Beat Cop to Top Cop. John F. Timoney

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 of my pending “gun collar.” Before the police car had even come to a stop, I jumped out, ran into the building, ran up six flights of stairs, and emerged onto the rooftop by myself. After a cursory search, I found nothing. I then started to catch my breath as Tommy Fitzgerald emerged onto the rooftop, holding out the keys to the police car. He said, “Hey, kid. This is the South Bronx. You leave the keys in the car, when you come back, there's no car. Oh, and by the way, there's an elevator in the building. Look at you! You're huffing and puffing. What if there had been somebody on the roof? What the hell could you have done in your condition? Wait for your partner, asshole.”

       Deadly Stereotypes

      During my first year in the 44th Precinct, I learned another lesson: stereotypes can fuel crime. The predominantly Jewish area of the 44th included the Grand Concourse and its surrounding streets. By 1970, the Jews who remained there were largely elderly, many of them Holocaust survivors. Unfortunately, young thugs in the area believed that “the old Jews had lots of money.” For a three-or four-year period, a number of these elderly Jews were the victims of nasty crimes, including push-in robberies, where the elderly person would be followed to his door and then pushed into his apartment, where he was then robbed and sometimes gratuitously assaulted, especially if he said he had no money. As a detective explained, “One group of thugs used to remove the shoes of their elderly victims because it was a known fact that is where they hid their money.”

      The borough commander of the Bronx at the time was a two-star chief who happened to be Jewish. He devised a Borough Robbery Report mimeograph form that all reporting officers had to complete, in addition to the regular crime report, whenever a robbery was committed. The Borough Robbery Report asked for the age, race, and, more important, the religious identity of the victim. To the best of my knowledge, nobody ever asked why we were required to fill out the additional borough report. We were cops and did what we were told.

      The rationale behind the Borough Robbery Report became clear one Saturday morning while I was walking my assigned foot beat along 170th Street. I received a call from the desk officer of the precinct directing me to report to the borough headquarters, which was located on the second floor of the 46th Precinct, just north of the 44th. When I arrived, I joined a group of more than a half dozen young officers who had come from the other precincts in the borough. We were there to meet with the borough commander—a two-star chief! This was unusual, to say the least.

      The borough commander instructed us to go through our precincts’ Borough Robbery Reports and compile a chart, by religion, of the victims of the robberies. Once I finished the chart for the 44th Precinct, the numbers spoke for themselves: Jews had made up a disproportionate share of all robbery victims for the prior three years. From speaking with the other young officers, it was my sense that all of the precincts with significant elderly Jewish populations were similar. Once we finished, we were directed to return to our various precincts. Nothing more was said. Nothing more needed to be said. It was apparent that the Jewish two-star chief was just trying to confirm his suspicion that the old Jews around the Grand Concourse neighborhoods were disproportionately the victims of certain violent crimes.

      Two years later, I was assigned to the 44th Precinct Anti-Crime Unit. This was a select group of officers in civilian clothes assigned to make robbery arrests on the streets of the South Bronx. While I was in this unit, the borough chief's suspicions were corroborated. Sometimes after we made a robbery arrest, while debriefing the prisoner, we would ask him, out of curiosity, why he had committed the crime. At times these young men would be quite honest in their rationale. The reason they targeted their victim was because he/she was Jewish and “you know the Jews have money!”

      Another lesson I learned while patrolling the South Bronx was just how powerful individual police officers are and how they often don't even realize it. As a young police officer in 1969, like other young officers in the city, I was given the less desirable assignments: watching over a DOA (dead on arrival), taking an emotionally disturbed person—an EDP—to the hospital, or guarding the broken window of a store that had been burgled. Every once in a while, on the day or evening shifts, I would get to ride in a car with a partner, and it was like being a “real cop.”

      However, due to personnel shortages on the overnight shift (midnight to 8:00 A.M.), I almost always got to ride in a police car with a partner. After a few months of riding on the late shift, a few things became apparent. First, after about 1:00 A.M., just one hour into the shift, the radio went dead. There were very few calls for service, and thus the next seven hours were often boring, with nothing to do. Idle hands are the devil's handiwork, my mother used to tell us. Second, one night I was riding with another young officer (he was probably the same age as me, twenty-one). Sometime during the shift he turned to me and said, “Can you believe this? Here we are, just the two of us, and WE ARE IN CHARGE. Jesus!” It was true. While there was a sergeant working with us, we rarely saw him or knew where he was at any given moment. Thus, two young men, still wet behind the ears, were in charge of a rather large geographical area. We could take a life or make an arrest or just make someone's life miserable. What power!

      This notion of the power of the officers working the graveyard shift took on more sinister and damaging implications as the NYPD moved to the practice of “steady tours” СКАЧАТЬ