Peter Moskos
Subject: Reducing Crime in NYC
Bio: Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Author of Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City’s Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is Reducing Crime in NYC.
Our speaker is Peter Moskos who is a Professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is the author of a new book entitled Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City’s Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop. This book is an oral history of the NY Police Department from 1970 to 2000 and includes commentary from several NY Police Commissioners as well as officers who were critical to the successful policing reforms. This book is spectacular and is one of the best books that I have read this year.
Peter spoke on this podcast previously when he discussed alternative punishments like Whipping in the Public Square.
Peter, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Peter Moskos:
The 1970s was a particularly tumultuous decade for New York City. The twin towers of the World Trade Center were built. The Knicks won two basketball championships. The Yankees went to the World Series three times, and not far from Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx, DJ Kool Herc hosted parties that would mark the birth of hip-hop. Nevertheless, a great city was in decline and it lost 10% of its population in ten years.
In 1970, the city towed away 73,000 abandoned cars. Murders in New York City steadily increased from 390 in 1960 to more than 1800 in 1980. In 1971, 1,466 people were murdered, 229 in robberies alone. Attacks on the police were also on the rise. In 1971, 59 New York City police officers were shot, 12 fatally. Of those, four were through surprise attacks linked to the Black Liberation Army, a militant offshoot of the Black Panthers.
But talk of any coordinated attack on police was muted by Mayor John Lindsay, who would soon announce his run for U.S. President. His police commissioner Patrick V. Murphy publicly insisted the killers were just a roving band of crazies.
As for those killed by police, the New York City Police Department made its first concerted effort to keep track. In 1971, police officers shot at least 314 people and killed 93. Some of those were victims of the stakeout squad formed in 1968. Police officers would hide in businesses lying in wait for armed robbers. More than a third of the confrontations ended with a robber being shot.
Fiscally the city was on the verge of bankruptcy. In 1974, Mayor Beame inherited a $1.5 billion deficit on a $10 billion city budget. The federal government's unwillingness to help led to a Daily News headline Ford to City: Drop Dead. In June, 1975, the NYC mayor announced layoffs of 19,000 workers. Police headquarters ordered the collection of the guns and shields of 20% of the entire city police department. The NYPD retrenched both in numbers and philosophically. There would be no new police academy recruit until 1979. These layoffs and the chaos of the decade would scar the NYPD for a generation and were formative experiences for young officers who would later become police leaders during New York City's extraordinary 1990s crime drop.
Larry Bernstein:
Let's go to the event in Crown Heights when Hasidic Jews driving resulted in the death of a black young kid. Tell us what happened.
Peter Moskos:
The spark was the killing of this black boy. This is Mike Julian talking. “The Crown Heights riots never should have happened. There were so many mistakes compounded by different people. In 1991, Robert J. Johnston Jr is chief of department, the top uniform officer in the NYPD. Johnston made his rank with the assistance of the Brooklyn Hasidic Jewish community. It was dangerous for the Hasidic community. He had agreed to give the Grand Rebbe a police escort on Mondays to visit his deceased wife in the cemetery. NYPD does a report and says it shouldn't be doing the escort. But Johnston was retiring soon and he asked them to keep it until he retired.
The Rebbe’s escort police car with lights on goes through the stop light on Eastern Parkway and the Hasidic people follow through it, but they don't have fucking lights and they get sideswiped and pushed into the sidewalk. 7-year-old Gavin Cato is killed. After the kid is run over, youths ran through the streets looking for some Jews to beat up, and they found Yankel Rosenbaum.
They stabbed and killed him and he never should have died except the doctors missed internal bleeding. The riot starts and the police withdraw. They're paralyzed. They don't know what to do. And the thought is that maybe it'll burn itself out. It goes on for three days and nights, and finally the mayor and the police commissioner are going to visit the family of the dead youth. Their police car gets rocks thrown at it. Probably for the first and only time in NYPD history, they call for officer assistance.
It marked the end of David Dinkins' political career. He was elected, he was a great person, a failed mayor. He was elected in part to improve race relations in New York City and at that he failed miserably. Giuliani was able to capitalize on that. And it's a large part of the reason that he got elected.
Larry Bernstein:
Giuliani brings in Bratton with a new philosophy to policing to the NYPD.
Peter Moskos:
Bratton had been New York Transit Police Chief and Chief of Police in Boston. He comes back to New York to take over the NYPD and Bratton makes Jack Maple, a lieutenant in the Transit Police, his right-hand man, the deputy commissioner. Jack Maple starts asking people, when are we going to start caring about crime? I know we care about corruption, I know we care about scandal, but when are we going to start caring about crime?
Larry Bernstein:
Tell me what Bratton's philosophy was and why it radically changed the ethos of the NYPD.
Peter Moskos:
He's aided by the Dinkins administration. A family from Utah came to the U.S. Open, they get jumped at the 57th Street subway exit. The son goes to protect his family and is stabbed and killed. And this led to the famous headline in the New York Post, which is Dave Do Something. And Dave Mayor Dinkins, after years of dithering, announces the largest boost to the police department ever. And the program was called Safe Street, Safe Cities, and it requires Albany's approval. There's a state tax on phone bills, so people don't really notice it. They hire thousands of police officers, but they don't come on the job until the next mayor.
Bratton is at their graduation. And that class had more cops than the entire Boston Police Department. More cops alone aren't the answer. You need leadership. Bratton came in and said, I'm going to bring down violent crime 15% in New York City. He exceeded that year after year.
Larry Bernstein:
People thought that was crazy.
Peter Moskos:
Why would you put your reputation on the line? The police department had largely abdicated themselves because of a progressive liberal idea that crime is caused by poverty, racism, unemployment, structural inequality, bad education and so on. They said, we can't focus on all that. We can focus on public order, repeat violent offenders, and crime prevention. It was fundamentally that idea that we're going to care about public order and crime.
Larry Bernstein:
The book references a London-based police officer who had principles on how to do police work.
Peter Moskos:
Bill Bratton quotes them a lot. They were invented in 1940s by an author summarizing British policing --Robert Peel's nine principles. Robert Peel established the first modern police department, meaning officers in uniform patrolling to maintain order and prevent crime and paid for by the municipality. This is 1829 London. And that's why cops in England are still called Bobbys after Robert Peel. They're unarmed. It was the idea of policing with consent.
It came to New York in 1845 under local and often corrupt political control at the level of the Ward Alderman. American police started carrying guns because America has always been more violent. Cops were getting killed.
Peel’s principles are pretty noble. The public are police and the police are the public, and we're paying cops to do what is incumbent on everyone in a civil society. The purpose of police is to maintain order. It's not just about fighting crime. It is about keeping a civil society.
Bratton took that to heart with his application of broken windows. Focusing on public order and the little things that annoy people like car alarms. Do you remember how bad that used to be?
Larry Bernstein:
All day and all night.
Peter Moskos:
I'm not saying it's all police doing, but crime went down in the subways under Bill Bratton as Transit Chief when crime didn't go down above ground. What a great natural experiment when robberies dropping in the subways but not on the street. The only variable is what's going on in the subway. The only thing that changed was enforcing subway rules and cracking down on turnstile jumping in particular. It was a relentless approach.
The idea was not that most turnstile jumpers are robbers, but that every robber is a turnstile jumper. It allows the cops to check for warrants, frisk you for weapons. It was something like one in eight people had outstanding warrants and one in twenty had weapons.
They focused on stations where they knew that a lot of subway criminals were getting on because when they were based on home addresses. Felony crime on the subway dropped immediately and dramatically.
Larry Bernstein:
I moved to New York in 1987, there was graffiti everywhere, and then there wasn’t.
Peter Moskos:
There was graffiti on half the trains back in ‘87. It also was one of those problems that couldn't be solved. You had a lot of people defending it as a way to express themselves. Keep in mind, graffiti writers were not mugging people. It's not that they were bad people. We just didn't want it. You couldn't see out the windows of the trains. They were covered with paint and the insides were filthy. And it gave that idea that nobody was in control. And Mayor Koch hated it.
They had the resources to keep one train line clean. They started on the 7 subway line from Flushing to Times Square. It was above ground so people could see it. They cleaned up one train and committed that this train will not leave with graffiti inside or out. And of course, it was immediately tagged and they cleaned it.
They expanded that clean car program, train by train, and then line by line. It took five years and by 1989, every train was graffiti-free. Here's what's interesting, and it goes against the broken windows theory. Robberies didn't go down when they cleaned up the train, but it was one of the first victories in a city that was in decline for decades. Nothing had gotten better and suddenly the trains were clean. That was a great moral victory and was good for subway riders.
Bill Bratton said, Peel’s first principle is the basic mission for which police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.
Larry Bernstein:
And why is that principle so important to Bratton's success?
Peter Moskos:
It goes back to the riots of the sixties and the Kerner Commission that says that police are the problem and that crime is caused by an unjust society and racism. It set out the root causes argument for criminal activity. From that the idea came that it is preferable if police respond primarily when people want them, so that they won't get in people's business. We have this new 911 phone system. If you want the cops, they’ll appear and be at your service. But when they're not there, they won't be bothering anybody because police don't prevent or deter crime.
Larry Bernstein:
In reading the book, I get the sense that the police force thought it was not their job to prevent crime.
Peter Moskos:
How about this? They weren't rewarded for preventing crime.
The first thing they had to do was care. Police have become fatalistic. Jack Maple in particular said poor people deserve the same police services that Donald Trump gets. It starts with caring and then comes data collection.
They did it for two years before all getting fired by Giuliani.
Larry Bernstein:
What did they do?
Peter Moskos:
How do weekly meetings stop people from shooting each other on the street? It was not particularly high tech; it was just a crime map. Jack Maple loved crime maps and all the computer did was a simple batch file.
It got crime data centralized within a week. Before it was gathered quarterly to send down to Washington to become part of national crime statistics. A smart cop on the beat knew where the crime was, who the criminals were, but there wasn't that organization behind it saying, let's put our resources together. A lot of this is organizational theory and management.
All the specialized units are working 9-5 Monday through Friday. Well, criminals are working at night and on weekends, so where's the weekend police department? Jack Maple changed that and Bill Bratton backed him. Suddenly you have cops going where the crime is when the crime is happening.
You get caught in a stolen car. Okay, where's the car going? It was going to a chop shop. Well, let's go to that chop shop and see what they're up to. It was trying to bring down the whole criminal enterprise and not just focus on making X number of arrests for Y number of crimes.
Larry Bernstein:
Bad process, you spend the whole day taking the guy down to the courthouse and wasting your day. There were people that refused to play and just wanted to get their pension. And people who were opposed to any innovation.
Peter Moskos:
The system failed because it did not reward success. It was defensive in nature. It was about not being in the news. And if you don't work, you can't get in trouble as an old police maxim. And unfortunately, there's a lot of truth to that. There's a lot of job security. It's civil service up to the rank of captain. How do you get these people back in the game? First of all, you have to figure out who's in the game and who isn't.
I would say the bad guy was organizational inertia. There were no incentives to fight crime.
If you're going to crack down on turnstile jumping, where are you going to put them? How are you going to process them? The whole system could come to a screeching stop. So, they invented the bust bus, which is instead of taking people downtown, they put them on a retrofitted bus and do the work at the subway station. So this required cooperation with other agencies.
But once crime started going down immediately. August of 1994 was a turning point, then everybody wanted to get in on it. Every city agency, every police officer who was looking to work their way up, suddenly it became this winning team.
Larry Bernstein:
Bratton wanted to create incentives. He bought them new Glocks, new uniforms, better cars and the police appreciated his effort and that paid big dividends. Tell us about recognition of the Cop.
Peter Moskos:
It's fixing broken windows within the police department and how do you inspire police officers? A lot of that was going into police stations, setting up focus groups. What are the problems? And some of it was like, the damn water fountain in the precinct doesn't work. Oh, we can fix that and then they did.
Cops were complaining about the uniforms. Going from revolvers to the semi-automatic Glock was a huge deal. Bratton first did that in Transit and then did that in the police department.
Suddenly things are looking better. New cars, all this stuff is relatively cheap. 90 plus percent of the police budget goes to labor, so it doesn't cost that much to fix up the police precinct so the roofs aren't leaking. And it showed that they cared.
Larry Bernstein:
Stop and Frisk was a Kelly/Bloomberg phenomenon and not a Bratton and Giuliani concept. Tell us about that.
Peter Moskos:
Cops were stopping more people under Bratton. It is a more assertive form of policing. It's still legal and constitutional. It wasn't malicious and no one really cared. Come 2004, ironically, in response to a lawsuit, the NYPD is ordered to keep accurate count of the people that they stop and check whether they're questioned or frisked. And from 2004, we start getting semi-accurate stop data.
Once the department started using stops as a measure of officer productivity because they could, it simply rewarded making more stops. But there wasn't any connection between stops and crime. This happened under 12 years of Bloomberg and Kelly. Kelly did a lot of good as police commissioner, but this was a legal and moral disaster, and it's set policing back for decades. We still haven't recovered because it gave up on broken windows. There were always some people that were ideologically opposed to it, but this was a legitimate complaint, but it wasn't broken windows policing. This is not what Bratton, George Kelling, and James Q. Wilson in the original article talked about.
Now during this era, we had over 700,000 stops a year in New York City. Not everybody was frisked mind you, but it was just too many. It did not have a great impact on violence, and then there was a lawsuit and the department had to stop. It doesn't mean that cops can't stop people, but it restricted it as it was practiced and the sky didn't fall. Apparently 700,000 stops weren't necessary because it went down to like 7,000 and murders also declined. So it was ineffective, immoral, and wasn't legal.
Larry Bernstein:
How did we get away from Bratton's objective of preventing crime and disorder to this?
Peter Moskos:
People ran out of ideas. They were afraid to try something new and then crime might start going up and they would be held responsible. So, there was no more juice from that squeeze.
Larry Bernstein:
We hear that the penalties for crack possession or sales are so different than for cocaine and that it's race related and therefore inappropriate. But the story that you tell was that this was different. Take us back to the crack epidemic and what it meant for crime and life in the city.
Peter Moskos:
Crack appears in the mid-to-late eighties. In the good old days, if you wanted to buy your weekend supply of cocaine, you needed a lot of money and buy it in baggy form. Crack is single serving. So, there are a lot more transactions, and there's risk and danger to each transaction.
It made everything younger and thus more irresponsible. You didn't need to be an established drug dealer, and I don't want to romanticize that old established drug dealer, but at least they understood that chaos wasn't in their best interests. When you have some kid slinging on the corner, $10 at a time, and you got to be armed, the violence skyrocketed in the late eighties because of crack. It was almost entirely a young African-American male increase in homicide.
And then of course you get crack addicts, and that's hardly a good advertisement for crack. Along with destroying their lives, they're committing crimes to hustle to get money. It was hyper localized and so damaging. Given your professional background, I'm sure you saw powder cocaine back in the days, but you also weren't shooting people on the weekends over it.
The overly harsh laws were supported by the Black Congressional Caucus and other African-American leaders. Crack did recede partly as a result of tougher law enforcement, and partly as the crackhead became a thing.
Drugs have cycles and that cycle peaked in 1990 and faded in the nineties. Technically, the crime drop did start 1990/91 because of the receding of crack cocaine, but those were small declines, and you would've expected it to go back to what it had been say in 1986. But instead of just dropping to that level, not only did the drop continue, but it sped up. Crack is an important part of the story, but it's not a huge part of the crime drop story.
Larry Bernstein:
The lessons that I learned from reading the book was that the New York police was ineffective because of bureaucratic reasons, and that Bratton came in, applied problem solving, and he saw immediate long-term success from good policing. He got buy-in from the mayor's office, the police at all levels, and the people of New York.
But over time, you lost some of the community. The mayor's office may not be in support of it, and some of those techniques either became lost or stale. Today we don't have that same enthusiasm that we had during the success of Bratton's first term.
What can we say that is optimistic?
Peter Moskos:
We've learned that good policing can prevent crime. Bratton was fired less than two years after he became commissioner, but they set up a system that could perpetuate itself for a very long time. That is a mark of a great leader. It also showed that there's not a minimax situation between crime reduction and being overly aggressive. The era is often falsely seen as a super aggressive form of policing, and to some extent it was. But complaints against cops went down. The number of people cops shot went down, use of force went down, arrests and incarceration went down after a short while. Every quantifiable metrics was trending correctly, it was win-win-win. That's important because often people, especially now with Trump, say law and order is in conflict with moral, effective and constitutional policing. And it doesn't have to be that way.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Peter for joining us.
If you missed the last podcast, the topic was Loving Avocados.
Our speaker was Monique Parsons who discussed her new book Green Gold: The Avocado’s Remarkable Journey from Humble Superfood to Toast of a Nation.
I would like to make a plug for next week’s podcast with Darren Schwartz our What Happens Next Culture Critic. Darren and I will be reviewing the recently released Naked Gun movie as well as the entire Naked Gun oeuvre.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Loving Avocados, here.
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