Yrys
Army.ca Veteran
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Cop for a day
To help fund expensive crime-fighting tools, New York's finest allow paying members
of the public to take command, says Harold Evans.
When I commanded a police unit in a tough precinct of Brooklyn, New York, I never knew
what to expect. The bad day began with a shoot-out between a couple of young guys. By
the time I got to the decent-looking apartment block, the paramedic teams had just moved
the body of the loser from the elevator entrance and the wounded winner had fled. Nobody
in the block was talking much but it seemed it wasn't drugs, as I thought it would be, but
an argument over a woman.
The day ended with news almost as bad; that one of my counsellors posted to a school to
keep a watch on drug dealers had become a dealer herself. In between, on patrol in an
unmarked van with my team, we were stopping for a light in a derelict shopping area when
four teenagers on motorbikes roared around the corner, missing an old woman by inches.
They were gone in a flash and we were facing the wrong way. There was no room for a
U-turn. My driver knew the district well enough to go around the block double-quick and
we caught the hell-raisers at the next corner. None of them had licences or insurance.
We impounded the bikes. Minor stuff but their dangerous conduct could have ended our day
as it began - with bloodshed. I wasn't a precinct commander for long. In fact, I did it only
for a day. It wasn't that the New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly thought I had no
aptitude for the work, though I soon enough decided myself that I hadn't.
I was just part of a scheme he'd cooked up to let citizens like me see what it was like to be
responsible every day for the well-being of 85,000 people among the 8m in the city. The day
was organised by the New York Police Foundation, which raises money for the police. Hey,
isn't that what taxes are for? Yes, but what do you do when the police face budget cuts that
make cities less safe?
One thing I admire about Americans is what the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville noted
nearly 200 years ago: they have a gift for association, for coming together for philanthropic
purposes. It's still true.
Watchful eyes
The New York citizens started their Police Foundation in 1971. Gang-ridden Los Angeles, much
more chronically under-funded, started theirs in 1998. In New York 95% of the police budget
goes on pay. It leaves little for the cops to keep pace with rapidly evolving technologies of
detection, so the Foundation has raised $90 million to put in 400 innovative programs.
For instance, stand in the Real Time Crime Center, the first of its kind anywhere in the world.
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 40 detectives at serried banks of computers sit
in front of a two-storey video wall of 18 connected screen panels giving them sight of the
streets of the city. They zoom in by satellite and helicopter feed whenever a precinct reports a
crime. The cops' desk computers have access to five million criminal records, parole and
probation files, 20 million criminal complaints, arrests, emergency calls and summonses
spanning five years… 31 million national criminal records. And more than 33 billion public
records.
Before they set up the Real Time Crime Center - think of it as an integrated data warehouse -
it took days, if not weeks, to access all these different scattered records. "Like any very big
organisation," Kelly told me, "we didn't know what we knew."
Into the Real Time Crime Center comes a 911 call.
"A guy just robbed me. Stuck a gun in my face."
"Did you see what he was wearing?"
"Dunno. Had a tattoo on his neck." The cameras zoom in on the location, maybe they'll spot
the bad guy - perp for perpetrator. An operator searches the records for robbers with tattoos.
A lot of faces to go through.
There's another call. A customer in a pizzeria took his time eating a slice with pepperoni, then
when everyone had gone, came up with a silver handgun, threatened to shoot the owner and
got away with a big wad of dollars. All the owner could say was the robber was white and was
tattooed - SUGAR - he thought. That one word narrowed the searches. The perp had a record
and soon enough Sugar, hiding out in apartment 2B, was off the streets.
Mug shots
I wish they'd had a Real Time Crime Center when I was working as a publisher in the 1990s. I
stood in midday sunshine at a railway station in the borough of Queens.There was nobody about
for the good reason that no train was coming, since the Long Island Railroad operator I'd twice
called for a time had overlooked some small print in her schedules.
I started to phone the office from an open public kiosk - no cell phones then - when I saw a man
come down the stairs to the platform. I was loaded up with books but my companion had no
interest in literature. If I didn't give him my effing money he'd shoot me. I found myself curiously
detached, looking down as a middle-aged man in my suit holding my book bag tells the robber he
can have $50 but not the credit cards. "They're no use to you," says the calm man who'd just as
calmly observed the robber approach wearing a heavy woollen hood over his head in midsummer
and deduced he wasn't coming to help.
The emergency operator couldn't decide whether it was a matter for transit or city police and
refused to hear a description of a 5ft 9in robber with Louis Armstrong lips wearing a black hood
and Reeboks. The cops, when they arrived, were very angry about that. A day later, with a
blinding headache, I was taken to look at mug shots of muggers.
Broken windows
Crime had New York even more by the throat when I first arrived in 1983. Times Square was
a centre for porn and pushers of crack cocaine. Murders were nearing 2,000 a year. Squeegee
men menaced you at stops. Cops didn't bother with fare jumpers, street hustlers and graffiti
gangs. Now it is all changed. Times Square is a showplace again. The commonplace explanation
is based on the broken windows theory - that if you let one window stay broken, vandals will break
the rest; that if you don't arrest one panhandler, you'll have scores of them. And often enough if
you make an arrest, you'll find the offender has an illegal gun or knife.
I'm sure there is a lot to the theory. But it doesn't explain everything. The biggest difference in
New York has been a police commissioner and a mayor with innovative ideas who got enough cops -
38,000 in New York - and with dollars from the Police Foundation to invest in technology for
intelligence gathering.
How else to explain that New York - yes New York - is the safest city in the United States? The
murder rate is a third of what it was in 1990. That's matched with a comparable fall in major
felony crime. So what? you may say. European cities are much safer. Despite all the efforts in
New York, the murder rate at six per 100,000 citizens doesn't begin to touch London where the
rate is a mere 1.95 per 100,000.
Hair trigger
There's a major reason for the homicide rates in the two societies, and I can give it you in four
letters: Guns. Historically, the US has a more violent culture but it's easy access to guns that
makes the violence lethal. More than 200 million guns are owned by Americans. New York City
has the toughest law in the US against illegal guns but they're smuggled in all the time from states
that don't bother to check on the buyers' mental or criminal records.
You may recall that in 2007, 32 people were shot dead when a crazy student went on the rampage
on Virginia Tech campus. The ancient Commonwealth of Virginia, faced with the deadliest shooting
by a single gunman in US history, has just voted against - repeat, against - making it impossible for
the mentally disturbed to get a gun.
The National Rifle Association "buys" a majority of congressmen as easily as killers buy bullets. To
cops all across the country, it's dismaying. Last year 140 cops died from gunfire in the line of duty.
So here's a final word from Precinct Commander Evans - if ever the British were mad enough to
legalise guns US-style, they'd die to regret it.
To help fund expensive crime-fighting tools, New York's finest allow paying members
of the public to take command, says Harold Evans.
When I commanded a police unit in a tough precinct of Brooklyn, New York, I never knew
what to expect. The bad day began with a shoot-out between a couple of young guys. By
the time I got to the decent-looking apartment block, the paramedic teams had just moved
the body of the loser from the elevator entrance and the wounded winner had fled. Nobody
in the block was talking much but it seemed it wasn't drugs, as I thought it would be, but
an argument over a woman.
The day ended with news almost as bad; that one of my counsellors posted to a school to
keep a watch on drug dealers had become a dealer herself. In between, on patrol in an
unmarked van with my team, we were stopping for a light in a derelict shopping area when
four teenagers on motorbikes roared around the corner, missing an old woman by inches.
They were gone in a flash and we were facing the wrong way. There was no room for a
U-turn. My driver knew the district well enough to go around the block double-quick and
we caught the hell-raisers at the next corner. None of them had licences or insurance.
We impounded the bikes. Minor stuff but their dangerous conduct could have ended our day
as it began - with bloodshed. I wasn't a precinct commander for long. In fact, I did it only
for a day. It wasn't that the New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly thought I had no
aptitude for the work, though I soon enough decided myself that I hadn't.
I was just part of a scheme he'd cooked up to let citizens like me see what it was like to be
responsible every day for the well-being of 85,000 people among the 8m in the city. The day
was organised by the New York Police Foundation, which raises money for the police. Hey,
isn't that what taxes are for? Yes, but what do you do when the police face budget cuts that
make cities less safe?
One thing I admire about Americans is what the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville noted
nearly 200 years ago: they have a gift for association, for coming together for philanthropic
purposes. It's still true.
Watchful eyes
The New York citizens started their Police Foundation in 1971. Gang-ridden Los Angeles, much
more chronically under-funded, started theirs in 1998. In New York 95% of the police budget
goes on pay. It leaves little for the cops to keep pace with rapidly evolving technologies of
detection, so the Foundation has raised $90 million to put in 400 innovative programs.
For instance, stand in the Real Time Crime Center, the first of its kind anywhere in the world.
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 40 detectives at serried banks of computers sit
in front of a two-storey video wall of 18 connected screen panels giving them sight of the
streets of the city. They zoom in by satellite and helicopter feed whenever a precinct reports a
crime. The cops' desk computers have access to five million criminal records, parole and
probation files, 20 million criminal complaints, arrests, emergency calls and summonses
spanning five years… 31 million national criminal records. And more than 33 billion public
records.
Before they set up the Real Time Crime Center - think of it as an integrated data warehouse -
it took days, if not weeks, to access all these different scattered records. "Like any very big
organisation," Kelly told me, "we didn't know what we knew."
Into the Real Time Crime Center comes a 911 call.
"A guy just robbed me. Stuck a gun in my face."
"Did you see what he was wearing?"
"Dunno. Had a tattoo on his neck." The cameras zoom in on the location, maybe they'll spot
the bad guy - perp for perpetrator. An operator searches the records for robbers with tattoos.
A lot of faces to go through.
There's another call. A customer in a pizzeria took his time eating a slice with pepperoni, then
when everyone had gone, came up with a silver handgun, threatened to shoot the owner and
got away with a big wad of dollars. All the owner could say was the robber was white and was
tattooed - SUGAR - he thought. That one word narrowed the searches. The perp had a record
and soon enough Sugar, hiding out in apartment 2B, was off the streets.
Mug shots
I wish they'd had a Real Time Crime Center when I was working as a publisher in the 1990s. I
stood in midday sunshine at a railway station in the borough of Queens.There was nobody about
for the good reason that no train was coming, since the Long Island Railroad operator I'd twice
called for a time had overlooked some small print in her schedules.
I started to phone the office from an open public kiosk - no cell phones then - when I saw a man
come down the stairs to the platform. I was loaded up with books but my companion had no
interest in literature. If I didn't give him my effing money he'd shoot me. I found myself curiously
detached, looking down as a middle-aged man in my suit holding my book bag tells the robber he
can have $50 but not the credit cards. "They're no use to you," says the calm man who'd just as
calmly observed the robber approach wearing a heavy woollen hood over his head in midsummer
and deduced he wasn't coming to help.
The emergency operator couldn't decide whether it was a matter for transit or city police and
refused to hear a description of a 5ft 9in robber with Louis Armstrong lips wearing a black hood
and Reeboks. The cops, when they arrived, were very angry about that. A day later, with a
blinding headache, I was taken to look at mug shots of muggers.
Broken windows
Crime had New York even more by the throat when I first arrived in 1983. Times Square was
a centre for porn and pushers of crack cocaine. Murders were nearing 2,000 a year. Squeegee
men menaced you at stops. Cops didn't bother with fare jumpers, street hustlers and graffiti
gangs. Now it is all changed. Times Square is a showplace again. The commonplace explanation
is based on the broken windows theory - that if you let one window stay broken, vandals will break
the rest; that if you don't arrest one panhandler, you'll have scores of them. And often enough if
you make an arrest, you'll find the offender has an illegal gun or knife.
I'm sure there is a lot to the theory. But it doesn't explain everything. The biggest difference in
New York has been a police commissioner and a mayor with innovative ideas who got enough cops -
38,000 in New York - and with dollars from the Police Foundation to invest in technology for
intelligence gathering.
How else to explain that New York - yes New York - is the safest city in the United States? The
murder rate is a third of what it was in 1990. That's matched with a comparable fall in major
felony crime. So what? you may say. European cities are much safer. Despite all the efforts in
New York, the murder rate at six per 100,000 citizens doesn't begin to touch London where the
rate is a mere 1.95 per 100,000.
Hair trigger
There's a major reason for the homicide rates in the two societies, and I can give it you in four
letters: Guns. Historically, the US has a more violent culture but it's easy access to guns that
makes the violence lethal. More than 200 million guns are owned by Americans. New York City
has the toughest law in the US against illegal guns but they're smuggled in all the time from states
that don't bother to check on the buyers' mental or criminal records.
You may recall that in 2007, 32 people were shot dead when a crazy student went on the rampage
on Virginia Tech campus. The ancient Commonwealth of Virginia, faced with the deadliest shooting
by a single gunman in US history, has just voted against - repeat, against - making it impossible for
the mentally disturbed to get a gun.
The National Rifle Association "buys" a majority of congressmen as easily as killers buy bullets. To
cops all across the country, it's dismaying. Last year 140 cops died from gunfire in the line of duty.
So here's a final word from Precinct Commander Evans - if ever the British were mad enough to
legalise guns US-style, they'd die to regret it.
