Beat Cop to Top Cop. John F. Timoney
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for the Bronx was Mario Merola, a person held in deep distrust by the vast majority of Bronx police officers. Merola seemed to be more of a politician than a professional district attorney. If indicting a cop could win him support or votes, a cop was not given the benefit of the doubt in close-call situations. Merola impaneled a grand jury to investigate the Bumpers case and, not surprisingly, a murder indictment was handed down against Officer Sullivan. This, in turn, brought about the largest demonstration of off-duty police officers in the history of the NYPD. Over ten thousand police officers converged at 161st Street and the Grand Concourse to express their outrage, demand Merola's resignation, and protest other assorted complaints. Needless to say, this further heightened racial tensions in the city.
Early on in the Bumpers case, Commissioner Ben Ward made an offhand but understandable comment that infuriated police officers and their union. He remarked, upon seeing a picture of Bumpers, “That could have been my grandmother.” Ward was just stating a legitimate feeling that any human being would register. However, in the racially charged atmosphere, many police officers viewed Ward's words as taking a side, and not one in support of Officer Sullivan. The charges against Ward were unfair, and anyone who viewed his statement in an unemotional, detached manner would conclude that they were the statements of someone who understood the plight of Bumpers and her family. Nonetheless, Ward took an unfair beating from his police officers.
As the case moved forward, it became clear that while Ward fully empathized with the Bumpers family, he obviously understood Officer Sullivan's predicament and was quite vocal in his denouncement of Merola's indictment. When the case went to trial, there was a great deal of testimony, especially from medical personnel. A doctor testified that the first shot had struck Bumpers in the hand that was holding the knife. This immediately disabled her and brought into question the necessity of the second shot. This had an alarming impact on police officers. They began to ask themselves, Am I expected to stop after firing every single bullet to check the medical well-being of the opponent?
The issue was cleared up when the defense presented its side of the case. It turned out that officers in the Emergency Service Unit had been trained to discharge two successive blasts from their shotgun and then look to see if the opponent had been hit. Police training at the firing range is meant to instill in officers tactics and protocols that they will use in real life. The training over the years has varied, based on trends in policing. For example, when I was a rookie, we trained with bull's-eyes at twenty-five yards. The more often you hit the bull's-eye, the higher your score. There was no reality check or correlation to what actually happened on the street. Over the years, training became much more realistic. The goal of the training now is to develop what athletic coaches call “muscle memory.” There is no forethought, there's no thought, there's just action. In stressful, emotional situations, the survival instincts that are embedded in police officers during training take over. In the case of Steve Sullivan, he did what he had been trained to do, and he was rightfully found not guilty.
The Eleanor Bumpers case was the beginning of a series of sometimes tragic, sometimes unfortunate, sometimes necessary police shootings that inflamed tensions during Ward's time in office. The irony was that Ward was an African American, and a lot of those who were shot were African American or another racial minority. Ward was in a no-win situation. If he supported his cops, he was seen as a traitor to his race. If he empathized with the person shot, he was viewed as not fully supportive of police. In fact, Ward supported the cops, but he also recognized that there was a better way of doing police business.
At that point, I had discharged my gun twice during my career. The first time, I killed two wild German shepherds that were running loose in a six-story apartment building and had bitten at least one tenant. The second time was during the gun battle on Sixth Street with my partner. Other than those two experiences, my dealings with police shootings had been an academic exercise. I had reviewed thousands of pages of data, conducted informal internal studies, graphed trends, and performed all of the studies a good academician would do to fully understand a topic. What I lacked was operational experience in conducting investigations of police shootings; captains had the responsibility to lead the police shooting investigations at that time. However, that was about to change, when I was promoted to captain in the summer of 1985.
4
Captain Timoney
There goes three lucky Saturdays.
—TOM WALSH, DEPUTY CHIEF
After numerous postponements of the captain's exam in 1984, the test was finally administered in January 1985. It was a good time to take the captain's exam since the Ward administration was committed to increasing the number of captains in the NYPD. My boss, Robert Johnston, was a strong proponent of this increase. He also supported tasking captains with additional responsibilities, including those that traditionally belonged to the front-line supervisors (such as sergeants and lieutenants). There were some who argued, quietly and privately, that Johnston was demeaning the rank of captain by giving them tasks sergeants and lieutenants usually performed. Others argued that by giving these tasks to captains, they were taking critical responsibilities from the front-line supervisors and, in fact, retarding their supervisory development. But Johnston was the clever silver fox. Times were changing, times were tough, the department was under siege, and there was a need for greater management control. There was also a need for greater accountability. You just can't keep blaming cops when things go wrong.
What Johnston understood and others forgot was that in the promotional system in the NYPD, the only ranks that the administration controlled were those above captain. This was a huge lesson for me, and it would come to haunt me in Philadelphia.
The NYPD's promotional system is a bifurcated system. Up to the rank of captain, there is a civil-service system based on open, competitive exams. Above the rank of captain, the promotions are at “the pleasure of the commissioner.” The civil-service system means the officer controls his/her own destiny. There is nothing that anyone can do for you or against you in the promotional process. In fact, there are many jokes surrounding civil-service exams and the type of supervisors they produce. The best I have ever heard was from my immediate boss, Deputy Chief Tom Walsh, who was Chief Johnston's executive officer. He was a one-star chief who one day remarked about a captain walking by his office, a captain with whom he was not particularly impressed, “There goes three lucky Saturdays.” This was a reference to the NYPD's tradition of giving the civil-service exam on Saturdays and this person's luck in passing on those days.
Above the rank of captain, promotions were controlled by Johnston, Murphy, and ultimately, Ward. They had the power to promote or not. Johnston knew that captains would be more likely to carry out new policies with the requisite understanding and enthusiasm. They wouldn't just read a series of words from some document or new policy at a roll call. Because their careers or, more correctly, their career advancement, depended upon the implementation of and adherence to these policies, captains would “buy in,” which would ensure that their officers would be made to understand the rationale of the new policy. By and large, Johnston's method worked.
It was under this emerging managerial philosophy that I became a captain in 1985. I remember the new captains’ orientation course, at which Ward was one of the lecturers. He was serious and funny, insightful and thoughtful. But most important, he was firm. He said, “The cops may screw up, and we'll deal with them. But I'm going to be looking to you and at you when things go wrong. You represent me out there, you represent the department, but most important, you represent the citizens of New York City. And if you think I'm bad, wait until Chief Johnston gets ahold of your ass.” Nobody wanted to deal with Johnston. He was every captain's worst nightmare. However, this made the rules pretty easy to understand: this is your job, and this is how you are going to do it. Johnston was the enforcer, and everybody knew it.
Regardless of the fact that I had worked for Johnston for the previous three years, I was not exempt from critical overview. The same can be said for my old boss, First Deputy Commissioner Pat Murphy.
As I was being readied for my promotion to captain, a decision had to be made about my new assignment. Some people thought I should remain at headquarters. Others, especially Deputy Chief Tom Walsh, knew better. Chief Walsh brought me to his office