Beat Cop to Top Cop. John F. Timoney
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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