Blue on Blue

by Charles Campisi

  I should point out that “stop, question, and possibly frisk” has been an NYPD tactic since before I came on the job. A 1968 Supreme Court decision held that cops can briefly detain and question someone if there is “reasonable suspicion”—not “probable cause,” just reasonable suspicion—and can search them if there is reasonable suspicion that they have a weapon. What Bratton did was to insist that cops on the street be more proactive in conducting stop-question-frisks—and he held their commanders responsible for making it happen. As a result the number of stop-question-frisks surged—by 2012 the NYPD was making more than 500,000 stop-question-frisks a year—and crime had plummeted.

  Yes, it’s true that the majority of people in New York City who were stopped-questioned-frisked were young black and Hispanic males—but it’s also true that for whatever reason, the majority of crimes committed in the city are committed by members of those same age, gender, and ethnicity groups. I guess the NYPD could have made it a policy to stop-question-frisk more elderly black men or middle-aged white women, but I’m not sure that would have had much impact on crime. In any event, de Blasio shows which side of the argument he’s on shortly after he becomes mayor by dropping the city’s appeal of a 2013 federal judicial ruling that the NYPD policy is racially discriminatory. Stop-and-frisks plummet 90 percent by the end of 2014, and, unfortunately, what had been predicted by cops in precincts across the city happens: In 2015, amid rising crime rates, the New York City murder rate increases.

  Anyway, while it’s fair to say that in early 2014 most cops aren’t happy about de Blasio being elected, it’s also fair to say that most people in the Department are pleased to have Bratton coming in as police commissioner—and I’m one of them. I figure that if we can’t have Ray Kelly as PC—Kelly left after Mayor Bloomberg was term-limited out of office—Bill Bratton will still protect the Department against de Blasio’s worst antipolice instincts.

  But I also know this: With Bill Bratton as police commissioner, the handwriting concerning my personal future in the Department is indelibly on the wall.

  I like Bill Bratton, and more important, I respect him. He’s the guy who gave me my first star, and he and Jack Maple and others worked miracles in helping to turn around New York City and the NYPD in the 1990s. Throughout his long career as a Boston cop, chief of the New York City Transit Police, chief of the Boston Police Department, and, following his first term as PC of the NYPD, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, he’s proved himself to be a good, brave cop and a brilliant administrator.

  True, he’s a bit of a showman, a guy who likes the TV cameras. For example, in his first term as PC in the early 1990s, when the 30th Precinct Dirty Thirty scandal was about to break, he made certain he was at the center of attention. Although it was the district attorney and the Mollen Commission and the feds who were actually heading the investigation—the old NYPD Internal Affairs Division had mostly been left out of the loop, with the new IAB under Walter Mack only being brought in at the end—Bratton personally led the well-publicized arrest of two of the officers at the 30th Precinct house. And at a press conference the next day, he held up the two arrested officers’ NYPD shields, declared that they had disgraced those shields, and announced that those shield numbers would be permanently stricken from the NYPD rolls. Then he dramatically threw both shields into a strategically preplaced trash can.

  (Actually, one of those shield numbers had formerly belonged to a friend of mine, an NYPD lieutenant, who wasn’t happy that his old shield number had been designated a symbol of disgrace. Later I helped the lieutenant quietly resurrect the shield number so that his son could have it when he graduated from the Police Academy.)

  That sort of headline-grabbing gesture made Bratton a popular PC with the public and the press in his first term—too popular, in fact, for Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani was a good mayor, the right mayor for New York City at the time, but he never willingly shared a spotlight. After several run-ins with Bratton over his high media profile, in 1996 Giuliani in effect fired him and replaced him with Howard Safir.

  But there’s another aspect of Bratton’s executive style that I know will have an impact on me. In every position Bratton has ever had, he always brings in his own people for the top slots. When he took over as PC in 1994, every senior chief in the Department either retired or was shifted to another slot. And when he takes over again in 2014, I know he’s going to do the same.

  It’s not necessarily a bad management system. In any organization sometimes it’s good to have a shake-up at the top. And no one in the NYPD, me included, is irreplaceable.

  Besides, I’m going to have to retire in eighteen months anyway, when I hit the mandatory NYPD retirement age of sixty-three, so it’s not like I’m going to be here for much longer in any case. Yeah, there’s some talk about shifting me to another three-star chief slot, but I’m not interested. I don’t want to start a new job and then have to leave in a year and a half.

  So when in February 2014, Commissioner Bratton calls me into his office, I know what I’m going to do. We chat for a minute or two, then he says that while he has absolutely no complaints about IAB, and he appreciates the work I’ve done with IAB over the years, he’s decided to make some changes, and there are going to be some moves. And I tell him: Commissioner, I understand that and I think the best thing for me and the Department is for me to retire. We chat a bit more, shake hands, wish each other good luck, and that’s it. We’re friendly then, and we’ve remained friendly since.

  So I drop my papers, and then I spend the next thirty days filling out paperwork—in terms of paperwork, getting out of the NYPD is almost as hard as getting into the NYPD—and generally getting things in order. We’ve still got ongoing IAB cases that need attention, including a long-standing IAB–Social Security Administration investigation involving dozens of former NYPD cops who allegedly are fraudulently collecting 9/11-related disability pensions. I won’t be around for the conclusion of that case, or other ongoing investigations, but that’s the way it is when you’re a cop—you’re never around for the end of your last case. The case, and crime in general, goes on without you.

  Am I sad to be leaving the NYPD? Sure. I’m sad that I’ll never wear the uniform again, the uniform that I’ve worn so proudly for so many years, the uniform that hundreds of thousands of my brother and sister cops have proudly worn before me, and will proudly wear after me. In fact, at this point I’ve got more years on the job than all but one currently serving cop in the entire NYPD. But like every cop, I’ve always known the day would come when I’d have to put the uniform away.

  And the way I see it, I’m leaving at the top of IAB’s game. During my more than twenty years with IAB, we’ve put the IAB draft system in place, implemented the proactive anticorruption and serious misconduct programs, dramatically increased integrity testing, and—except for that damned towing program—we’ve shifted the Internal Affairs Bureau’s emphasis away from petty “white socks” violations and toward serious police misconduct. We’ve reduced corruption cases by two-thirds, even as the number of NYPD cops and civilian employees has grown to fifty thousand. Although we’ve investigated a lot of corrupt or brutal cops, most of those cases were isolated, involving a few bad cops; we’ve defied history by passing the aforementioned twenty-year cycle of serious, widespread, systemic police corruption scandals—and with our proactive anticorruption methods and tactics, we don’t expect to ever see that kind of historical corruption scandal again. The NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau has gained a national and even international reputation as a model Internal Affairs operation, one that many other police departments copy and emulate. And I’m proud of all that.

  So yeah, I’m sad that my NYPD career is inevitably coming to an end. But I’m going out with my head up.

  Whenever a cop retires from the NYPD, somebody wants to make a big deal out of it. There’s a retirement party, and speeches, and everybody telling stories about you, some of them actually true. For retiring seni
or chiefs the Department usually stages what’s known as a walk-out, with bagpipes and an honor guard and even a vintage patrol car from the year you first came on the job to drive you away.

  And that’s all fine—but it’s not for me. I’ve made it clear that for me there’s going to be no party, no speeches, no walk-out.

  So on my last day I shake a few hands, say some good-byes, and then I quietly walk out the door of One Police Plaza. My retirement doesn’t officially kick in until midnight, so I’m ending my last shift with the NYPD the same way I ended my first shift with the NYPD more than forty years ago.

  I’m just another cop, heading home.

  EPILOGUE

  Even after a cop leaves the NYPD, the NYPD never really leaves the cop. He or she remains a part of its proud history, traditions, and culture, and the former cop cares about what happens to it.

  And since I left the NYPD, I’ve worried about some of the things that are happening to both the Department I love and respect and to my great city as well.

  Yeah, I know, people always look back and say that things were better in the old days. But I’m not saying that at all. When I came on the job in 1973 and for many years thereafter, the situation was almost immeasurably worse than it is today, not only in the NYPD but in New York City as a whole. Crime, drugs, violence, attacks on police officers, racial disorders, corruption, police layoffs, low morale, depopulation as people ran for their lives to the suburbs—they were all almost out of control, and New York City came this close to being unlivable, ungovernable, and un-police-able. It took a quarter century of discipline and hard work by the NYPD, some of the city’s best politicians, and the people of New York City to make this city what it is today—one of the safest big cities in the world, and still easily the greatest.

  So I’m not shouting gloom and doom here. But I have seen some trends that worry me, not just as a former NYPD cop but as a citizen—trends that, if they continue, could in ten years have us back to where we were twenty-five years ago.

  I’ve already mentioned the drastic reduction in the use of stop-question-and-possibly-frisk tactics by NYPD officers, a trend that I know from my four decades of experience as a cop is going to lead to more illegal weapons being carried by criminals, and thus higher crime rates. The tactic can still be used by NYPD officers, but only under restricted circumstances. At one point the de Blasio administration even proposed that every cop doing a stop-question-frisk be required to give the person a card with the cop’s name and shield number on it along with instructions on how to file a complaint against the cop—which is sort of like requiring a doctor to give every patient a business card for a medical malpractice lawyer. Commissioner Bratton headed that one off, but still, if you’re a cop on the beat, you know the score. Why risk your career getting involved in a politically charged controversy by stopping, questioning, and maybe frisking that guy who’s holding something inside his waistband while he’s peering into the window of a frequently robbed convenience store at two a.m.? Sure, if you see a guy actually commit a crime you’ll chase him—but that’s reactive police work, not proactive police work, and relying solely on reactive police work leads to more crime.

  There have also been persistent attempts by the New York City Council and others to decriminalize so-called quality-of-life offenses, or at least to discourage cops from enforcing laws against them—public urination and public drinking, aggressive panhandling, fare beating, plain-view drug activity, all those “small” crimes that as we learned in the 1970s and ’80s have a direct correlation with the prevalence of more serious crimes. As commissioner, Bratton has resisted those efforts—but without political support behind them, cops aren’t enforcing those laws as aggressively as they should. Almost every New Yorker can tell you stories about the increase in quality-of-life crimes they see every day. The New York Post summed up the situation precisely with a photo of an aggressive, emotionally disturbed homeless man openly urinating on a busy Manhattan street, under the headline: “TWENTY YEARS OF CLEANING UP NYC PISSED AWAY!”

  Attempts to wrest control of police work away from the people who know how to do it—which is to say, the police—and give it to civilian “watchdog” agencies continue to be a problem. As I was leaving the Department the de Blasio administration and the City Council created a new civilian agency, the NYPD Inspector General, to monitor the Department’s handling of things like community relations and stop-question-frisk and to make recommendations to the mayor and the City Council. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with monitoring; every police department should be monitored by a civilian agency to make sure it’s doing its job and treating the citizens properly. But the NYPD already is monitored by five civilian elected district attorneys and their public corruption bureaus, by two US attorneys and their corruption and civil rights units, by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, by the civilian Commission to Combat Police Corruption, by the civilian police commissioner, by the elected civilian mayor of New York City—and, not least, by the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau itself. So do we really need to spend millions of dollars every year for another civilian monitoring agency that really doesn’t do anything? I think not.

  The attitude by some political figures toward cops—and the actual, physical “war on cops” perpetrated by some people—is another disturbing trend, not just in New York City but across the country. During protests over the July 2014 death of Eric Garner, an African American man who died of asphyxiation while NYPD cops on Staten Island were trying to arrest him for selling untaxed “loosie” cigarettes—he had been arrested thirty times before for various offenses—Mayor de Blasio called the death a “terrible tragedy,” which it was. But after a grand jury declined to indict any of the officers—which sparked protests across the country—de Blasio infuriated a lot of cops by not backing up the officers and by saying that he had warned his own biracial son about the “danger” he might face during any interaction with what the mayor implied were racist NYPD cops.

  It got worse when a career felon shot and killed NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu while they sat in their patrol car in Brooklyn’s 84th Precinct in December 2014. The killer, a thug with a long criminal record who committed suicide after the murders, had announced on social media that he intended to “put wings on pigs”—in other words, kill cops—in retaliation for the death of Garner and the police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which also resulted in a grand jury clearing the officer of criminal wrongdoing. Hundreds of NYPD cops famously turned their backs on Mayor de Blasio when he appeared at the hospital where the officers were taken and later at their funerals. Personally I wouldn’t have done that—you should show respect for the office, regardless of who’s in it—but I know why they did it. The way the cops looked at it, de Blasio was another one of many politicians and community activists across the country who seem to think that the murder of a cop, while regrettable, is an understandable angry reaction by some people to years of brutality and racism by police officers.

  Look, I know better than almost anyone that there are some bad cops out there; I spent half my career fighting them. But the idea that all or even a majority of cops are inherently racist, that they come to work each day hoping for a chance to shoot somebody or beat them up, is ridiculous—and so is the suggestion that cops are increasingly brutal or trigger-happy when dealing with suspects. As I pointed out, between the time I came on the job and the year before I left it, the number of people shot and killed or wounded by NYPD cops every year declined by almost 90 percent. Any politician who even suggests that cops in general are the primary enemy of any community is doing that community a terrible disservice—and whether he intends to or not, he’s putting a target on cops’ backs, sometimes figuratively, but too often literally.

  After the furor over his performance during the Eric Garner demonstrations, Mayor de Blasio put Bill Bratton out in front on most police-related issues. And he’s done some good work. Take police “body camera
s,” for example. Twenty years ago I was asked by a promotion board what I envisioned would be the single greatest change agent in law enforcement in the future, and my answer was videotape recorders in the hands of cops and citizens that would capture some of the realities of police work; I guess I really would have been prescient if I’d said iPhone 6s Pluses, but it’s the same idea. The NYPD under Bratton has begun a pilot program to test the use of police body cameras and expects to soon increase the number of cameras deployed to about five thousand, and maybe many more in the future. I believe they will help protect good cops from false allegations, and help protect citizens from a few overly aggressive cops. But they aren’t a cure-all for all police controversies. People have to remember that, as I said earlier, a lot of police work is necessarily brutal, and it always will be, but that doesn’t always make it police brutality. Every case of alleged excessive force by the police has to be judged in the context of the entire incident, not just by a few moments’ worth of digital images played on the news—and too often politicians and community activists seem to forget that.

  Low pay for NYPD officers continues to be an alarming trend, as it has been for years. Currently a rookie NYPD police officer gets a base salary of $42,000 a year, which after six years on the job increases to about $76,000; detectives and supervisors are paid more depending on rank. The pay is far less than it is for cops in suburban departments. Sure, NYPD cops also get overtime, night differential, vacation time, and so on, but remember, this is New York City, where the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in 2015 is four thousand bucks a month. Remember, too, that we give these cops guns, shields, and the enormous responsibility of enforcing the law—and the responsibility-to-pay ratio for NYPD cops is seriously out of whack. You’ve heard the expression “You get what you pay for”? With the NYPD, the people of New York City are getting a lot more than they’re paying for. But if the city continues to scrimp on police pay, there’s inevitably going to be a decline in the quality of recruits and the retention of good cops.