Security Policing Your Homeland, Your State, Your City

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 IWhitman, Ellis is the author of 'Security Policing Your Homeland, Your State, Your City', published 2004 under ISBN 9780312334987 and ISBN 0312334982.