FROM ONE TOP COP TO THE NEXT
Police Commissioner Dermot Shea gives his
Thirty years ago, when I first put on a shield that said “Police Officer, City of New York,” I patrolled a crack-ravaged Bronx neighborhood that had not yet recovered from the arson and abandonment of the 1970s. There were burnedout buildings, vacant lots and stripped-down cars up on blocks. New York City would see more than 2,000 homicides that year, some 5,000 shootings, in excess of 100,000 robberies. The prevailing mood was of pessimism and fear. Polls found that a majority of New Yorkers did not want to be New Yorkers anymore.
By December 2019, when my new shield read “Police Commissioner, City of New York,” the transformation of our city had been astonishing. We would close out the year with 319 murders, 922 shootings, and 13,369 robberies. New York State was closing prisons it no longer needed. Moreover, since 2014, our gains in public safety came as we drastically curtailed our enforcement efforts, refocusing instead on precision policing. Because most of our serious crime is committed by a relatively small number of people, targeting patterns, recidivists and networks such as gangs can deliver better results than an expansive and punitive enforcement policy.
When I started as a cop, police commissioners never bragged about how few arrests they were making. But I did and I still do: In 2019, we made 44% fewer arrests than we had five years before. The city was even safer.
Still, I knew the honeymoon would be brief. On Jan. 1, 2020, sweeping changes to our legal system enacted by the Legislature went into effect. It was a triumph of ideology over expertise. Bail reform meant that only defendants charged with a narrow range of offenses could be held before trial. For bail-eligible crimes, judges were required to limit the amount set to the defendant’s ability to pay — which, for a teenage gang member charged with gun possession, say, tends to be not much. A defendant’s history of violence — the best predictor of future violence — could not be considered by a judge. And while other states affected reforms in a similar spirit, they also allowed for public safety concerns to be evaluated in addition to a defendant’s risk of flight, which had traditionally been the sole criterion for setting bail. New York chose not to do so.
In addition to bail reform, discovery reform required DAs to produce a vast amount of documentation, much of it irrelevant, before proceeding with a prosecution. In the case of the 4-year-old child shot in Times Square this past May, the body-worn camera footage and memo books of 79 individual police officers had to be collected, collated, reviewed and sometimes redacted for purposes of bystander privacy before being turned over to the defense. In an ideal world, a large staff of attorneys could be dedicated to one case; in reality, a single prosecutor is responsible for many.
In the first two months of 2020, major crime in New York City went up 23%. Two months is not a long time, but we’d never seen a comparable jump since we’ve been keeping a close eye on the data. The next month, the pandemic struck our city, and few of us worried about anything else. By the end of the year, however, the stunning rise in gun violence reminded us that plagues don’t always arrive one at a time.
How these events were interrelated has been the subject of much debate, much of it ill-informed. Yes, our court system was effectively shut down, and it’s harder to identify suspects when we’re all wearing masks. But most countries did not experience anything remotely similar to the record-breaking 30% rise in murder that we saw in the United States, amounting to nearly 5,000 excess fatalities. In Mexico, murder went down, very slightly. In Canada, a nation of 38 million, there were 56 additional killings, for a total of 743. That’s 28 fewer murders than there were in Chicago.
While we don’t know enough about the recent surge in gun violence here — our clearance rate for shootings is about onethird, for firearm homicides around onehalf — it’s not exactly a new field of study for
me. I ran our CompStat meetings for several years, studying the cases and the patterns that emerged from them.
What I can tell you is that someone arrested for a shooting or a gun homicide had been arrested, on average, eight times before. The same names would frequently reappear in case files — last year’s uncooperative witness was often last month’s shooting victim, and this month’s shooter. Needless to say, all of these people carried guns. And I can also tell you that more than 80% of the people arrested for illegal gun possession this year are not in custody. Does that sound like a formula for success?
On Jan. 1, Keechant Sewell will be sworn in as police commissioner. I believe she has the experience, vision and values to succeed here, and I wish her the very best. But she will have a hard enough job keeping nearly 9 million people safe with the tools we have. When I hear some officials say, “We can’t arrest our way out of our problems,” I have to wonder: What problems are you talking about? If it’s opioid abuse, probably not; if it’s a rise in gang-related gun violence, if you’re not making arrests, you’re not addressing the problem.
Since 1982, when police departments across the country shifted away from a laissez-faire approach to drunk driving, alcohol-related vehicular fatalities have been cut by 52%, and total traffic deaths by 18%. A decade later, a comparable change took place with our approach to domestic violence, with a “must arrest” approach to acts of physical injury by an intimate partner. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found a 65% reduction in domestic violence victimization rates between 1995 and 2015. For both of these crime categories, we’ve arrested our way toward a much-improved state of society.
None of this is to say that we shouldn’t also invest in what Mayor-elect Eric Adams calls “going upstream,” trying hard to address problems before they metastasize and have to be dealt with through the criminal justice system. Of course we should have better preventative programs to put young people on a path to school and career success, and to interrupt violence before it happens. But these investments may take years to show results, and, for too many of us, there simply is no time left.
Statistics alone can never tell the story of what violence means to our community. Earlier in December, I joined a group of women who gathered at the Capitol in Albany to share their experiences of unbearable loss and to urge the Legislature to rectify the most egregious excesses of bail and discovery reform. They were led by Jackie Rowe Adams, a Harlem mother who lost two sons to senseless gun violence: Anthony, who was killed by two young men who thought he was staring at them, and Tyrone, who was shot by a 13-year-old during a robbery. “We should not live in fear,” she cried out. “As we stand here today, somebody’s getting killed. Somebody’s child is getting shot. Our children can’t go to the store.”
Eve Hendricks, whose 17-year-old son Brandon was shot to death in the Bronx, said, “Tell me, how would you feel to open your child’s bedroom door, realizing they are no longer there?”
Milagros Ortega, whose son Francisco was killed, warned those in attendance, “Make a change. Our kids are gone now. Make it for your own children.”
During the past year and a half, all across the country, debates over criminal justice have been characterized by magical thinking, a wishful insistence that we can have public safety without police. Budgets have been slashed. Resignations and retirements have further reduced police manpower. Morale is in a tailspin, which makes police recruitment — particularly among young Black men — especially challenging. The difficulties of effective policing are increasing while the effects of successful policing are being systematically undermined. It’s a vicious circle. We’ve lost more young people to homicide than we have to COVID. And yet the reasons for the current surge in gun violence remain “elusive” and “mysterious” to any number of academics and pundits, as if we have to keep digging to figure out the depth of the hole we’re in. Here’s a good first step: Put down the shovel.