From counterterrorism to tracking criminals by satellite Safir'sSecuritygives an expert's tour of 21st century law enforcement, and reveals the tools, methods, and science that police officers use to reduce crime, and track and apprehend criminals, including surveillance, crime scene evidence, DNA profiling, narcotics and quality of life enforcement. Securitygives insight into how methods of enforcement need to be adapted to prevent terrorism, a look into the workings of a police department, and examines how the NYPD drastically reduced crime with Goal-Oriented Neighborhood Policing.

From 1996 to 2000 the New York City Police Department under Commissioner Howard Safir reduced the rate of major crimes in New York City by 38% and today the city is, per capita, the safest in America with population over 1 million. Safir was appointed commissioner after a career in law enforcement that started in 1965 with the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, now the Drug Enforcement Agency. During the 1980s he was chief of the Witness Security Division of the DEA and associate director of U. S. Marshals. He is now a partner in the New York-based security consulting firm, Safir Rosetti.

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

xi

1. Goal-Oriented Neighborhood Policing

1

(12)

2. Quality of Life

13

(10)

3. Technology and Policing

23

(14)

4. Crime-Scene Evidence and Forensics

37

(20)

5. DNA Profiling

57

(20)

6. Murder

77

(28)

7. Special Victims

105

(14)

8. Surveillance

119

(16)

9. Homeland Security

135

(20)

10. Getting Guns Off the Streets

155

(16)

11. Organized Crime

171

(14)

12. Drug Enforcement

185

(18)

13. Managing the Police

203

(28)

Sources

231

(38)

About the Author

269

(2)

Index

271

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Chapter One

For many years New York City was considered legendary in the history of crime. Nineteenth-century crime lore encompasses the immigrant ghetto gangs of Five Corners and the corrupt politicians of Tammany Hall; and with the twentieth century came more high-profile crime. Criminal enterprises like Murder Incorporated (Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Bugsy Siegel) were set up during the early decades of the century to organize racketeering, bootlegging, narcotics, and prostitution. These criminal ventures evolved into the larger-than-life crime families that New York is known for. These mob families-Gambino, Genovese, Lucchese, Colombo, and Bonanno-and their capos, John Gotti, Vinnie "the Chin" Gigante, the Persicos, have been transformed into modern-day myths by film and television.

Organized crime was and is not the city's only crime problem. From the early 1970s, New York City witnessed an escalating murder rate. The city was known as a dirty and dangerous place, even home to infamous serial killers, like "the Son of Sam," David Berkowitz, whose seven murders during the summer of 1977 led to rampant fear and disorder in the city. An earlier murder, that of Kitty Genovese in 1964 in Kew Gardens, Queens, was particularly infamous. Genovese was murdered at her doorstep as her neighbors stood by and did nothing to help her. The incident has often been held up as a symbol of the beginning of civic apathy and the kickoff of decades of moral and social decay in the city.

Because of these high-profile murders and the homicides of the thousands who never made front-page news, New York City became known as Murder City, and for many years it topped the FBI's index of most dangerous cities. With the increased fear came the exodus of the middle and upper classes to the suburbs, and those who remained in the city were horrified when, in 1989, a woman-who became known as the Central Park Jogger-was brutally beaten in the middle of the park. The vicious, random, and almost fatal attack on an urban professional-a banker jogging after a long day at work-in a place thought to be an oasis and adjacent to the city's most affluent neighborhoods, was a wake-up call to many New Yorkers.

When the city turned its attention to crime, it was not a pretty picture. In the early 1990s, violence and crime were endemic to the city and fueled by the crack cocaine drug epidemic that had started in the early 1980s and was now in full swing. Over the years this volatile and dangerous situation precipitated the flight of the city's tax base to New Jersey, Connecticut, and Long Island, setting off a financial crisis that affected every person and bureaucracy in the city.

The NYPD was not exempt from these negative trends, and thus the enforcement of laws that govern quality-of-life crimes was not a priority. In 1990, panhandlers aggressively solicited money from passersby, drug dealers had taken over entire streets and turned them into open-air drug supermarkets, squeegeemen attacked drivers who refused to pay for unwanted window cleanings at intersections, and muggings were commonplace. Many, including myself, were very concerned with the situation in the city, and within the law-enforcement community new solutions were being formulated to help solve the crime and quality-of-life problems.

Over the years it had become clear that the NYPD's policies of the late '80s and early '90s were ineffective. When I became NYPD commissioner in 1996, I made it my mission to achieve record crime reduction and to improve the quality-of-life for New Yorkers. To achieve this I established Goal-Oriented Neighborhood Policing. The strategies that were implemented in this program were many and involved special units, task forces, and multi-agency partnerships. With these strategies in place, and a total commitment to fighting crime, the NYPD turned the city around.

Much of this progress was made while I was commissioner, during which time the homicide rate dropped 67 percent. To give you an idea of how far we came in less than a decade: In 1990, New York, with a population of 7.5 million, had over 2,200 murders, 700,000 major index felonies, 100,000 robberies, 120,000 burglaries, and 147,000 car thefts. These numbers mean that if crime had been equally distributed across the city's population, 10 percent of all citizens would have fallen victim to a major crime in 1990. In 1998, after I had been in office for two years, there were only 633 murders. This means that in 1998 there were 1,500 people walking around that in 1990 would otherwise have been dead. The same goes for the other serious crimes-in 1998, there were only 44,000 stolen cars, 46,000 burglaries, and 39,000 robberies compared to the figures from 1990. These numbers translated into a city that today is a model for other communities, a destination location for tourists, and a home to New Yorkers, who now feel safe on the streets.

The roots of Goal-Oriented Neighborhood Policing lie in the redisposition of power within the department-precinct-by-precinct-and a reexamination of how the police interact in the communities.

In the past the structure of the NYPD, and many other police departments, had been based on the paramilitary model, which assumes a strict chain of command. Unfortunately, as messages and reports were passed along the chain, key information was getting lost. The top end didn't know what was going on in the field, and the field commanders had no idea what was going on at One Police Plaza. During my administration, the chain of command was reorganized so that the middle manager, the precinct commander (who has access to both ends), was accountable for the crime rate and the behavior of his officers on the streets.

To address the behavior of the police officer when interacting in the community, the NYPD adopted a policy of Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect (CPR). With CPR we fostered respect for the public, and discipline, integrity, and professionalism among police officers. To monitor officers and make sure they were fulfilling their role as the public faces of the NYPD, I instituted a program of CPR testing-assigning the Internal Affairs Bureau (IAB) and Quality Assurance Division (QAD) officers to test beat cops on their interpersonal skills with the communities they served. CPR testing scenarios included sending undercover officers out onto the streets to ask patrol officers on their beat for assistance and making calls to the precincts to test if the respondents to complaints would act correctly. We cast a broad net in our approach to testing CPR, and although we tested precinct's CPR based on community complaints, we also tested officers, and borough commands randomly.

Testing CPR also included bias testing, and we set up undercover stings with IAB and QAD officers who would employ Hispanic and other ethnic accents to see if the response to their complaints was comparable to the treatment received by nonethnic members of the community.

CPR testing helped us to identify problem officers and pockets of questionable behavior. To educate officers in CPR we set up a Police Advisory Board of community representatives to counsel the NYPD, and the board acted as a complement to the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) in overseeing the NYPD's interaction with the community. The CCRB examines civilian complaints and allegations against officers and publishes their findings in a semiannual report chaired by a group of community members appointed by the mayor, the NYPD police commissioner, and the New York City Council.

To ensure that officers were responding to the community appropriately, civilian grievances were tracked and assessed. We monitored individual officers who received an excess of three CCRB complaints. Officers who received excessive CCRB complaints were enrolled in monitoring programs, their enrollment based on a formal process point system that track brutality and discrimination. The level of monitoring is determined by the severity of the offense or track record of offenses. Counseling was provided at the command level, and when an officer received complaints, commanders brought them in and questioned them about what was going on. Were there racial issues? Personal problems? Depending on the outcome of these meetings, different measures-counseling, retraining, reassignment-would be taken.

One of the biggest challenges of an agency that is 40,000 strong and polices a city with 7.5 million residents and another 4.5 million commuters is coordination and accountability. To determine the success of Goal-Oriented Policing, the NYPD's strategies to reduce crime need to be tracked. To understand what was happening in each community, the NYPD developed CompStat, a computer-comparison statistics program that allows us to track crime trends and patterns with pinpoint accuracy.

We need to manage crime, and not be managed by it. CompStat meetings forced precinct commanders to be familiar with every block, every known criminal, and the genres of crimes committed within their jurisdictions; and it made them accountable to monitor these crimes, enforce the law, and lower the crime rate in their precinct. Through exchanges with borough and precinct commanders, my team would determine the best route to crime reduction for each borough and precinct.

Beat cops who wander the streets reacting to crime and hoping that their presence will thwart it, are wasting their time and our money; whereas officers who know their neighborhoods intimately and know where, when, and how crimes are committed can-and always have had-an impact on crime. "Feel good cops" are very little help in areas that are overrun with drug dealing.

In New York, to address each precinct individually, I changed this approach. My department had just one philosophy in regard to who was the responsible community policing officer, and that was the precinct commander. Holding the precinct commander accountable retains control, but it also serves to empower those at the midlevel of the organization.

Having established precinct commanders as the department's chief community-policing officers, my team worked on enforcing specific types of crimes and quality-of-life problems. The Giuliani administration established the strategic components that we would use to fight crime:

• Getting guns off the street

• Curbing youth violence on the streets and in the schools

• Driving drug dealers out of the city

• Breaking the cycle of domestic violence
par
• Reclaiming public spaces

• Reducing auto-related crime

• Reclaiming the roads of the city

• Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect

• Bringing fugitives to justice

• Rooting out corruption

The strategies were identified through focus groups conducted with officers, precinct commanders, community members, and an analysis of the root problems the city was facing. We gave officers on the street clear instructions on what they should do, not just what they were not to do. By holding officers more responsible for their own behavior with CPR, and giving them clear directions to put the safety and well-being of citizens before their own, we saw NYPD officers making more arrests with less force.

The ability of police officers to have an impact on crime is something that criminologists-who believe that the fluctuations in crime ate due to social and economic forces-have often refuted. Many criminologists believe that these problems are beyond the ability of police officers, or law-enforcement agencies, to address. In New York City we demonstrated that this is not the case. Police activities do have a significant impact on crime, but success is not just in the numbers of officers on the streets, but in what they are doing while they are there.

The mistake that the NYPD and many other local law-enforcement agencies have made when it comes to drug enforcement is to think globally. The real key is to be more local in your approach. It was my responsibility to ensure the safety of the citizens in my jurisdiction, and I would encourage the mayors of towns around New York, all over the country, and the world to implement the same tough stance toward the illegal drug trade as I did. Until a way is found to successfully reduce demand, cutting off the supply of drugs by reducing trafficking and making the sale of drugs a losing proposition is the only way to moderate the drug trade.

My job was not to chase heroin and cocaine traffickers across continents and across oceans. Getting drugs out of New York City was my goal. I was very pleased when early in the Northern Manhattan Initiative (NMI), a wiretap picked up drug dealers discussing moving their businesses to New Jersey because Manhattan had gotten too hot to operate in. I do not wish my Jersey neighbors ill will, but I believe that each city must adopt a policy to drive out drug dealers. If every community made this effort, the aggregate effect would be a large-scale reduction in crime and narcotics distribution nationally. In some ways this philosophy is akin to the Old West marshal's "not in my town" approach to law enforcement.

NMI was our most ambitious and large-scale model for eliminating drug gangs. Three precincts-the Thirtieth and Thirty-third in Manhattan North and the Thirty-fourth in Washington Heights-had been drug-distribution centers for many years. In 1990, those precincts accounted for 157 murders; but in 1998, with the NMI in place, that number dropped to 28. The results of the drug-enforcement techniques in Northern Manhattan and, later, in other parts of the city-we used the tactics in the Bronx (in the Fortieth, Forty-first, and Forty-third Precincts) and in Queens (in the 103rd, 105th, and 113th)-reveal how we had so much success in reducing crime.

Taking back streets and parks is one thing, but maintaining them is another challenge. Without diligent follow-up, locations often fall back into the hands of criminals. This is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of crime prevention-spending time and resources to clean up a neighborhood only to give back all of the gains after we move out. The Model Block Program was a collaborative effort between the police department, block residents, community organizations, and other city government agencies to turn the worst blocks into the most vibrant ones in the community.

Tracer Units, uniformed officers trained in the methods of patrolling the streets and drug dealers, were assigned to areas that we had reclaimed to assure that drug locations did not slip back into their original state. Vertical patrols performed a similar function in the city's most dangerous buildings and in the public-housing developments (in New York City 600,000 people live in public housing), treating each unit as a beat.

Copyright © 2003 by Howard Safir

Excerpted from Security: An Inside Look at the Tactics of the NYPD by Ellis Whitman, Howard Safir
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.