What I learned from this event is something I continue to put into practice even today: It is the responsibility of the sergeant to get police officers to do their job, and while the officers are doing their job, the sergeant must also make sure to keep them out of trouble! Sometimes keeping the cops out of trouble might mean sergeants have to do unpopular things: confront the cops, including their informal leaders, and sometimes even impose discipline. In paramilitary organizations, discipline is the glue that holds everything together.
Layoffs: Cops Matter
In the spring of 1976, New York City was going through a profoundly difficult fiscal crisis. There were threats of layoffs for city workers, including police officers. To avert layoffs, the police union made an agreement with the city that all officers would work an additional five days over the following twelve months. The deal never made sense to me, since I did not understand how working an additional five days (the officers got to choose which days) over the next year would put money in the city's coffers. But I had a brother who faced a layoff and, being a good union man, I went with the program.
We began working the extra days almost immediately. In June of that year, the city did not get the assistance from the federal government that it had anticipated. One of the city tabloids ran a headline regarding President Gerald Ford's refusal to give money to the city—“Ford to City: Drop Dead.” On June 30, 1976, the last day of the fiscal year, the city laid off five thousand police officers, my brother, Ciaran, included. However, the police officers who remained were still held to the bargain of working those additional five days, even though five thousand officers had been laid off. It was surreal.
It became more surreal for me about a month later when I was working one of my additional five days. I was with my partner when I spotted a kid, about seventeen, in a car that looked suspicious. As soon as I made eye contact with the kid, he took off, so I chased him with the police car, using lights and siren. After a few blocks, the kid dumped the car and took off on foot. I was quite fast at the time and actually liked foot chases. I chased the kid for about two blocks and eventually caught him. No harm, no foul. Or so I thought. A few police officers who came to back me up in the chase cursed me out: “Timoney, you jerk! What the hell are you doing? They laid off your brother, Ciaran, and here you are, working for nothing but a broken promise. And to make matters worse, you're making collars! You're an asshole!” My only retort, which probably seemed lame at the time, was that we were still police officers and we had to enforce the law even when it didn't seem to be in our own personal best interest.
The real eye-opener with the layoffs was the police union's reaction, or lack of action. Five thousand officers were laid off in one day, and the effete union could do little but protest. The lessons of the 1971 strike were fresh in every officer's mind, including those heading the union, and we were not about to pay any more fines under the Taylor Law.
There was an even greater lesson for me personally as a result of these layoffs—that you could lay off five thousand police officers and not expect there to be a dangerous downside. You really had to believe that the number of police officers does not matter. You had to subscribe to the theories coming out of the 1960s that there was little the police could do about crime because the police did not address the underlying causes of crime: poverty, racism, unemployment, homelessness. There was also the notion, since the Knapp Commission, that police officers should not deal with drugs, disorderly bars, and other so-called quality-of-life issues. Enforcement in these areas, it was assumed, only bred corruption; there was no nexus between low-level quality-crimes and “real crime.” Finally, there was the idea that low-quality-of-life enforcement, especially in ethnic minority areas, was an example of being judgmental and unfair. Enforcing minor violations such as open-container drinking, illegal social clubs, and low-level drug use (marijuana) was wrong. The police needed to be more sensitive to other cultures rather than engaging in strict enforcement. And there was the recognition that enforcing low-level quality-of-life violations was labor intensive and therefore distracted police from real crime. For example, if a police officer made an arrest for violation of the marijuana law, it meant that that police officer had to come off the street and be stuck in the station house, and then in court, when he could have been more viable out in the street.
Only with a mind-set like this could five thousand police officers be laid off without a whimper. Worse still, in addition to the five thousand laid-off officers, another five thousand officers were lost through attrition over the next five years. By 1980, the NYPD had only about twenty-one thousand police officers on payroll, as opposed to the thirty-thousand officers it had had in the mid-1970s. During all of this time, I do not remember any high-ranking police official speaking out against or resigning in protest of these layoffs. They, too, had bought into the idea that cops don't matter—that crime and disorder are beyond the ability of the police to affect.
With this thinking, is it any wonder that by the end of the decade New York City had the highest crime rate in its history? The police leadership failed to understand the direct connection between low-level, quality-of-life violations and serious crimes. They didn't understand that the failure to break up and arrest a small group rolling dice on the corner could prevent a homicide later that night when the loser of the game took back his money at gunpoint. They didn't understand that not dealing with unlicensed social clubs could lead to the deaths of eighty-seven people in a fire at one of those very clubs. They didn't understand that two seemingly harmless marijuana dealers could engage in a turf battle, guns blazing, at 5:30 P.M. in Bryant Park, killing a woman who was waiting for a bus to take her home after a hard day's work.
By the summer of 1977, I had spent a full eight years in the 44th Precinct and was ready for a change. I had worked very hard making hundreds of arrests while somehow managing to earn a bachelor's degree in American history from John Jay College. I then moved on to Fordham University, where I earned a master's degree, also in American history. Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep and the lines in my face were well earned. I had given serious thought to becoming a high school history teacher and, in fact, I did some per diem teaching at Pleasantville High School in Westchester County. That experience convinced me to stay in the NYPD.
Blackout
If the 1965 blackout was a romantic dream, the 1977 blackout was a nightmare.
In June 1977, I was transferred from the 44th Precinct to the Organized Crime Control Bureau, Narcotics Division, working out of the Bronx Narcotics Office located at the 50th Precinct in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Our job was to investigate drug dealing, whether it was low level, medium level, or high level, within the borough of the Bronx. However, the fun part was that once you had initiated a case, usually with an informant, you went wherever that case took you. Early on, one of my “Bronx cases” took me to the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, where I’d spend the better part of the next two years on it and other offshoot cases.
However, a month after my assignment to Bronx Narcotics Division, we had an interruption for about a week to assist in quelling the three days of rioting that surrounded the citywide blackout in July 1977. The power went off in the city around 7:00 or 7:30 P.M., while it was still daylight. As darkness descended, so did the marauding gangs who were looking to take advantage of a vulnerable city. Within hours fires were set and looting was taking place. Brand-new cars were driven through showroom windows of dealerships along Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. Similar episodes were taking place elsewhere in the city, especially in Brooklyn.
The police commissioner, Michael