By Andrew White, New York Times Op-Ed Contributor
After his second inauguration, in early 1998, with crime falling and New York on its way to becoming the safest large city in America, Rudolph W. Giuliani rose to heights of popularity he would not see again until the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Meanwhile, the man in charge of the city’s vaunted Police Department, Commissioner Howard Safir, was slipping badly in opinion polls.
A little more than two years later, after notorious incidents of police brutality and the mistaken police shootings of two innocent black men, Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond, Mr. Safir’s tenure was over. Just before his resignation in August 2000, a poll found just 11 percent of black voters - and less than a third of all New Yorkers polled - had a favorable opinion of the police commissioner.
What a difference a new administration makes. Last year polls consistently found Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly to be the city’s most popular public official by far, with approval ratings near 70 percent. It is Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg who has settled into a trough of unpopularity, with ratings below 40 percent.
What explains this change in attitude? Enthusiasm for Mr. Kelly has roots in the public support for uniformed services that followed 9/11, but there’s more to it. There has been a significant shift in policing strategy under the Bloomberg administration - even as crime rates have continued to decline. It is this shift, along with Mr. Kelly’s political skills, that have improved perceptions of police headquarters, especially in black and Latino communities.
Several hundred officers are now engaged in antiterrorism efforts, and tight budgets have driven the number of officers down to below 37,000 from a peak of more than 40,000 in 2001. But equally notable is a steady transition away from some of the hardball tactics of the Giuliani era that inflamed neighborhoods in northern Manhattan, central Brooklyn and the Bronx.
A few years ago, critics asserted that New York’s street-level enforcement efforts, particularly the special plainclothes units independent of the precinct commands, harassed innocent citizens. Defenders of the tactics said the stop-and-frisk routines in high-crime neighborhoods were necessary to control guns and drugs.
Yet some smaller cities, including Boston, San Jose and San Diego, managed to drive crime rates down substantially without generating the depth of anger and distrust seen in New York City. Police commanders worked with religious leaders and community organizations to identify crime spots and develop support in those cities’ substantial minority populations. Boston, like New York, developed a comprehensive computer-based crime tracking and precinct accountability system, but also integrated nonstatistical information drawn from local organizations to help commanders better understand the sources of crime.
Mr. Kelly’s department is somewhere between these two models. While full-fledged community policing is a relic in New York, there is a recognition that tough policing does not necessarily depend on the harsh stop-and-frisk tactics typical of the 400-strong plainclothes Street Crime Unit that Mr. Safir vastly expanded in the late 1990’s.
The current administration put most of that unit’s detectives back into local precincts. Smaller firearms units, with far fewer officers and detectives, now go after illegal gun dealers. Today, most street-level enforcement is now the responsibility of local precincts and of Operation Impact, a program that suppresses street crime by flooding troubled neighborhoods with uniformed rookie officers and setting up visible, accessible command-post trailers. The program also includes meetings with residents and merchants, and a clear explanation of strategy and tactics.
Furthermore, after a 66 percent increase in misdemeanor arrests from 1993 to 1998, the level of arrests and pretrial detentions for such minor crimes as turnstile hopping and public drinking has declined. While misdemeanor arrests remain high compared to the early 1990’s, they dropped by more than 20 percent in Manhattan between 1998 and 2003, with the largest decline coming during Mr. Kelly’s first year in office.
Mr. Kelly has also been more responsive when the police make mistakes. A 57-year-old woman, Alberta Spruill, died last May of a heart attack after police officers used a concussion grenade during a “no knock” raid on her Harlem apartment. Mr. Kelly quickly went into the community and apologized for his officers’ reliance on inaccurate information from an informant. He transferred or reassigned several officers responsible for the policy and the assault. The department temporarily ended the use of stun grenades and drastically reduced the number of no-knock searches.
Of course, the Police Department remains a paramilitary organization. It is not always adept at responding to criticism. And Mr. Kelly has failed to reach beyond religious institutions and the official precinct community councils to include other types of groups - neighborhood associations, tenant groups, youth service organizations - in meaningful discussions.
Boston’s departing commissioner, Paul Evans, was a pioneer in this approach. Such work may seem an inefficient sideline in a city burdened with huge antiterrorism responsibilities, but if Mr. Kelly hopes to retain his newly won reputation, he would do well to follow through on recent efforts by becoming more inclusive in his outreach.
Even so, crime control remains dependable in New York and policing today in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant and other neighborhoods is no longer generating the harsh reaction so common in the recent past. The credit may not yet have accrued to City Hall, but it has, at least for now, reached the headquarters of an extraordinarily popular police commissioner.
Andrew White is director of the Center for New York City Affairs at New School University.