20 Years Later: Post-9/11 Policing

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Jami Floyd: [music] It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Welcome back. I'm Jami Floyd, Senior Editor for Race & Justice filling in for Brian Lehrer today and for the week leading up to the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. We're looking at one big way each day at something in the New York area or something in the world has changed as a result. We're beginning the series right now with how 9/11 changed policing in New York City. Joining me is Jim O'Grady, WNYC features reporter. Hello, Jim.

Jim O'Grady: Hi, Jami. How are you?

Jami Floyd: I am well enough, Jim, and that's good on a good day. How are you today?

Jim O'Grady: Okay. Good to be here.

Jami Floyd: All right. It's good to be with you. Jim, in the newsroom, we decided to take a different approach to 9/11 this year, a deep dive at the 20th anniversary on the intersection of 9/11 and policing, specifically examining the ways in which the department changed on September 11th and thereafter given this moment of reform and reflection about policing that we're in at the moment of the 20th anniversary, but we asked you, Jim, to launch the series with a look at the department before the attacks. That's what we're going to talk about here, that fascinating and pretty much unknown history of the NYPD.

Listeners, we also want to hear from you, particularly those of you who know NYPD history or New York City history or if you serve or have served on the force, give us a call, 646-435-7280. Jim, you had reported on this before in the context of those tragically powerful funerals for Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu back in 2014. They were killed in their patrol car in Brooklyn, right?

Jim O'Grady: That's right, Jami, and it raised the question when you saw the funeral for these officers and you saw the pomp and circumstance, the question came up, how did this come to be? How did police funerals come to have these very, very formal flourishes? That set us to looking into the history of the NYPD and in that case, the answer was that after the Civil War, veterans of that war returned to New York City, they found a municipal police force that was kind of ragged, and these veterans of war decided to reorganize the force on a military model. There was a rank structure imposed, there were uniforms.

That's why at a funeral, you'll see guns going off in a salute, you'll see caskets draped in American flags, just like you will at a military funeral, and this culture change continued to the point that now when you talk to experts on the NYPD as I have, they'll say, "Listen, the first thing you got to understand is, this is a paramilitary organization. It reports to civilian control, but it is a paramilitary organization."

Jami Floyd: But that's not something new. That's not a new thing.

Jim O'Grady: It has been evolving since the end of the Civil War, and the department has been growing since the end of the Civil War, and I think what looking into the history has shown us, and you and I've discussed this, is that it has changed tremendously but certain things remain the same, the challenges and the failures of rogue cops, of bad policing, of corruption, of disorganization keep cropping up in the history of the NYPD. As well as its successes, there's always a change in the threat to public order that the police have to deal with. Now, there's digital policing that has to occur which was unimaginable 20 years ago. There's the problem of maintaining order in the department and the challenge of responding to new types of crime and threats as time goes on.

Jami Floyd: Jim everything about the modern 21st century NYPD is big, as you report, 36,000 officers, I think 5,000 or so are detectives, 8.5 million people that they've got a police across 360 square miles, the budget is $5.4 billion and as we report later in the series, an intelligence, and counterterrorism unit that operates overseas. In fact, that'll be on all things considered tonight. I was really surprised to learn from your reporting for our series that this current iteration with all this heft and might is a pretty recent thing. For the first 200 years, this is what shocked me, the first 200 years, New York City had no police force, is this right?

Jim O'Grady: None that we would recognize today as a Unified Central Police Force, that's right, and it sort of surprised me too. Our current police force, all those numbers you use throughout there puts NYPD as by far the largest force in the United States, twice as large as the next largest force in Chicago. That's just gives you a sense of scale, and it all started in the mid-17th century with eight dudes walking around. What we now know is Manhattan in a place at the time was called New Amsterdam, a precursor to New York. They carried lanterns that had tinted glass that made them glow green, which were supposed to give them a distinctive look so citizens would know those are constables who you can turn to if you have a problem.

The force, the NYPD is good at ritualizing its own history, so when you see those eight-sided hats that officers wear to this day, the reason why they have that peculiar shape of eight sides is a sort of a call out to those original eight night watchman who walked around New Amsterdam. Then over time, they were just there to deal with emergencies, I don't know, drunks and fights.

Gradually, their numbers grew and their responsibilities grew. They were tasked with recovering stolen property. They went and sat in court proceedings and they bang their sticks on the table if things got out of hand. They gradually became more and more involved with maintaining order in the city itself, especially as the city grew and grew and grew, and so did the force. There were constables, there were marshals, there were court officers. It grew in sort of a motley way until the mid-1800s when it became a true force.

Jami Floyd: This is why your article or your story that we've run at othamist.com is called Rat Holes and Tin Horns, a sketchy history of policing in New York until 911 because they had rat holes and tin horns and it was sketchy, and that famous green lantern which we can still see outside the precinct house harkens back to that day, right?

Jim O'Grady: That's right. All of the city's 77 police precincts have a pair of glowing green sconces that flank their front doors, and again, that's another homage to the early force, just to give this sort of, I don't know, aura to the department as a very long enterprise in the life of the city.

Jami Floyd: The light is on, you know someone's on duty in the precinct. Let's talk then, Jim, about how we get from there to here. You mentioned that the London Metropolitan Police Department, the paramilitary organization, but you haven't mentioned, Jim, the corruption, cops on the take, commissions that have to look into corruption. That's not new either, is it? The former Police Commissioner Bratton said to you in the piece, "Every 20 years, New York seems to have a corruption crisis." Tell us about that.

Jim O'Grady: That's not new at all. You mentioned London's Metropolitan Police Force. That was the model for the mid-1800s when New York started to make its own unified police force. When London did it, the citizens were very wary that this police force would just be another name for a military unit that could occupy the city and invade their lives. The London City leaders very pointedly gave the Metropolitan Police blue uniforms in contrast with the military, which had red coats. That's why NYPD copied that and that's why our officers wear blue. It's to stress the civilian oversight of the force.

By the time the city unifies in around 1898, there are 18 different police forces in what we now call the Five Boroughs. With unification as one city, it becomes one force. It was initially called the Municipal Police, but then it's called the Metropolitan Police and then the New York Police Department.

Almost as soon as it is organized, we see the first of a long series of commissions investigating corruption in the force and this was in 1894, actually a little before unification. The Lexow Commission takes a hard look at policing in New York City, and it finds counterfeiting, extortion, election fraud, brutality, and to a certain extent it's addressed, and then when Theodore Roosevelt becomes police commissioner, he launches a reform movement.

This is the ebb and flow you see in the decades since then with the police force. 1913, the Curran Committee finds cops colluding with gamblers and prostitution. 1932, the Seabury Commission finds-- You may want to raise this subject separately, prohibition.

Jami Floyd: Yes, I was going there.

Jim O'Grady: This is waves of corruption through the police force. Maybe we should talk about that.

Jami Floyd: I would think that was just the perfect moment for prohibition. Before we get there, I can't pass up my favorite mayor. Well, I was going to say and yours, but I don't want to project. Little flower, Mayor La Guardia. Let's take a listen to a bit of our littlest mayor.

Mayor La Guardia: You don't have to be an experienced detective to recognize a punk or a tin horn. Keep away from them, and you see them on your beat, sock them in the jaw. I'll stand back of you.

Jami Floyd: All right, so there he is. What's he talking about? He was mayor, I believe, I want to say 1917 to 1919. What's he talking about? What's he saying? What is he talking about? What's that language?

Jim O'Grady: La Guardia becomes Mayor at the end of prohibition. Tin horn is like a chiseler, or a punk, or someone who would approach a cop and offer a bribe to get whatever they wanted. In that clip, La Guardia is addressing a newly graduated force of patrolmen in New York City. What's striking to me about it is, it is just assumed, everyone knows that, okay, you've become police officers, people are going to try to bribe you. That's just the fact. He's trying to like back them up and say, "Punch them and sock them in the jaw when a tin horn or a punk tries to do this. I'll support you." That's how rife corruption had become in the department.

Jami Floyd: Because of prohibition?

Jim O'Grady: Because of prohibition. Before prohibition, the political machines would collude with the police force to look the other way for prostitution and gambling. Prohibition brought organized crime into existence on such a massive scale with so much money. They weren't beholden to any political organization, and they just corrupted the police force in an unprecedented way. La Guardia comes along and then we have yet another wave of reform to try to get past that era of prohibition.

Jami Floyd: Before people write in to correct me on his height, I don't know that he was the littlest mayor. I'm taking a guess. He was little.

Jim O'Grady: He was.

Jami Floyd: My years, I said 1917 to I was thinking '19 because he was in Congress. People don't know, he was so famous for being our mayor, but he was in the House of Representatives. Then he becomes the mayor, as you say, during prohibition. I want to get to the more modern era of the '90s, which is modern in my mind, but not in the minds of my children. First, I want to take a call from Peter in Suffolk County. Pushing back a bit. Join us please, Peter. Join the conversation on the history of the NYPD and tell us about your service.

Peter: I started from the ground up, I was a patrolman in the '90s when Operation Pressure Point then became then quickly each administration had their different policies. They're trying to address basically crime. What happened was, it was Operation Pressure Point, then it became community policing, then it became the broken window policies and stuff. All these are different administrations. I'm not going to go into the granularity of everything. Just basically what it is, is that you have a collection of policymakers, whether it'd be executive staff of the NYPD or the mayor's office. Basically, what they're saying is we got to reduce crime.

They employed different techniques and different strategies. I came from the ground up. My career was from patrolman to narcotics as an undercover, all the way to technology and headquarters and putting cases online. At the end, I became an executive assistant to the executive staff. What happens is you get to see an overview of what's going on and how things have evolved.

I understand, I do appreciate the historical significance of what the speaker or your guest is saying, but we can't delve into corruption and-- There's different types of corruption. That's not the neighborhood cop that says, "Oh, you pay the guy $10 a week, and then he does your favors." It's not even that, it's not bribery anymore. I understand what they're trying to say and we cannot pick. Every 10 years or every even 20 years, the NYPD is totally different.

The corruption that they're mentioning, there's actually active cases of actual criminals that are police officers that are committing nefarious crimes to a higher level, it's not even at the point where-- Recently, if you look back in the news, there was an Asian officer that was giving up secrets on an espionage level to Communist China. When you have that--

Jami Floyd: Yes, that was a big case. Of course, there's the Scarcella case which is not a-- I would think espionage is at the top of the list in my book, but Scarcella is a big case. There's corruption, there's crime, there are different ways of categorizing it, but it doesn't sound as though, Peter, you disagree that periodically, the department has to do some reflection on its mission and reform.

Peter: Reform is very important. What happens is, it's like a self-auditing. Reform is like saying, "What do we want to be?" You start to question yourself. If you're building, let's say, something, you have policies, you look at the numbers, and then everybody reflects on that. Then they say, "How do we make it better?"

Yes, reform is important, but when you start to use emotion such as defund the police and all this other nonsense that's going on, without the statistics backing anything up, when people are dying in the street, being killed because now you've handcuffed all the police officers, we understand about stop, question, and frisk, which was a real big thing that nobody wanted, because it would violate people's rights or it's being used on the minorities, yes. These things have to be explored, but it was basically a tool.

Now that we're trying to put more liability on the police departments, police departments are going to be putting new policies where they would minimize their liability. In essence, what they're doing is you want them to do something, to stop crime, but then you're telling them you can't do it that way, which was traditionally that's the way things were done.

That's where reform comes in, says, "How do we do it better?" When I've seen it from actually an executive point of view, where I've seen these policies have been in place, and how important it is to have that limited liability where, yes, the intention of the officer was to control the person, but a person, let's say, was an emotionally disturbed person, how do we know that? Do you understand? There's cases from years ago that actually explain things like this.

Nothing is going to be perfect. When you do call the police, you got to remember they know as much as you do, or maybe even less. They get it on the scene, and then make any split-second decision. You have to give them the benefit of the doubt. You can't just say his whole intention was to kill that person. You can't do that.

Jami Floyd: Well, Peter, let me ask you this. You said you started with Operation Pressure Point, which I think we're talking about the same thing because I grew up on the lower east side, my mother still lives there, my parents live there 55, almost 60 years. That I think was a drug operation on the lower east side to try and crack down on street level. My question, it sounds as though you've, sir- Well, I had a question because you mentioned that and so that tells me that you've served under a number of different commissioners. That would take you back to maybe Kelly and Bratton, and then Kerik and then Bratton again, and then O'Neill and then Shea.

Peter: Oh, I've been through it. [chuckles]

Jami Floyd: Do you notice a change in the department and the culture of the department, and perhaps the desire and intention to reform the department depending on who's in leadership?

Peter: Yes, and it's important. What happens is it's just like anything else, it's like when I was a detective and the boss would come over, like he would take a case from, let's say, another detective and give it to me and just rework it because some people have a different way of doing things. I'm more like thinking outside the box, so I relied on different streams of information.

Same thing with these commanders, you have a new administration, they can look at something and change it the way they need to do it in a different way and it might work, it might not work, but that's what's great about these policies. We do reflect on prior policies. If we see the numbers going up, there's something wrong. If there's people getting killed in these neighborhoods and policies were in place, it's time to reform.

If we're trying to save lives, people talk about, oh, well, they're violating civil rights by doing this or stopping this person, stop, question and frisk. You know what, this stop, question and frisk, when you use your Facebook account, because they're stopping you from your day, you're looking at your Facebook account, they're timing you on how long have you looked at this advertisement. All that information is funnels to a private entity. You've given up your privacy and everything else and all your rights that they know how much you're willing to spend on a pair of Jordan's. I mean, everything--

Jami Floyd: Peter, I could talk to you all afternoon because you know I have a response to that, but I got to let it go. I really hope you'll call us back, because this is a fascinating conversation and we need to have more conversations with law enforcement about policing, police reform, and yes, you're right, some people even say defund. That's Peter, he called from Suffolk. He was with the NYPD on the executive staff alone for 22 years, so valuable to have your insights, Peter.

Jim O'Grady, I want to come back to you, it's interesting what Peter had to say because he's speaking to the entire range of our series, which starts with the NYPD and your report it's founded essentially, more or less in 1845, and then we're going all the way to the modern era. We've got John Miller who is the Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counter Terrorism talking about the NYPD as of 9/11/2021. That's a huge breadth of time and expanse that it's very difficult to cover.

What Peter points out is that it evolves, it changes, it responds, it's as you say, in your piece, Jim, it's a human organization made up of human beings, and he talks about Commissioner Bratton there. You interviewed Commissioner Bratton for your piece, who's a bit of a historian about the NYPD as well. He acknowledged this constant push and pull with corruption and integrity, but he also talked about blind spots, did he not?

Jim O'Grady: He did. He framed broken windows policing as Peter mentioned as a change in approach by the NYPD from being reactive to crime, to tackling issues of disorder on the street and in public spaces, very simply prostitution, public urination, or turnstile jumping which he argued was the key to bringing about better order to the city and helping to catalyze a crime drop.

One incontrovertible fact about policing in New York City and its history is there was a 30-year sustained drop in crime from roughly 1990 to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. People argue about what role broken windows had in that, but that is the fact, and yes, as Peter said, the NYPD needs to self-reflect or maybe you said that, but there are other ways of imposing reflection on the NYPD.

Stop and frisk, which grew out of broken windows, got out of control to the point where there was something like 700,000 stops a year in 2011, and civil rights groups brought a class action lawsuits and then the courts intervened and the NYPD resisted, but it was brought down to a much more reasonable level. I think most recently there was 13,000 a year, so yes, there needs to be reform. Sometimes it comes from within the department and sometimes it's imposed on the department, and everyone who said crime would shoot back up when stop and frisk was reigned in, was wrong.

Jami Floyd: I also have to emphasize that Facebook and the NYPD are entirely different because the constitution protects you against police violating and infringing on your privacy. We haven't quite figured out how to reign in Facebook, but it's not a state-run entity. Well, Jim, let me just ask you one last question and toss you a piece of sound from Bill Bratton himself coming after the 1993, the first terrorist attack, which you've reported on extensively for your podcast Blindspot, The Road To 9/11. The first terrorist attack came in 1993. Here's Bill Bratton.

Bill Bratton: They basically solved the World Trade Center blowing, and they thought that was it, that they had eliminated that problem.

Reporter: The successful prosecution culminating in the guilty verdict today is the final touch we needed to make it the perfect investigation and prosecution.

Jim O'Grady: Bratton admitted that he too was putting his energy's elsewhere.

Bill Bratton: I didn't have a sense of the growing threat. During my two years, my focus was almost entirely on crime and disorder. The city was a mess.

Jami Floyd: Jim, that takes us right up to the beginning where your piece lands and the rest of the series takes off, September 10th, 2001, the major blind spot in the NYPD with focus elsewhere thinking, "Oh, we got those guys," when in fact we had not.

Jim O'Grady: Yes, the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, the prosecution in 1995, there you heard one of the prosecutors saying it was perfect, so no need to look any further into this. Bratton himself was so consumed with fighting street-level crime that he admits he didn't understand this growing threat. If I can give a really quick example of that, there was an assassination in 1990 and in broad daylight, a man named Sayyid Nosair guns down Rabbi Meir Kahane in a Midtown hotel room. Very famously that night and the next day, the chief of detectives in the NYPD said, "This is a lone deranged gunman, cased closed."

It was not investigated further, at least to the extent that it warranted. It could be understood that this assassin was belongs to a terror cell, that we then go on to bomb the World Trade Center, killing six people. It was not clearly understood that out of that bombing, the master bomber Ramzi Yousef would go on to conceive of the plans for flying planes into buildings. Each one of these attacks built on the other in the 11 years leading up to 9/11 and law enforcement, they prevented some attacks and they were very clever in discovering who might be a threat to us, they ultimately fail. They were always a couple steps behind when you look at the ultimate outcome, which was the attacks on 9/11.

Jami Floyd: We will have to leave it there, but there is so much more at gothamist.com. You can read Jim's fabulous reporting on the history of the NYPD, WNYC's features reporter Jim O'Grady. Thanks so much for your time today, Jim.

Jim O'Grady: Thank you, Jami. Always a pleasure to talk to you.

 

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