COLUMN ONE : The NYPD: Bigger, Bolder--Is It Better? : New York police claim their new militarism has led to the city's startling drop in crime. The hard-line strategy has raised cheers--and fears.

By JIM NEWTON

Dec. 24, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

NEW YORK —

Jack Maple, the roly-poly intellectual buzz saw behind the New York Police Department’s new war on crime, slugged back another espresso and trumpeted the philosophy that has revolutionized policing in America’s largest city.

“He who tries to defend everything,” said Maple, “defends nothing.”

In a business where commanders generally cite management manuals, think tank studies and Justice Department reports, Maple drew his quote from a 4th century work by Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu. Called “The Art of War,” the book has helped guide centuries of generals but not too many police chiefs.

But under the leadership of a new mayor and police command, the NYPD has spent the past two years shedding its historical reluctance to confront criminals in favor of a new militarism, one reflected in everything from the ideas of its command staff to the uniforms worn by street cops.

In precinct after precinct, those cops today are taking on crime with new numbers and intensity. Backed by a department that has hardened its rhetoric, hired 8,000 new officers and revolutionized the use of crime statistics, they are producing results that have startled criminologists and forced a reexamination of long-held national assumptions about what causes crime.

The questions being asked in New York have deep implications for Los Angeles, where the Police Department has attempted to chart a near-opposite course. Unlike the NYPD, the LAPD’s paramilitarism is being softened in an effort to regain the community support undermined by beatings, riots and racism.

To the cheers of many New Yorkers, the NYPD’s approach seems to be working. Since early 1994, when newly installed Police Commissioner William J. Bratton borrowed from the wartime words of Winston Churchill and vowed to “take the city back, block by block and neighborhood by neighborhood,” crime in New York has plummeted to the lowest levels in 25 years. Once-empty streets now bustle with officers, their presence welcomed by business leaders, though a rise in citizen complaints of police brutality and racism have triggered alarm in some quarters.

But battling crime is Bratton’s central mission, and over the past 24 months reports of:

* Murders are down 39.7%.

* Robberies are down 30.7%.

* Burglaries are down 24%.

* Aggravated assaults are down 12.9%.

* Shootings are down 39.6%.

Overall, New York crime dropped 11% in Bratton’s first year and is on track to fall another 16% this year. Even at a time when crime has dropped nationally, those statistics are far ahead of the national average and of every other major city in the United States. In fact, they are nothing less than staggering.

“Something is happening in New York,” says Bratton, 47, a former Boston police chief and onetime candidate to head the LAPD, whose accent is part Boston but whose stiff bearing and lean, sharp-eyed looks are all cop. “It’s the direct result of what we’re doing.”

Not everyone, however, is a convert.

Academics vs. NYPD

Academic crime experts--and many police chiefs--for decades have argued that police have little to do with crime trends. Instead, they attribute swings in illegal activity to social forces: age shifts in the population, fluctuating economic fortunes, migrations in and out of cities and changing drug habits.

“Increases usually are not the policeman’s fault,” said Marcus Felson, a distinguished crime expert who has worked at USC and Rutgers University. “And decreases are not his credit.”

Writing on the subject in 1994, David H. Bayley, arguably the foremost scholar in the field, stated: “The police do not prevent crime. . . . Experts know it, the police know it, but the public does not know it. Yet the police pretend that they are society’s best defense against crime and continually argue that if they are given more resources, especially personnel, they will be able to protect communities against crime. This is a myth.”

Just try telling that to Maple, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for operations. With the fervor of the convert, Maple dismisses each counterargument offered by Bayley and his colleagues.

Age? There has been no noticeable change in New York’s young adult population, which commits most crimes, since 1993. Drugs? Suspects still overwhelmingly test positive for cocaine, the drug most associated with criminal activity. The economy? There do not appear to have been any dramatic shifts that would account for the vast drop in reported criminal activity. Deep public cynicism that discourages victims from reporting crimes? Undoubtedly that exists, but no evidence suggests that the public is significantly more cynical than it was in 1993, when a gentle decline turned into a precipitous one. New jails? New York, like California, has waged a jail and prison construction boom in recent years, but the number of new cells lags far behind the rate of New York City’s drop in crime.

And Maple’s response to the experts?

“These criminologists,” he scoffed, “their ancestors are the same people that said the world was flat.”

The reason crime is down, according to Maple and others in and around the NYPD, is simple: The department is getting bigger, tougher and smarter.

Today, officers make arrests not only for felonies but for lower-level offenses that degrade a city and make it less hospitable.

Thousands of new officers whose hiring was initiated under former Mayor David Dinkins--who paid for the expansion out of the city’s massive budget--have helped. But just as important, according to Bratton, are the strategies under which the officers work. Spotting crimes quickly, responding assertively and snuffing out trends--those are Bratton’s missions, and he says the statistics back up his belief that the NYPD is onto something revolutionary.

“We haven’t found the magic bullet,” said the commissioner. “But what we have found is a way of getting American police forces back into the game where we can effectively reduce crime independent of all those historical pressures.”

Trading Places

In ways large and small, America’s highest-profile police departments are heading in opposite directions, each emulating the other’s recent past while rejecting its own.

These days, the NYPD, long famous for the size of its force--and, some would say, the size of its cops’ midsections--wants to project a tougher image, starting with its uniforms. Out are the light-blue shirts that for decades made officers look like friendly security guards; in are dark blue duds that look more authoritative--and that consciously emulate the LAPD.

In Los Angeles, officers are trying to shed the very image that the NYPD covets. Cops are getting out of cars, walking beats, putting on shorts and riding bicycles, all to be closer to the public. Far from wanting to look more intimidating, they are trying to appear more approachable--something like the officer-friendlies that the NYPD once symbolized.

Los Angeles police are being encouraged to spend more time talking to residents and merchants about what troubles their lives, to emphasize community contacts over arrests, to consider the underlying community pressures that give rise to crime rather than focusing exclusively on criminal behavior itself.

But while LAPD learns to counsel and console, NYPD is recalling how to confront and arrest.

Unchained by Bratton, New York cops are hauling in more and more suspects, often for low-level “quality-of-life crimes” such as aggressive panhandling. Suspects arrested for petty offenses are checked for warrants, searched for guns and grilled about criminals working their areas. Those are rough tactics. In fact, they remind some observers of the sweeps that then-LAPD Chief Daryl F. Gates began during the late 1980s.

Today, the LAPD bristles every time someone raises the specter of its image as an “occupying army.” Bratton, meanwhile, says he is now trying to get away from his military rhetoric, but it’s not easy. He and his top aides routinely refer to their campaign against crime in military terms.

A department leader, said Maple, must be “part CEO, part field general.” And victory, Maple added after another gulp of high-octane coffee, goes only to those who “act swiftly and audaciously.”

In short, community policing is today’s watchword in Los Angeles; in New York, it is yesterday’s, preserved in the department’s official rhetoric but, as a practical matter, abandoned in favor of a more militaristic approach to suppressing urban blight and crime.

Computers and Crooks

The NYPD’s “mantra,” as Bratton calls it, echoes through almost every interview with every department commander. It has four parts, and officials utter them with reverence:

* Accurate and timely intelligence.

* Rapid deployment.

* Effective tactics.

* Relentless follow-up and assessment.

None of those ideas originated with the NYPD, of course. In various forms, they exist in all departments. But the NYPD has honed their application as few others have, particularly in the quick collection and turnaround of “intelligence,” the crime statistics that increasingly drive New York’s policing strategies.

The New York idea is simple: Gather crime statistics, day in, day out. Then overlay them on maps and produce visual representations of the patterns of violence and illegal activity across the city. The patterns, they say, suggest solutions.

Using a recent batch of data from the 73rd Precinct, Maple showed off the department’s new approach. With a reporter at his elbow, he projected the precinct map on a wall and barked cheerful orders to a computer operator:

“Get me shootings,” he said. A string of blue crosses appeared across the map.

“Let’s see housing projects.” Green blocks flashed up, overlapping many of the shootings.

“Homicides,” said Maple. More marks.

“Now let’s see warrants,” he barked. This time, a blizzard of black slashes covered the map, with obvious pockets of concentration.

Through the overlapping crosses, dots and colors, patterns began to emerge. The areas with large numbers of robberies also were home to clusters of shootings and homicides. Many of those crimes were concentrated in and around a couple of housing projects, where a bevy of suspects were wanted on outstanding warrants.

Armed with that intelligence, Maple proposed a tactical strategy: Start serving the warrants in those areas. Bring the suspects in, question them about the local drug trade and its attendant violence. Find out who’s doing the dealing, who’s doing the shooting, then go out and get them.

Twice a week, that technique is applied by the department’s top brass at the NYPD’s command center, a high-ceilinged, smartly computerized post at 1 Police Plaza, headquarters of the nation’s largest police department.

The meetings are known as “Compstat,” short for computerized statistics, and they start at 7 a.m. so that precinct commanders cannot claim conflicts. The brass sit at one end of a rectangular configuration of tables. Precinct commanders and others are arrayed throughout the room. On a big day, the audience can number 200.

There, in front of peers and bosses, precinct commanders are tested over and over again. What are the problems in your area, and what do you plan to do about them?

Their answers start with the crime maps. They end either with proposed solutions or with drubbings.

Bratton attends the grillings, peppering his subordinates with questions, prodding them for results. Like others in the room, the commissioner is armed with detailed printouts on each precinct. The sheets even feature color pictures of the commanding officers, a reminder of the personal accountability that Bratton demands of his subordinates.

Tales of success abound.

Inspector Richard Seta and his then-colleagues in the 9th Precinct identified a rash of quality-of-life crime along St. Marks Place in southeast Manhattan.

As is typical of the NYPD’s new approach to crime-fighting, Seta and his officers started small. They cracked down on illegal vendors, arresting a few and chasing the others off. That removed the cover for the drug dealers, which made it easier for police to infiltrate and break up that trade. Next was an aggressive move against store owners who were selling illegal weapons and drug paraphernalia.

Backed by civil confiscation laws, officers carted off 751,954 items--from switchblades and brass knuckles to marijuana and crack pipes. Residents stood near the police tape and cheered.

“People don’t call me up and say: ‘I’m tired of these murders and robberies,’ ” said Seta, who now commands Midtown South, the city’s largest precinct. “They say: ‘I’m tired of this guy urinating in my doorway. I’m tired of this guy drinking beer outside my building.’

“What we’ve learned,” Seta added, “is that by going after that guy who’s drinking or urinating or aggressively panhandling, we can have an effect on other crimes too.”

Like many department leaders, Seta has flourished under Bratton’s system. But officials acknowledge that not all commanders have fared as well.

During one recent Compstat meeting, a precinct commander acknowledged what the statistics made clear. A housing project in his area was home to a rash of drug crimes and citizen complaints. But the commander did the one thing that Bratton and Maple most abhor: He pleaded helplessness, saying it was difficult to penetrate the project with undercover officers.

“It’s tough to buy [drugs] in there,” he lamented.

“How hard do you think it is to live there?” one of his bosses shot back.

Maple, for one, is not losing any sleep over hurt feelings.

“These are police commanders we are talking to here, senior people,” he said. “And this is a very serious business we’re doing. We’re trying to save lives.”

In the process, the new leadership is willing to punish its own. Since the commissioner took office two years ago, more than 80% of the city’s precinct commanders have changed jobs. Some have been promoted, some transferred, others ousted. In the old days, no more than five or six would have changed jobs in a comparable period, officials say.

“Some people rise to the challenge and it’s very noticeable,” said Chief of the Department Louis R. Anemone, who oversees the NYPD’s day-to-day operations. “Some of them see it as a big pain in the ass.”

Complaints Rise

Fighting crime is the issue that put New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney, in office. He brought along Bratton to wage his battle, and the two have never looked back.

But their war has triggered its share of alarm as well. Critics warn of a new aggressiveness within the NYPD, of a distillation of public anger toward the poor and of an unleashing of Police Department frustration bottled up for years.

The NYPD’s embrace of militarism, its self-consciously hardened approach to crime fighting, contains the seeds of police violence, said Paul Chevigny, a nationally renowned expert on that subject and the author of “Edge of the Knife: Police Violence in the Americas.”

“The military analogy leads to brutality,” said Chevigny, a professor at New York University’s School of Law. “The military is brutal.”

Some observers say they are already seeing those fears realized.

“The homeless know their enemy today is the NYPD,” said Michael Harris, a spokesman for New York City’s Coalition for the Homeless. “Ever since Bratton and Giuliani started, we’ve seen harassment, police abuse, all of that.”

Harris cited the recent case of Thomas Dross, a homeless man sleeping at the Port Authority when the police tried to move him along. According to Harris, the man was beaten, thrown down a flight of stairs and hurled through a plate-glass window. The coalition has arranged for a lawyer to represent Dross in a civil rights complaint against the officers, but Harris said that incident was just one of many troubling ones.

Citing the man’s pending case against the department, police decline to comment. But Harris said the word is out among the city’s underclass.

“Homeless people in New York,” he said, “are scared to death of the police.”

While crime has been on the run in New York, complaints against officers have jumped startlingly. In the first six months of 1995, overall civilian complaints against NYPD members were up 31.8%, according to figures accumulated by the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board.

In record-breaking numbers, officers were accused of improper force, abuse of authority, discourtesy and offensive language. A total of 1,778 use-of-force allegations alone were filed in that six-month period, a number that is as staggering in its own right as the NYPD’s crime statistics are in theirs.

More than three-quarters of all complainants were black or Latino.

Bratton downplays the significance of the complaints, and some observers outside the department agree with much of his rebuttal. As he and others note, creation of the new civilian review board was bound to increase complaints because it encouraged people to lodge their gripes with an organization outside the Police Department. Increasing the size of the department, meanwhile, meant that there are more officers on the street, inevitably giving rise to more complaints. And encouraging officers to go out and make arrests means that there are more unhappy people, if only because few people appreciate being locked up.

A Simple Message

In the vast majority of cases, citizen complaints have been ruled unfounded. But there have been scandals, to which Bratton has vigorously responded.

When the department’s 30th Precinct in Manhattan was virtually dismantled by a corruption probe, Bratton confiscated the badges of the officers involved and announced that they would never be worn again. The badges have been destroyed, symbols of their disgrace to the organization.

Bratton said his message to his troops is simple: “Go out and do it. We’ll train you to do it the right way. We’ll lead you. We’ll support you. We’ll focus on the results. But if you do it the wrong way and do it intentionally . . . we’re not going to protect you.”

Bratton’s approach may trouble some observers outside the department, but it has struck a resonant chord with the NYPD’s rank and file. Under Bratton’s leadership, morale has soared, and it now approaches something close to cockiness. Once it was the LAPD that swaggered. But when an NYPD officer recently learned that a visitor he was talking to was from Los Angeles, he laughed and shook his head.

“If O.J. had killed her in New York,” said the officer, “he’d be going to jail.”

Criminologists may scoff. They may say that the solutions being tested at the NYPD are at best temporary, that long-term progress against crime depends on changes in the fabric of society, not the efforts of even well-intentioned police.

But Maple and Bratton see the statistics and disagree. Fewer people are being shot in New York these days, they say, because police are changing the way criminals behave.

When every person arrested is searched and every gun confiscated, Maple believes the word gets out. Criminals become more cautious about carrying guns for fear that they will face felony charges if caught committing minor offenses. The result: When a drug dealer gets into a fight or an evening of drinking turns violent, there are no guns handy, so there is no shooting, no victim, no homicide.

Two thousand fewer people will be shot in New York City than in the year before Bratton and Giuliani took over. That’s more than three shootings a day that won’t happen in 1995. And that’s the proof Maple needs.

“You do this enough times,” says Maple, leaning back in his chair with evident satisfaction, “and crime comes down.”

Still, even success breeds tensions, and politics has intervened. Giuliani’s staff has fumed about the attention given to Bratton and the Police Department, and resentment has flared on both sides, say New York political observers.

“I think Giuliani goes to sleep at night believing that the reductions in crime are the result of his hard work, not the police commissioner’s,” said former Mayor Ed Koch, outspoken as ever. “Maybe it’s all the arrests that the mayor is making.”

Koch, who calls Bratton “equal to the best police commissioners we’ve ever had,” believes that the political squabbling may prove too much for the commissioner and may persuade him to leave. But Bratton shrugs off suggestions of political discord, effusively crediting the mayor with bringing the political will to fighting crime.

On the streets, meanwhile, many New Yorkers, a notoriously jaded bunch, still need to be convinced that the NYPD has revolutionized the art of fighting crime.

Take Bernie Wittie, who runs S. Greenspan Hardware, a few blocks from the Midtown South precinct building. “It’s a little better,” Wittie said of the neighborhood since Giuliani and Bratton took over. But crime remains an abiding concern, especially since a high school for troubled kids moved in down the block. “Hoodlum High,” Wittie calls it.

‘It’s Not Bad’

Or try Derrick Basdao, who runs a fruit stand across the street from Macy’s in Manhattan. “It’s better, sure,” he said. “People used to get robbed right here. Not anymore.”

And then there is Maria Varga, who works at the Big Apple Sign Corp., just down the street from Greenspan Hardware.

She hears the reports of crime dropping, but she finds them hard to reconcile with stories about double and triple homicides, crimes of extraordinary brutality. She has lived in New York all her life, and crime rates don’t mean as much to her as the stab of fear when she steps outside her 35th Street office after dark.

“I know they’re saying it’s a lot safer, but I don’t see it,” Varga said. “As far as crime around here, as far as I can see, it’s not bad. But you gotta be smart. You leave at 5. You don’t stay at night. You can’t be stupid.”

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Crime in America’s Largest Cities

New York:

Over the past two years, crime has been on the run in New York City. Led by a 40% drop in the number of murders, crime in America’s largest city has fallen to the lowest levels in 25 years. Academics offer a host of possible explanations, but the New York Police Department says the reason is simple: assertive work by an emboldened police force.

Background:

Officers: 38,000, who also cover housing projects and transit system.

Area: 322 square miles

Population: 7.3 million

Los Angeles:

While New York has registered the most stunning decline in crime in modern American history, Los Angeles also has seen a decrease, though not of the same magnitude. Like their New York counterparts, Los Angeles police claim some credit for the drop but say other factors have contributed as well.

Background:

* Officers: 8,000

* Area: 450 square miles

* Population: 3.5 million

(please see newspaper for charts)

N.Y.C. MURDER

(In thousands)

1995: 1,024 (Through Nov. 12)

N.Y.C.: Down 39.7% over past two years

L.A.: Down 12.2% over past two years

N.Y.C. ROBBERY

(In thousands)