do.” I don't know if that is true or not, but it is as good as any other explanation I have heard.

One major gripe police officers had concerning the Knapp Commission was how it seemed to focus almost entirely on the police department, paying little attention to other parts of the criminal justice system that they knew to be just as corrupt. For example, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, lawyers roamed the halls of the Bronx Criminal Court at 161st Street and Third Avenue looking for clients. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the cases they took on, and there seemed to be no standard fees except the cold cash that happened to be in the defendant's pocket. It was not uncommon for a defense attorney to ask a judge for the postponement of a case because one of his witnesses, “Mr. Green” (that is, the money), hadn't arrived yet. The judges understood and acquiesced to these and other such requests.

One day I was standing outside the courtroom waiting for my case to be called on a gun arrest I had made a week earlier. The defendant's lawyer, who was probably the most famous of the hallway lawyers, was engaged in conversation with the defendant and his family on the other side of the corridor. Out of nowhere, the lawyer approached me and asked, “Patrolman Timoney, what time is it?” I replied sarcastically, “What are you, nuts?” and indicated the large clock overhead. He just thanked me and returned to the family. Frank Gaffney, a veteran cop from the 43rd Precinct, came up to me and asked, “What did he want?” I told him he wanted to know what time it was, even though there was a huge clock right here. The veteran cop replied, “You've just been set up. He's gone back over and told the family that he has spoken to you, that the fix is in, but it will require another hundred dollars to pay Timoney.” I replied, shocked, “You gotta be fucking kidding me.” That was life in the criminal court of the South Bronx, and I am sure it existed in the other four county courtrooms in the city as well.

The Knapp Commission did make a series of recommendations that were solid, including more formal education of police officers. The commission also decried the poor wages police officers received and recommended increases, which all officers overwhelmingly endorsed. The pay issue was brought home to us one day at roll call. The Seventh Division inspector stopped in to speak to us before we hit the street. He talked about the Knapp Commission's findings and recommendations and then got to the issue of the pay raise and said, almost matter-of-factly, “Listen, you guys, we're gonna be giving you better pay, so there's no need to steal.”

The Knapp Commission hearings affected me directly when the Bronx district attorney, Burton Roberts, held a press conference. Roberts was a larger-than-life figure with a boundless ego; he did not suffer fools lightly. As the police department was being bashed day after day in the press, Roberts decided to hold a press conference to show that in the Bronx, at least, there were good cops who did not succumb to theft and bribery. He decided to call the press conference with Bronx police officers who had made bribery arrests the prior year. Two dozen police officers were assembled in a conference room, and I was one of them. The plan was for all of the officers to form a semicircle around the D.A. while he made his announcement and pontificated on how there were many brave and honest police officers in the Bronx. Before the conference, I figured out the best position to be in to get my mug on television, since I did not have a speaking part (our role was that of blue potted plants, a role I would play on numerous occasions throughout my career). I maneuvered for a position next to and slightly behind the D.A. while the officers took their positions. When I gathered all of my friends that night to watch the press conference on TV, there was a great shot of the D.A. with my left hand slightly to the right of his face. As the camera zoomed out to get a panoramic view of all those assembled, it panned to the left and showed all of the fine officers to my right, missing Patrolman Timoney, who stood to the right of the D.A. That was my first appearance on television. As the years passed, I would manage to get other parts of my body in the picture and even every once in a while have a speaking part.

Plainclothes in Anti-Crime

The Anti-Units were regular patrol officers who were assigned to wear plainclothes within the precinct. Their main job was to deal with crime, specifically violent crime and burglaries. There was a quid pro quo deal between the anticrime officers and the police department. We got to work in plainclothes and use our private cars, and the police department had to supply only the gas. At the time, I was driving a 1966 blue Volkswagen Beetle with a sunroof and a rotted floor in back. You could actually see the ground under the car as it was moving. On more than one occasion I had to put prisoners in the back with the admonition to keep their feet raised so that they didn't fall through the floor.

My two partners in the Anti-Crime Unit were Joe Rooney and Richie Sabol. Sabol was the senior man on the team and was considered by most to be one of the top and toughest cops in the 44th. He was a veteran of fifteen years, having spent seven of those as a cop in Yonkers before joining the NYPD. Sabol had entered the Marine Corps at age seventeen and served a two-year stint during the Korean War. He had an easy-to-understand policing philosophy: “Our job is to protect the most vulnerable: the very young and the very old.” Joe Rooney was a blond-haired, blue-eyed cop with less time than I had on the job. While I had spent my first two years as a police trainee, Joe served those years in Vietnam. He was a very good street cop with a bit of a temper. Fortunately, Sabol controlled the worst tendencies of both Rooney and me.

In 1973, my brother, Ciaran, entered the NYPD, and after six months he was assigned to the 44th Precinct. Ciaran's class was the first in the history of the NYPD to have a significant number of females who trained next to their male counterparts in preparation for all aspects of policing. Prior to this, women in the NYPD had been assigned to specialized units such as the Juvenile Aid Division or had performed matron duties like handling female prisoners. Now, women were to become full and equal partners with their male counterparts.

When Ciaran was assigned to the 44th, I was a little surprised; I had thought that there was an unwritten rule that brothers were not assigned to serve in the same precinct. There was the so-called Sullivan rule, based on the World War II military tragedy of the five Sullivan brothers who were assigned to the same ship and who were all killed when the ship sank. I should not have been surprised, though, because in the 44th at that time there were two other sets of brothers and a father and son who were both assigned to the 44th Precinct.

The rationale for the Sullivan rule became apparent to me shortly after Ciaran started work at the 44th. I was assigned to the Anti-Crime Unit with my partner Richie Sabol and we were on the lookout for robbers and other miscreants. I knew the patrol post where Ciaran and his partner were working. The radio had been quiet when all of a sudden Ciaran's partner got on the police radio hysterically screaming, “Officer needs assistance!” Since I didn't hear Ciaran's voice, I assumed the worst. I drove my Volkswagen like a maniac through the streets of the South Bronx, mounting sidewalks to get through traffic. I eventually arrived at the location: 1430 Grand Concourse. This address consisted of six seven-story buildings surrounding a huge courtyard. It was referred to derisively by the cops in the 44th as “jungle habitat.” About a year earlier I had responded to this location only to have a burning mattress, heaved from the roof, barely miss my partner and me. “Airmail garbage! Incoming!”

When I entered the building where Ciaran and his partner needed the assistance, I found him on the second floor, as cool and calm as could be, with his prisoner handcuffed. When I asked him, “What the hell happened?” he just head nodded toward his partner, saying, “He panicked.”

A few hours later, discussing the whole incident with my partner Richie, we concluded that the Sullivan rule, if it didn't exist, should be implemented and enforced. I had risked not only my life and Richie's life but also the lives of those pedestrians whom I almost ran over in my highly emotional state. In any police response to an officer needing assistance, the heartbeat will always increase, as will the tension and the desire to get to the location as quickly as possible. When it's your brother, the heart rate goes off the charts. The blood rushing to the head clouds your thinking, and the results can be disastrous.

Tommy Ryan

The most profound lesson I learned in my eight years in the 44th Precinct, and, in fact, probably in my entire career, related to an incident that took place while I was on vacation in Ireland in July 1975. Upon returning from vacation, I received a phone call from my plainclothes partner Richie Sabol, who was now a sergeant in Brooklyn. “Did you see the papers?” he asked. “Your friend Ryan's in trouble.” While I obviously was not working the night of the Ryan incident, I learned enough about what took place from my fellow officers.

On the evening in question, two police officers were dispatched to an apartment building on Nelson Avenue in the Highbridge neighborhood regarding “men with guns.” Upon arrival at the scene, the two officers confronted three men exiting the building; when they frisked them, they discovered the men were armed with illegal handguns. It was a very good arrest. Other units responded to “back up” the initial two officers, but when they arrived, the three bad guys were already in custody. Some of the responding officers were curious to see what apartment these three men had come from. The three arrestees were obviously reluctant to talk. Enter Officer Thomas Ryan.

Tommy Ryan was a friend of mine with whom I played football in the Bronx. Tommy, like me, was a police trainee; he was assigned to the 44th Precinct when I came through the door in 1969. When Tommy turned twenty-one and became a full-fledged police officer, he was assigned to the 41st Precinct (known as “Fort Apache”) in the South Bronx. The 41st Precinct had a reputation as a “wild” precinct, and many of the officers assigned there tried to live up to that reputation. Tommy was no different. After a short time in the 41st, Tommy ran afoul of police brass and was transferred to a precinct in the North Bronx. He didn't last too long there before he again came to the attention of the police brass and was transferred once more, this time to the 44th Precinct. Tommy had come full circle.

Right around this time, after Richie Sabol was promoted to sergeant, I was back on a uniform post. One day I was summoned to the precinct commander's office and informed that Ryan had been assigned to the 44th Precinct. The commander knew Tommy and I were friends and asked me to work with him and to “look after him.” I partnered with Tommy over the next few months on a semisteady basis. Tommy was a guy with a big heart, but he also had an unorthodox way of policing, which irritated many of the veterans to no end. He was a handful. And that's putting it mildly.

The night of the incident on Nelson Avenue, Tommy Ryan took one of the three prisoners back into the building to ascertain which apartment he had come from. Ryan took the prisoner to a top-floor apartment and had the guy stand in front of the door. Ryan then knocked on the door.

Inside the apartment were a man and a woman. The man had just been “ripped off” by the three other males who had been arrested fleeing the apartment building. The man inside the apartment looked out through the peephole, saw one of the men who had just robbed him standing there at the door, got a gun, and fired at the door. Officer Ryan, who was standing to the side, heard the shot and told the other officers nearby that the person inside was shooting at him. The officers forced their way into the apartment and arrested the man inside. Everything was fine up to that point. What happened next is not quite clear, but it goes something like this.

When the officers got inside the apartment, the man who had been shooting was roughed up and injured, but apparently not too seriously. The prisoner and the occupant of the apartment were taken from the apartment to the street, where the other two guys were still in handcuffs. All four were then transported by police vehicles to the 44th Precinct station house, about ten blocks away.

It was alleged that, while being transported to the station house, the man who shot through the door was punched about the body. It was further alleged that, over the next few hours in the station house, the male was again beaten by police officers, specifically by Tommy Ryan. The man was eventually taken to a local hospital, where he lay on a stretcher for a long period of time before he was taken into the emergency room. But it was too late. The male died from internal injuries as the doctor was working on him.

As you can imagine, a huge investigation was undertaken by the Bronx District Attorney's Office. Ryan was indicted for murder, and three other officers were indicted for assault. Eventually, the charges were dropped, correctly, against the three other officers. Ryan, however, fled the jurisdiction for a few years (allegedly to Ireland), then surrendered, stood trial, and was sent to jail.

The damage this case did to the esprit de corps of the 44th Precinct is not to be underestimated. Police officers testifying against other police officers…not a pretty sight. Police community relations were severely damaged, and there were protests by community members against the officers assigned to the “House of Murder.”

In the immediate months after the initial incident, police officers were reluctant to discuss this case with other police officers. Nobody wanted to be involved. However, every once in a while, I would be assigned to partner with an officer who had been working that night and, though he may have gotten to the scene a little late, still had some insight into how this could have happened. The stories among the officers I spoke to were remarkably consistent in the details, and there was almost unanimous agreement on what went wrong, and who failed to do his job.

The sergeant who was working that fateful night was a joke. He fancied himself as “one of the boys” and always thought he was funny. In fact, some officers opined that, during the night of the arrest and beating, he found the whole thing somewhat amusing. The problem was that he failed to do his job. He was the one person who could have stopped the nonsense, but he didn't. While I never tried to make an excuse for Tommy Ryan's actions that night, he was not the only one at fault. The patrol sergeant failed—big time.

There are certain unwritten rules in the police world. While it is never excused, there is an understanding that sometimes, in the heat of battle or in a highly emotional situation, a police officer might loose his cool. However, it is up to other officers, especially those not directly involved in the situation, to intervene to stop any conduct that is counter to good policy and procedures. Sometimes it is a lot to ask of an officer to step in and break up these situations, but good cops do it all the time. When it comes to a sergeant, however, it is his job. He must stop the conduct forthwith. The sergeant working in the 44th the night in question failed miserably, and there is some anecdotal evidence that he, in fact, encouraged the misconduct. Yet he went unpunished, turning state's witness against his own officers.

What I learned from this event is something I continue to put into practice even today: It is the responsibility of the sergeant to get police officers to do their job, and while the officers are doing their job, the sergeant must also make sure to keep them out of trouble! Sometimes keeping the cops out of trouble might mean sergeants have to do unpopular things: confront the cops, including their informal leaders, and sometimes even impose discipline. In paramilitary organizations, discipline is the glue that holds everything together.

Layoffs: Cops Matter

In the spring of 1976, New York City was going through a profoundly difficult fiscal crisis. There were threats of layoffs for city workers, including police officers. To avert layoffs, the police union made an agreement with the city that all officers would work an additional five days over the following twelve months. The deal never made sense to me, since I did not understand how working an additional five days (the officers got to choose which days) over the next year would put money in the city's coffers. But I had a brother who faced a layoff and, being a good union man, I went with the program.

We began working the extra days almost immediately. In June of that year, the city did not get the assistance from the federal government that it had anticipated. One of the city tabloids ran a headline regarding President Gerald Ford's refusal to give money to the city—“Ford to City: Drop Dead.” On June 30, 1976, the last day of the fiscal year, the city laid off five thousand police officers, my brother, Ciaran, included. However, the police officers who remained were still held to the bargain of working those additional five days, even though five thousand officers had been laid off. It was surreal.

It became more surreal for me about a month later when I was working one of my additional five days. I was with my partner when I spotted a kid, about seventeen, in a car that looked suspicious. As soon as I made eye contact with the kid, he took off, so I chased him with the police car, using lights and siren. After a few blocks, the kid dumped the car and took off on foot. I was quite fast at the time and actually liked foot chases. I chased the kid for about two blocks and eventually caught him. No harm, no foul. Or so I thought. A few police officers who came to back me up in the chase cursed me out: “Timoney, you jerk! What the hell are you doing? They laid off your brother, Ciaran, and here you are, working for nothing but a broken promise. And to make matters worse, you're making collars! You're an asshole!” My only retort, which probably seemed lame at the time, was that we were still police officers and we had to enforce the law even when it didn't seem to be in our own personal best interest.

The real eye-opener with the layoffs was the police union's reaction, or lack of action. Five thousand officers were laid off in one day, and the effete union could do little but protest. The lessons of the 1971 strike were fresh in every officer's mind, including those heading the union, and we were not about to pay any more fines under the Taylor Law.

There was an even greater lesson for me personally as a result of these layoffs—that you could lay off five thousand police officers and not expect there to be a dangerous downside. You really had to believe that the number of police officers does not matter. You had to subscribe to the theories coming out of the 1960s that there was little the police could do about crime because the police did not address the underlying causes of crime: poverty, racism, unemployment, homelessness. There was also the notion, since the Knapp Commission, that police officers should not deal with drugs, disorderly bars, and other so-called quality-of-life issues. Enforcement in these areas, it was assumed, only bred corruption; there was no nexus between low-level quality-crimes and “real crime.” Finally, there was the idea that low-quality-of-life enforcement, especially in ethnic minority areas, was an example of being judgmental and unfair. Enforcing minor violations such as open-container drinking, illegal social clubs, and low-level drug use (marijuana) was wrong. The police needed to be more sensitive to other cultures rather than engaging in strict enforcement. And there was the recognition that enforcing low-level quality-of-life violations was labor intensive and therefore distracted police from real crime. For example, if a police officer made an arrest for violation of the marijuana law, it meant that that police officer had to come off the street and be stuck in the station house, and then in court, when he could have been more viable out in the street.

Only with a mind-set like this could five thousand police officers be laid off without a whimper. Worse still, in addition to the five thousand laid-off officers, another five thousand officers were lost through attrition over the next five years. By 1980, the NYPD had only about twenty-one thousand police officers on payroll, as opposed to the thirty-thousand officers it had had in the mid-1970s. During all of this time, I do not remember any high-ranking police official speaking out against or resigning in protest of these layoffs. They, too, had bought into the idea that cops don't matter—that crime and disorder are beyond the ability of the police to affect.

With this thinking, is it any wonder that by the end of the decade New York City had the highest crime rate in its history? The police leadership failed to understand the direct connection between low-level, quality-of-life violations and serious crimes. They didn't understand that the failure to break up and arrest a small group rolling dice on the corner could prevent a homicide later that night when the loser of the game took back his money at gunpoint. They didn't understand that not dealing with unlicensed social clubs could lead to the deaths of eighty-seven people in a fire at one of those very clubs. They didn't understand that two seemingly harmless marijuana dealers could engage in a turf battle, guns blazing, at 5:30 P.M. in Bryant Park, killing a woman who was waiting for a bus to take her home after a hard day's work.

By the summer of 1977, I had spent a full eight years in the 44th Precinct and was ready for a change. I had worked very hard making hundreds of arrests while somehow managing to earn a bachelor's degree in American history from John Jay College. I then moved on to Fordham University, where I earned a master's degree, also in American history. Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep and the lines in my face were well earned. I had given serious thought to becoming a high school history teacher and, in fact, I did some per diem teaching at Pleasantville High School in Westchester County. That experience convinced me to stay in the NYPD.

Blackout

If the 1965 blackout was a romantic dream, the 1977 blackout was a nightmare.

In June 1977, I was transferred from the 44th Precinct to the Organized Crime Control Bureau, Narcotics Division, working out of the Bronx Narcotics Office located at the 50th Precinct in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Our job was to investigate drug dealing, whether it was low level, medium level, or high level, within the borough of the Bronx. However, the fun part was that once you had initiated a case, usually with an informant, you went wherever that case took you. Early on, one of my “Bronx cases” took me to the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, where I’d spend the better part of the next two years on it and other offshoot cases.

However, a month after my assignment to Bronx Narcotics Division, we had an interruption for about a week to assist in quelling the three days of rioting that surrounded the citywide blackout in July 1977. The power went off in the city around 7:00 or 7:30 P.M., while it was still daylight. As darkness descended, so did the marauding gangs who were looking to take advantage of a vulnerable city. Within hours fires were set and looting was taking place. Brand-new cars were driven through showroom windows of dealerships along Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. Similar episodes were taking place elsewhere in the city, especially in Brooklyn.

The police commissioner, Michael Codd, went on the radio that night and declared a citywide emergency and ordered all off-duty police officers to report to their precincts. This was easy for me since I both lived and worked in the Riverdale section. When we reported to our precincts, we were given little instruction, other than to go out into the streets and “help out.” We were really just showing the flag, with no real clear purpose in mind. Many arrests were made, but the mayhem continued well into the morning hours.

The next day the various staffs at headquarters would coordinate much more effectively the police response the following night. Or so they thought. I, along with my partner, George Kennedy, and a group of other officers, were shipped to Brooklyn while the Brooklyn narcotics officers were shipped to the Bronx. This didn't seem very effective to me; it seemed like a waste of time. Especially when it took my partners and me almost three hours to reach the precinct to which we were to report, getting lost in Brooklyn along the way and appearing twice at the same precinct—though not the one we were supposed to report to.

On the third day of the blackout we were redirected to report to the Bronx, in my case the 44th Precinct, which would have made sense from the beginning. Slowly but surely, there was a strong and visible police presence throughout the city, and things eventually returned to normal. But there had been a lot of damage, especially to the psyche of the city. People complained about the wanton lawlessness and vandalism surrounding the blackout. Just twelve years prior, in 1965, the city had faced a similar blackout but the citizens responded en masse, volunteering to assist and direct traffic in intersections. The 1965 blackout brought the city together in ways unimaginable. Romances began the night of that blackout, and, in fact, it even inspired a movie. While the 1965 blackout was a romantic fairy tale, the 1977 blackout was a horrific nightmare, during which storeowners were shot, businesses were burned, and the police response was inadequate.

There were a lot of reasons for the poor police response in 1977. The city had not seen serious civil unrest or a riot since the late 1960s. The police officials who had mastery of tactical and personal deployment had moved on, and the quiet seven-year interlude had provided no opportunity for “practice.” It was evident to me that there will always be a certain amount of chaos at the beginning of a major incident or flare-up. How long the chaos lasts largely depends upon planning and practice. The NYPD at the time had not really planned and certainly did not practice how to respond to such civil unrest. Numerous efforts were made to address these shortcomings over the next two decades. It was not until Ray Kelly became the police commissioner in 1992 that the police response to civil disorder was finally mastered.

In 1977, a young congressman by the name of Ed Koch was running for mayor. Koch had been troubled by the blackout, the uncivil way that many responded to and took advantage of the residents of New York City. He was upset with the inadequate response of the NYPD. His blunt style of confronting people who were rude, uncivil, and criminal was refreshing, and many in the city rallied behind him. Koch won the election and took office in January 1978. His wagging tongue and finger and his heavy New York accent became recognizable parts of his persona. The bluntness was charming, even endearing. Finally, it looked like someone was in charge at City Hall who was ready to restore order and civility.

Issues of civility and policing were important concerns in the early months of his administration. With the police response to the prior summer's blackout still in his mind, Koch asked a simple question: How many police officers are working in the city on any given day? The brass at One Police Plaza didn't have a clue. As a matter of fact, they didn't even have an idea of how to begin to count or account for the number of officers who were deployed on the streets of New York on a daily basis. Clearly, there were fewer police officers in 1978 than there had been before the layoffs, when five thousand officers were eliminated and another few thousand were lost as a result of attrition. Koch was committed to increasing the staffing levels at the NYPD, but he wanted some basic questions answered. How many officers were there? How many were available on a daily basis? And what, if any, would be the minimum staffing level necessary to police the city on a twenty-four-hour basis? With the assistance of academics and consultants, a new “scientific” staffing model was developed.

Narcotics Division

Once the blackout was over and the city had returned to some kind of normalcy, I was able to go back to my new job as a narcotics investigator. It was a completely different job than anything I had done before. I was required to use my brains to outsmart others who depended on their brains to make them money. It was a bit of a cat-and-mouse game. But it also opened me up to a new facet of policing—the whole idea of bringing the job home with you at night. In other words, thinking about my job while off duty. In uniform in the 44th Precinct, you worked eight hours in a police car, handled all of your assignments, maybe made an arrest—but at twelve o’clock when your shift was over, you went home, forgot everything, and then started anew the next day. No connecting dots from one day to the next. Even when I was an anticrime officer in civilian clothes, there was no notion of “investigating” a case. We would show up at noon, patrol the streets, sometimes make an arrest, then be finished by 8:00 P.M. and home watching Monday Night Football by 9:00.

In the Narcotics Division it was different. I was investigating individuals and sometimes organizations. I was trying to make sense and create an organizational structure around loosely knit drug crews in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. I was investigating the Puerto Rican drug organizations on the Lower East Side, along with their Italian partners in Williamsburg and on Moore Street in Tribeca. One narcotics intelligence analyst informed me that there were more high-ranking mafioso figures in one building on Moore Street than there were in entire neighborhoods in the city. The stuff was fascinating, and it kept us thinking and rethinking and discussing and plotting on how we were going to gain entry into these organizations and bring them down.

While George Kennedy and I spent a great deal of time in the Lower East Side in Manhattan, we still had territorial responsibility in the Bronx. My team covered what was known as the Eighth Division, which included the 41st, 43rd, and 45th precincts. Technically, our team was responsible for the low-level and medium-narcotics trafficking in that entire area. In reality, we addressed only those complaints that came to our attention. A citizen might complain about open-air drug dealing on Story Avenue in the 43rd Precinct. We would respond, make a twenty-minute observation, and sometimes, if possible, make a street-level buy followed by an arrest (a buy and bust). This would prove that the Narcotics Division had taken action. If you thought seriously about it, however, that was a poor response and did little to alleviate the drug dealing that continued once we drove off the block. This would be an important lesson for me later on in the early days of the Bratton administration, when we began to look at the effectiveness of the Narcotics Division and its contribution to crime fighting, especially in terms of homicides and drug-related shootings.

However, there were some valuable lessons to learn from my narcotics days working on the drug gangs. One was that, the more you thought outside of the box, the better your chances were of succeeding. Especially in the case of “no-knock” search warrants of apartments and houses. The question always was: How do we get inside before the bad guy flushes the drugs down the toilet? For example, in one apartment unit within a six-story walk-up in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, the drug dealer's apartment overlooked the courtyard and the main entrance. In addition, he had lookouts on every corner ready to spot the narcs as they approached in their unmarked cars.

It is interesting the drug dealers did not fear a marked police car with uniformed officers inside. They knew that uniformed officers were discouraged, and in some cases forbidden, from making narcotics arrests. What we realized was that a uniformed officer in a police car caused no suspicion. If a uniformed car went by the apartment building, the drug dealers were not worried. Uniformed cops were not involved in “inside” narcotics enforcement.

After obtaining a search warrant, signed by a judge, George Kennedy devised a plan to take down that drug dealer in Morrisania as follows: drugs were to be dropped off at the apartment at 1:00 P.M. We would hit that apartment at 2:00 P.M. At 10:00 A.M. we had had our undercover officer, a scrawny Puerto Rican policeman with long hair and a beard, go into the building carrying a battering ram wrapped up in green garbage bags. When he went into the building, he gave the appearance of being a junkie burglar bringing home the stolen loot. The undercover officer took the battering ram to the roof and left it there in the green garbage bags off to the side. Kennedy and I, dressed in full uniform, borrowed a police car from the local precinct. We also secured a city ambulance and driver to add to the show. The ambulance pulled up in front of the location, and we arrived a minute later in our marked car and entered the apartment building as if we were handling a routine sick case. We walked into the building, observed but not suspected by the drug dealer. Kennedy and I went to the roof, retrieved the battering ram, walked down two flights of stairs, and announced our presence while simultaneously knocking down the door. After two bangs, we got inside the apartment and observed the dealer scurrying around like a rat on crack. We got him and his two kilos of coke before he had a chance to flush them down the toilet.

But there was a more challenging case a month later with our undercover officer Victor Cipullo, a good-looking Italian kid with balls of steel. Victor had been an undercover for five years and could buy from the lowest junkie on the streets as well as the high-end doctors at prestigious hospitals. There was no one from whom Victor couldn't buy. Along the way Victor had proved his mettle on more than one occasion when he had had to kill the drug dealers trying to rip him off. “Victor pisses ice water,” his lieutenant once noted.

The case in point was a sale of pure heroin from a house in the Soundview section of the Bronx. The house literally stood by itself on an abandoned street of mostly overgrown lots. Anybody coming onto the block was noticed immediately. Victor made the initial buy and three subsequent buys, called “B buy,” “C buy,” and “D buy.” With each purchase, the weight and purity of the heroin increased. While ordering the fifth buy, he asked for a kilo of heroin, having proven his credibility in making the previous four buys. And so the deal was consummated. The plan was to have Victor go into the house and get a sample of the kilo, which he would take with him to have it tested for purity. If the purity was high, he would return within the hour with $80,000.

When Victor left, the plan was for us to hit the house and seize the drugs. However, upon leaving, he transmitted to us, via his hidden microphone, a very important message: “My job is done. But you guys are fucked. There are three guys in there, all armed, and they're going to fucking kill yas! One of them is wanted for shooting a cop!” We met Victor a few blocks away, and he confirmed his transmission. He was having some fun at our expense, which was not uncommon for him. Like most of the undercovers, he always argued that he had more balls than the backup teams, that his job was the really dangerous job and that the backup team merely had to go in and make the arrest. The question quickly became how would we get into the house, get the bad guys, and recover the drugs, all without getting shot in the process.

Our lieutenant, Martin O’Boyle, viewed by many to be the most knowledgeable person in the whole of the Narcotics Division in New York City, proved his mettle that day by being not only a great leader but also an even better thinker. Within five minutes he had devised a tactical plan. We would use one large van and one unmarked police car. The large van, which looked like a UPS delivery van, held eight narcotics detectives. They were all secreted in the back and were armed with rocks that they had picked up at a nearby construction site. The second car held George Kennedy and me, along with Lieutenant O’Boyle. I had the battering ram to take the door down; Kennedy and Lieutenant O’Boyle carried shotguns.

The detectives in the van were instructed to pull up in front of the house, go to all sides of the structure, and throw their rocks at the windows to distract the bad guys inside. Simultaneously, I would hit the front door with the ram; we would make our entry, seize the three individuals, and confiscate the drugs. The plan went without a hitch except for one close call: one of the three bad guys with a gun went out the back window and confronted Sergeant John Loughran, who threw his last remaining rock at the bad guy with the gun and struck him in the head. Who said cavemen can't win?

The lesson here is that when things go okay, even though unorthodox methods are used, all is forgiven and forgotten. This was not the case on my seventh wedding anniversary, when I was involved in a shootout in New York's Lower East Side. Our undercover was shot in the chest when we attempted to execute a search warrant for a half pound of heroin. We had been working the Lower East Side for quite a few months out of the Bronx Narcotics Office, something in and of itself unusual. However, my informant was familiar with all of the big players in this neighborhood and parts of Brooklyn. Most important, he had never failed me. We had been focusing on a particular drug dealer when one evening, around 4:00 P.M., I got a phone call from my informant that a delivery of heroin had just been made to the drug dealer's social club, which was located on the second floor of a tenement building on Sixth Street between Avenues C and D. We quickly got our team together and headed down to Manhattan. Four of us went directly to the club while the fifth, Robby Morales, went to the District Attorney's Office to secure a search warrant based on the information supplied by the confidential informant. The four of us headed to the location with a plan.

Our plan called for us to drop off one of our undercovers, Chago Concepcion, a veteran undercover police officer who spoke very poor English but, like most good undercovers, always got the job done somehow. The really good undercovers took pride in the challenge; the harder the challenge, the better. But this operation seemed simple. Chago would knock on the door of the club and then in Spanish ask for some fictitious name. The expectation was that someone in the club would open the door, Chago would get his foot in, keep the door open, and then my other partner, Dicky Werdan, and I, would force our way into the club and freeze the occupants until Robby's arrival with the search warrant. We dropped Chago off a half a block from the club to allow him to “walk on the set.” We kept him under close observation as he approached. It was about 5:30 at night and getting dark. Snow began to fall. As Chago mounted the steps leading up to the front door of the building, some kind of conversation ensued, there was a commotion at the door, and the next thing I knew, shots rang out. Chago had his gun out and started shooting into the club. Dicky and I ran up the stoop on either side of the doorjamb. There was a flight of stairs leading up to the second floor, where a guy was holding a gun and shooting at us. We returned fire, not knowing if we hit the intended target. And then there was silence. I then heard Chago, who was now down on the sidewalk, scream, “I'm hit!” He put his hand underneath his green army jacket, and when he removed it, it was covered in blood.

We immediately got on the radio and called for assistance. “Ten-thirteen! Police officer shot!” Within less than a minute, we heard the sirens coming down Avenue B as the marked police cars made their way to us. Chago, with gun in hand, ran to meet them, with me behind him yelling, “Chago! Wait! Wait!” I knew what the responding cops would be thinking. The majority of cops at the time were white guys who looked like me. The Lower East Side was a largely Puerto Rican neighborhood. The responding police officers were going to think that the cop who had been shot looked like me and that the guy who shot him looked like Chago, a dark-skinned Puerto Rican. As we were running west on Sixth toward Avenue C, the first police car came to a screeching halt; using their police car doors for cover, these officers yelled to us to drop our guns. I immediately dropped my gun. Chago, who I assume was in shock, wouldn't drop his gun. I screamed at Chago, “Drop the fucking gun!” and then yelled to the uniformed officers that we were cops. While I looked like a cop, I could have also been mistaken for a denizen of the East Village, with my long hair, green army jacket, sneakers, and jeans. Chago certainly did not look like a cop. So who could blame the responding police officers if they shot someone who refused an order to drop his weapon? Somehow I was able to convince those two uniformed officers and their backup officers that we were cops, and so the standoff was resolved peacefully. Within ten minutes an Emergency Service Unit (ESU—in other cities this unit is called SWAT [Special Weapons and Tactics]) was on the scene; we began an apartment-by-apartment search of the two abandoned six-story buildings on either side of the social club while Chago was rushed to the hospital. We located and arrested the shooter in a closet on the fourth floor of the abandoned building to the east of the social club. We recovered his 9-mm handgun in the snow in the back alley. The entire episode was carried on the eleven o’clock news.

I spent several hours being interviewed by a police captain regarding the discharge of my weapon. The interview was finished by midnight, and I then returned to the processing of the prisoner and drugs to answer more questions from the 9th Precinct detectives. By 8:00 A.M., all of the interviews and paperwork had been completed and I headed off to court to arraign my prisoner. Oh, and by the way, I never made my wedding anniversary dinner. This was not the first, nor the last, sacrifice made by my wife and family.

Two days later we were summoned to police headquarters to meet with the commanding officer of the Narcotics Division to review the shootout. I assumed we would get all sorts of accolades and pats on the back. Not so. The police inspector leading the discussion was Joe Flynn, a well-liked and well-respected narcotics commander. He was always kind and gracious in his dealings with us. However, this time was different. He said, “You guys will probably get a medal for bravery. And you deserve it. You also deserve a smack in the head for stupidity! Who the fuck do you think you are? Executing a search warrant without first calling Emergency Service cops? You guys are too ballsy for your own good. And what was it all for? A fucking pound of white powder? You got your partner shot for a pound of white powder? You guys are lucky to be alive, and don't ever let that happen again!”

With our tails between our legs, we left his office. The point here is that, even when cops do brave things or make an outstanding arrest, if they use poor tactics or violate policy in the process, they need to be instructed accordingly. And we were.

An interesting side note to the shootout was the impact it had on the use of bulletproof vests by police officers. Each Narcotics Office usually had a half dozen bulletproof vests available for officers to wear, at their option, while executing a search warrant. While Chago was an undercover officer on this night, he was not acting in a true undercover capacity (buying drugs), so before leaving the office, he had put on a vest underneath his bulky, green army jacket. It was a decision that saved his life. The vest stopped the copper-rounded bullet from penetrating his chest. There was a deep contusion with a lot of blood, but that was the extent of the damage. That night, the vest was held up in front of the TV cameras for all to see. This incident became the cause célèbre to rally the private sector to purchase vests for police officers.

In the early years, private individuals contributed thousands of dollars to buy vests for the officers, which eventually embarrassed the city administration into accepting that as its responsibility. In the early 1980s, vests became part of the general issue equipment for all police officers. And an ironic note: one of the early contributors to the vest campaign was John Lennon, who was reported to have donated enough money to purchase a hundred vests. Years later he would be assassinated by a delusional fan in front of his Upper West Side apartment building across the street from Central Park.