Beat Cop to Top Cop. John F. Timoney
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11:00 on a Saturday night or to be in the classroom at 9:00 on a Sunday night. The overcrowding had a huge, negative impact on the quality of the training. And the quality of the training was dramatically reduced by the protests going on out on the streets. I often found myself on the back of a flatbed truck delivering wooden police barricades to a disturbance on a college campus or to a demonstration in Midtown, as opposed to listening to a lecture in the classroom. But we still finished our police academy training on time, even if we were not fully prepared.
The irregular hours of the academy, while not good for training, were better for me, personally, because I could work my side job of driving a Coca-Cola truck to augment my salary. With my brother still in high school and rent to be paid, I needed both jobs. Unfortunately, the Coca-job impinged on my class work and my participation in class. I often found myself dozing off from lack of sleep. At the end of the six months of training, my academic instructor, Sergeant Corrigan, made note of my less-than-stellar participation in the classroom as he gave a verbal evaluation of each student's career potential. When he reached me, he stated, “Timoney, you will amount to nothing because you're lazy and you keep falling asleep in class.” I was too tired to tell him about my Coca-Cola job.
The biggest lesson for me from my academy days was not what I learned in the classroom but what I observed in and around the academy. When the civil unrest broke out after Martin Luther King's assassination, the NYPD—like a lot of other police departments across the country—hired a large number of new police officers. They were immediately assigned to the streets after meeting the bare minimum qualification for firearms proficiency: they were required to shoot fifty rounds of ammunition.
These officers received no other training, and so when things quieted down in the winter of 1968–69, these officers were sent to the police academy for their formal training. Some of them had been involved in gunfights over the past nine months, and others had made great arrests and had been involved in other hair-raising experiences. In other words, many of these officers were seasoned “vets”—not exactly prime candidates for instruction at the academy. To make matters worse, if that was possible, most of these officers finished their probationary period within their first or second month of the academy. That meant that no matter what they did or refused to do, the police department had little recourse. The officers were off probation and had job security, which the department could not take away, except in the case of those caught committing a very serious violation of department rules and procedures or a criminal act.
The massive hiring of thousands of police officers in 1968 and 1969 provides one of the most valuable lessons for any police chief or mayor contemplating such an action (most cities across the United States have engaged in such practices over the past few decades, with similar results). While emergency hiring may work in the short run, bypassing thorough background checks and providing inadequate training can mean only trouble in the long term.
The new hires can be valuable in the short term—putting down riots, stopping an awful crime wave—but eventually the police officers who have slipped through the cracks will come back to haunt the department. Within a few years, many of officers from the 1968 and 1969 classes got into trouble. Some, including a classmate of mine, were arrested for a variety of crimes—ranging from drug dealing and ripping off drug dealers to murder. As these cases garnered headlines, police administrators and politicians openly questioned the fitness of the members of the classes of 1968 and 1969. The cops responded with typical gallows humor by creating T-shirts emblazoned with I SURVIVED THE CLASS OF 68/69 OR I AM A PROUD GRADUATE OF THE 68/69 CLASS. While the T-may have been funny, their reference was anything but.
2
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