Feature

The Twice-Top Cop

Communication is also the key, Kelly believes, when cops make a stop. He says he's been involved in hundreds of stop-and-frisks himself, and the difference between a good stop and a bad one is talking, letting the subject know why he's been stopped and exactly what's going to happen. "But I will tell you right now that while I think good community relations are critical, I am absolutely committed to keeping crime down and certain strategies will remain in place," Kelly says. "Like stop-and-frisks, which are a legitimate law-enforcement tool. It's all in how they're handled."

John Timoney says he learned from watching Kelly in '92 and '93 just how critical police-community relations are, and he took those lessons and successfully employed them in Philadelphia. "You remember that madman who shot all those people on the Long Island Rail Road?" Timoney asks, suddenly thinking of a bizarre anecdote. "His name was Colin Ferguson and he left a kind of incoherent, rambling note in which he said he wanted to kill all the white people -- except Ray Kelly."

Kelly believes there is a window of opportunity in the aftermath of September 11 to capitalize on the good feeling toward the cops. He's going to have to do this, however, while attempting to deal with a Police Department in crisis. Yes, the cops have performed spectacularly over the past eight years, and crime across all categories is down 64 percent. And yes, the cops were heroic on September 11 and have continued to do heroic work since then. But the NYPD is a tired police department, a department that has been pushed and stretched to its limits.

The department has been spending between $30 million and $50 million a month, month in and month out, on overtime. That money will simply not be there in the coming year. "Cops need to be weaned off overtime anyway," one high-ranking official says. "They need to know they have to do their job and make arrests whether or not they get overtime."

And for all of this remarkable above-and-beyond-the-call effort, the bill, both literally and figuratively, is about to come due -- at precisely the same moment that Mayor Bloomberg has called for cuts. It is contract time, and the cops want to be compensated for the work they've done. Anything less than what they believe is fair -- which will be an enormous problem given the budget deficit -- could send the department spiraling into a deep funk.

Kelly will also have to face an unusual triple whammy on the personnel front. The NYPD is hemorrhaging talent. As much as 10 percent of the uniformed force could retire this year. The loss of these experienced cops would be tough for the department to absorb under the best of circumstances. But it's losing people faster than it can bring in new recruits. On top of this, the department has perhaps as many as 3,000 more detectives than it actually needs. This means Kelly must find a way to shut down that pipeline -- the primary means of rewarding cops who do good work is promoting them to detective -- without killing incentive.

Cops are leaving in record numbers for essentially two reasons. With all of the heightened concern about security, private-sector job opportunities have opened up in an unprecedented way. More ominous is the Amadou Diallo scenario: Cops believe there is always a risk of being indicted for an action they might take while doing their job. Consequently, they're not willing to gamble their pension by staying on the job once they've put in their twenty years.

Kelly believes that various legislative possibilities currently being debated that would allow cops to stay on and have their pensions guaranteed will take care of the exodus. On the recruitment front, he says, he will exploit the fact that New York is the advertising capital of the world by bringing on someone to specifically handle the department's marketing efforts. He also believes improved community relations will send a welcoming message to potential recruits.

Many of the bedrock issues Kelly will face are a result of the department's being run almost like a successful but badly managed corporation -- badly managed in the sense that all the focus has been on greater and greater short-term profits (lower and lower crime stats) while no attention has been given to long-term planning. "You have to run the department like a business," says Timoney. "But only up to a point. You have to remember that you always have an obligation for the long-term health of the organization. There are a lot of things other than crime that have to be dealt with in a big-city police department, and these have been neglected."

In the case of the NYPD, it means failing to address significant issues -- quality-of-life issues for cops -- like the dismal condition of station houses. Many of the city's police precincts are old, run-down, falling apart, and filthy. "Cops should be proud of where they work," Kelly says. "Maybe we'll seek private-sector help. There's the adopt-a-school program, and maybe we can implement a variation of that."

But as urgent as all of these issues are, Kelly will ultimately be judged by how well he executes what he calls his "three-C approach": crime, counterterrorism, and community relations.

"The crime spikes in other cities are very real and very ominous," says Dr. George Kelling, a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and the Manhattan Institute, and a professor at Rutgers. "In Newark, they matched their murder numbers for all of last year in August. And the number of shootings is way up, too."

There are signs that this may be a trend. In Boston, which has often been held up as an example of a city where crime has been reduced without heightening police-community tensions -- as has happened in New York -- murder was up 67 percent last year. For the same period, New York's murder rate was down 12 percent. "Obviously, a police commissioner wants to keep crime down," says Tom Reppetto, head of the Citizens Crime Commission. "But it's especially true now because the public perception has been changed. The elites never believed the police could control or reduce crime. But because of the success of the last eight years, they do now. So everyone's expectations are different."

Terrorism may present the most difficult challenge of all. When Giuliani was elected, the mandate was clear: End the fear. The fear was of crime and disorder. Deputy police commissioner Jack Maple had an idea: If you tracked the crime and put little colored dots on a map so you knew where the crimes were taking place, all you'd have to do is put the cops where the dots were. Well, it worked. Immediately. Crime began to drop at unprecedented levels, and eventually the fear began to dissipate as well.

Now Ray Kelly has become police commissioner, and he, too, has a clear mandate: End the fear. Except this time, the fear isn't of crime. "It's fear of this amorphous force -- terrorism," says a former high-ranking member of the department. "Will a plane fly into my building? Will a truck-bomb explode while I'm taking my children to see the tree? Will a guy with a package strapped to his chest walk into a crowded deli? People are afraid of these things now, and you can't put the cops on those dots 'cause you don't know where those dots are. So Ray has the same mandate Bratton had, but he's chasing quicksilver."

Kelly is, however, uniquely qualified for this task. He was police commissioner the first time the World Trade Center was bombed, back in 1993. Mayor Dinkins was in Japan when the buildings were attacked, so Kelly took the reins. "He was running the city, if not in actual fact, then at least on television," says Reppetto. "When he appeared on TV after the bombing with his the-Marines-have-landed-and-the-situation-is-well-in-hand demeanor, the whole city was reassured. He has that aura. He's strong, and it's clear he's in charge."

Given this background, along with his vast experience navigating the Washington bureaucracy and his international law-enforcement work, Kelly has a shot at being the right man at the right time. And his sense of policing the city has clearly evolved as well.

On a rain-soaked afternoon a little more than eight years ago, Kelly and I sat drinking coffee in his office at One Police Plaza. Only weeks away from the end of his tenure as police commissioner, he was both frustrated and philosophical about the state of the city. He recognized the perception that things were out of control. He also recognized that the cops were the most visible agents of law enforcement and therefore the easiest to blame for the chaos.

He knew all the criticisms: not enough drug arrests; not enough quality-of-life arrests; cops don't track down fugitives; cops aren't tough enough. But he also believed that cops were neither the problem nor the solution. "I hope most people realize," he told me then, "that the issue of crime is much broader than the Police Department. There are a lot of problems out there, root causes, that we in law enforcement are never going to solve."

Over the past eight years, however, the Police Department has shown that the root cause of crime is criminals. And Kelly has learned along with everyone else. He knows that the genie is out of the bottle and that no matter how hard they rubbed it before 1994, they simply weren't doing it the right way.

"Job No. 1 is to control crime and disorder," he says now. "The resources are there, the systems are in place, and I believe we can continue to reduce the numbers."