|
|
|
Looking for material for my weekly contribution to Strike Me Pink, I went to
an old reliable source, the storage box where I keep relics of the
twenty-eight years I spent in the New York City Police Department. I knew I’d find a use
for them someday. Mostly they’re reports of “incidents” that I covered
during the 70’s while working mostly in Queens. Next to Staten Island, Queens is
the quietest borough in New York, so that I’m surprised when I examine my
collection to find that I spent so much time writing up various outrages,
breaches of the peace, acts of uncivil disobedience and general hellraising going on
in the Borough of Homes. (Brooklyn is the Borough of Churches).
Picking out things at random, here’s something I don’t remember at all: two
women in Astoria, barflies apparently, were whooping it up in a joint when
one of them got hurt by a punch thrown in a fight that was going on
simultaneously. They called the cops, who refused to search the neighborhood for the
fighters, who had taken off at high speed. They appealed their case to the
station house, where the onsite cops had to struggle with them to stop them from
wrecking some furniture to protest their treatment.
The yelling and screaming continuing, a lieutenant was called in to sit on
the case, but he immediately adjourned his court by referring it to me. The
report shows I got to the scene at 3:30 AM, four hours after everything started,
but with no sign of the girls running down yet. With their accusations of
police assault by fist and karate chop ringing in my ears, I gave up and told
the cops to arrest them and let someone else listen to them for the rest of the
night. The lieutenant reported that he had interviewed the bar owner and he
characterized the girls as “argumentative” customers. There seemed to be no
reason to doubt him at all.
How come I didn’t remember any of this? I must be like a sundial that only
remembers the sunny hours.
What else do we have? Here’s another outbreak in Astoria, this time
involving an off-duty detective who had a second job as a Burger King manager. This
guy must have been a glutton for punishment. He got it, in the shape of a
robbery at gunpoint, which he resisted by firing three shots at the getaway car.
It’s safe to assume the robbers took Burger King off their list after that.
As for the detective, his record showed a lot of citations, but no previous
shooting incidents. Burger King was waiting for him, and he was waiting for
them.
Next we come to another off-duty gun discharge of one shot, which got a
little involved and required a report of fifteen pages. No wonder I wished all the
cops would stay home when they weren’t working. Couldn’t they just watch TV
or read a good book? That wouldn’t have been a bad idea for those fun-loving
Astoria ladies either.
I have lots more gems in the vault, but that’s enough of its riches for now.
That is, except for one last item which I look on as historical in its way.
That’s because it sheds light on the real inner workings of the police
department and in fact the city government in a way that’s more striking than any
revelations that could ever be made by any so-called investigative reporter.
That’s a big buildup to give an ordinary document sent us to lay out the
management goals of the City for 1977 and the methods to be used in reaching them.
It sounds innocuous, but when you look at the contents, you realize you’re
seeing a disaster in the making. The goals were laughable -- so modest and
insignificant that even if they were achieved they’d have no effect at all on
the lives of the unfortunate citizens. Who could possibly be inspired by a 5%
increase in the number of auxiliary police, a 1.6 minute decrease in the
response time of radio cars, and worst of all, a 2% (2!) reduction in reported
robberies? Geez, thanks a lot, Mayor Beame. By the way, are you out of your
cotton-pickin’ mind? Don’t you know robbery is the key crime, the one people
fear the most, and the one that travels with murder like Bonnie with Clyde?
Abe Beame became a bank chairman after he left the mayoralty. Bank chairmen
who propose 2% increases in deposits don’t last long, so I assume he raised
his sights a little in that job. But this was the way the Beame administration
thought when it came to running the city. Is it clear now why I said what I
did about lighting up the inner workings of the administration using its own
pronouncements against it?
Beame and his commissioner, Codd, having enshrined mediocrity as the guiding
principle of the police department, there wasn’t much room in it for anyone
who tried to think outside the box, which I was doing. I actually told people
that 2% was a contemptible figure whether you wanted it as a decrease or an
increase in any class of merchandise, be it hog bellies or horse droppings or
hula hoops or, God forbid, violence against the taxpayers.
Beame was succeeded by Koch, who also meant well but didn’t have a clue, but
at least I escaped most of his tenure and worked at a job where results were
not only achievable, but they were welcomed. Finally in 1993 the redeemer
arrived, in the person of Rudolph Giuliani, who proved from his first day in
office that figures like two percent didn’t enter into his thinking, finally
achieving a 70% reduction in major crime, beginning with robbery and bearing out
what I’d said about its connection with murder.
Achievement wasn’t high on my Police Department’s list of values maybe, but
at least it did provide us with amusement now and then. On the same page
where the “goals” for ’77 were laid out, a methodology for ascertaining the voice
of the people, i.e., the rank and file, was also proposed. Ranking officers
were advised to visit training sites and engage in dialogue with the trainees.
Feedback from these sessions should then be sent to the Area Training Unit
for “analysis” after which the results would be furnished to the Area
Commander for possible “implementation”. The result would be improvement in “morale
and performance.”
Since it was agreed on all sides that the best thing ranking officers could
do when it came to training sessions was to stay as far away as possible and
since they would be really crazy to ask the troops for their ideas on managing
the department better, these directions were quietly dropped down the memory
hole, never to be seen again.
I miss the Police Dept. the way Abe Lincoln missed his log cabin. It wasn’t
much but it was home and there was always hope of improving it…someday.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
