Beat Cop to Top Cop. John F. Timoney

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СКАЧАТЬ police car drove by, reached the understandable conclusion that the cops were being paid off to look the other way. Over the next twenty years, I must have heard that complaint at community meetings at least a hundred times.

      The commission's recommendation to remove the NYPD from regulatory enforcement of the ABC (Alcohol Beverage Control) laws was aimed at ending the corruption potential from licensed and unlicensed premises. However, the unintended consequence of this allowed licensed and unlicensed premises to run amok and engage in more serious criminal violations, such as assaults, shootings, and drug dealing. This seemed to me not the best way to run a police department. Because we were fearful of corruption, we prohibited and discouraged police officers from engaging in activities at which they could be corrupted; yet we still had periodic episodes of corruption. The point is that police departments should never shy away from enforcing the law due to a fear of corruption. The bottom line is that you enforce the law, and if there is a corruption problem, you deal with the corruption problem. Years later, this would become one of the central tenets of Commissioner Bill Bratton's administration.

      What I most remember of these early days was the atmosphere of the time, the zeitgeist of the late 1960s. The Vietnam War was in full bloom and with it the antiwar protests in every major city, especially New York City. In April 1968, Martin Luther King was killed, which resulted in civil unrest in most major cities across the United States. Months later, Bobby Kennedy was also killed.

      The protests and civil unrest preoccupied the NYPD to the detriment of ordinary policing. It was policing by crisis. Hundreds or thousands of police could be handling antiwar protests in Midtown Manhattan, then head up to deal with the unrest and riots at Columbia University, and then later head to riots in the various African American neighborhoods in the city. There was a real feeling that Armageddon was at hand.

       The Police Academy

      Civil unrest and protests affected not only the ordinary policing of the neighborhoods but also training at the police academy. In February 1969, I was transferred from the 17th Precinct to the police academy to begin my six months of training to become a full-fledged NYPD police officer. The academy didn't have the feel of a regular school or college. Rather, it looked and felt more like a military boot camp mobilizing for war. Thousands of officers were going through the training, and the facility's capacity was always an issue. Incredibly, the academy operated seven days a week, from 6:00 A.M. to midnight. It was not uncommon to be doing calisthenics on the gym floor at 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 СКАЧАТЬ