The truth is, police brutality has been with us forever. So has corruption. The two feed on each other. We don’t recruit from the Planet Perfect. We recruit from society. But things are vastly better than they were. The main thing we changed on the NYPD when I was deputy commissioner in the mid-1990s was accountability. The police weren’t holding themselves accountable for fighting crime. Then we decided to change. We mapped crime out and deployed accordingly. And New York enjoyed the biggest crime declines in America in the 1990s. Now we need to be as accountable within the force as we are on the street. Police departments must map brutality and corruption complaints the same way we mapped murders and shootings. Then commanders must be held accountable to prevent their recurrence. Stings of every kind must be run for theft, brutality and discourtesy. Once caught, serious offenders should be interrogated like any criminal so we can make more cases on other bad cops.
Another answer is more transparency. Why do we have a weather channel in America but not a crime channel? People should be able to see what the latest local crime patterns are and to ask the precinct commander why their neighborhood doesn’t get the same protection others do. Journalists and community leaders should be able to go on patrol with the cops to gain a better understanding of real police work, not just what they see on “NYPD Blue.”
Some people think I coined the phrase “zero tolerance.” But I hate what the words imply. Zero tolerance–a term I first saw in the media–is for people who wear red armbands, brown shirts and jackboots. There’s a vast difference between zero tolerance and enforcing quality-of-life issues like graffiti or teenagers throwing beer cans and pissing in the street. Zero tolerance suggests bicycles should be confiscated if they don’t have effective bells. I think police should be reasonable. The code we had on the NYPD was that you can’t break the law to enforce the law. To say Justin Volpe badly betrayed that code is an understatement.
Mayor Giuliani thinks the blue wall of silence has crumbled during the Louima case. I think the wall almost always crumbles when it needs to. Sometimes, the wall serves a purpose. There are such things as rats and stoolies, and nobody wants them in any walk of life. That’s why Americans would rather have Monica Lewinsky as their daughter than Linda Tripp. All Linda Tripp did was blow the whistle. If Monica had been giving away national-security secrets, Linda would have been a hero. Cops need to be heroes to each other, but not at any cost. New York columnist Jimmy Breslin once had a great line about cops: they shouldn’t be “a softball team with guns.” They shouldn’t be a group with more loyalty to one another than to the people they serve.
On another level, it’s the New York cops who have a right to complain. They felt betrayed by the mayor when crime went down. The city had 33 million tourists and property values skyrocketed, but the police got zero-percent raises two years in a row. The saying was “zeroes for heroes.” Salaries need to be raised tremendously in American policing. You get what you pay for. We have to start attracting candidates from real colleges–not ones where you send for your diploma on a matchbook cover. And we should require three years of training to be a police professional, not six months. People will say we don’t have the time or money. If you want professionals, you have to spend both.
Finally, police departments simply must reflect ethnically the cities they serve. In New York–26 percent black and 26 percent Hispanic, with a force that’s 13 percent black and 17 percent Hispanic–that would take another 50 years to happen at the current pace. It needs to happen now. We’ve already thought “outside the box” on fighting crime. Let’s do the same for recruiting. I’m not saying it’ll be a better department statistically than it is now. But the community will know it looks like them, not like an occupying army. The police must have the trust of the citizens they serve. Volpe maimed that along with Louima’s body. Both will take a long time to heal.
