In January 1984, New York City mayor Ed Koch named Ben Ward the new police commissioner, succeeding Bob Maguire, who had held the position for the prior six years. Maguire's administration had been devoted to fixing the damage done as a result of the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, when the city had gone bankrupt. Staffing levels in the department had dropped from around thirty-one thousand sworn personnel in June 1975 to just under twenty-one thousand by the end of the decade. Not surprisingly, 1980 had the highest overall crime rates in the history of the New York Police Department (NYPD). Clearly, the number of police officers matters. By the time Ben Ward took over, the staffing level was around twenty-five thousand, which was good compared to 1980 but still far from the thirty-one thousand of the early 1970s.
While Ward had also been a high-ranking official in other city agencies, his background was all cop. He started his career as a foot officer in Brooklyn during the 1950s, then became a detective, and later reached the rank of lieutenant. In 1972, Police Commissioner Pat Murphy appointed him to serve in Murphy's “reform” administration. By 1984, as he took command of the NYPD, Ben Ward had a strong résumé to lead the organization.
And lead it he did—early on. In the first months of his tenure, Ward announced a sweeping anticrime, antidrug initiative called Operation Pressure Point. This action sent hundreds of uniformed and plainclothes officers as well as detectives into the Manhattan neighborhoods of the East Village and the Lower East Side. These areas were crime infested. Residents and visitors (tourists and drug purchasers) were all equal-opportunity victims. I discovered this myself on February 12, 1978 (which happened to be my seventh wedding anniversary). I was executing a drug search warrant when I was involved in a gun battle with a local drug dealer. My partner was hit by a bullet aimed directly for his heart. His bullet-resistant vest saved his life, but he was seriously injured by the blunt trauma.
Shootouts like this and other assorted violent crimes made this neighborhood ideal for Ward's new operation. In addition, there was growing demand from the public, especially from the new urban pioneers who were beginning to gentrify the fringe neighborhoods of lower Manhattan, for the police to do something.
Operation Pressure Point was an immediate success. The quality of life in these neighborhoods dramatically improved. The open-air drug bazaars were reduced in quantity and quality, and much of the drug trade was taken indoors as opposed to the corner of Eighth Street and Avenue B, to name just one of the more notorious corners. Crime, and especially violent crime, was reduced significantly. To no one's surprise, the success of Operation Pressure Point led to calls for the Ward administration to replicate the operation in other neighborhoods.
Operation Pressure Point 2 appeared in Harlem, and by the end of 1984 it was also implemented in other neighborhoods. There was a real feeling within the NYPD that the organization was fighting crime in a serious manner. I remember a colleague, Mike Tiffany, remarking that Police Commissioner Ward was the first commissioner since we had joined the NYPD (in the late 1960s) to make fighting crime our number one priority. It was true, and it felt good.
By the third year of his administration, Ben Ward and his team were on top of the world. Ward's chief of department, Robert J. Johnston Jr., was the four-star chief responsible for all day-to-day operations. Johnston was not only in charge but he looked like he was in charge. A silver-haired, barrel-chested man, Johnston began to epitomize the NYPD—a no-nonsense, take-charge organization. Behind the scenes, the day-to-day running of the huge bureaucracy fell to Patrick Murphy, the first deputy commissioner. Murphy was a kind, self-effacing man with a wealth of experience and brains to match. He had been the four-star chief of department under Bob Maguire but had been elevated to the number two position by Ben Ward.
While Ward and his team had great success in fighting crime, they also dealt in a serious fashion with other issues facing the department, especially use of deadly physical force and dealing with emotionally disturbed people.
But policing is a very volatile business. Things go wrong all the time. It's the nature of the business. In mid-1986, a police corruption scandal exploded in the newspapers. It was known as the “77th Precinct Scandal,” and the tabloids, led by Newsday columnist Mike McAlary and New York magazine's Michael Daly, told stories of drug rip-offs by cops and other crimes by police officers in full uniform. How could this happen? Where were the bosses? What was the top command at One Police Plaza doing? Who would be held accountable? Didn't Internal Affairs see the dots they should have connected? Headquarters, quite literally, was under siege. Something had to give. Heads had to roll. Things had to change.
As this scandal erupted I was a young captain assigned as the commanding officer of the 5th Precinct in Chinatown. The 5th Precinct was one of ten precincts in Patrol Borough Manhattan South, which encompassed everything south of Fifty-ninth Street in Manhattan. The commanding officer of Manhattan South was a two-star, Assistant Chief Gerry Kerins. Kerins was a respected NYPD veteran with a great sense of humor and tremendous streets smarts and experience. He was also a veteran of World War II, having served his time in the South Pacific. He despised lawyers and often said that had he known at the end of the big war that one day the NYPD would be run by and controlled by lawyers, he would have stayed in the South Pacific.
Kerins and his fellow one-star, two-star, and three-star chiefs were all summoned to One Police Plaza for a tongue-lashing by the top bosses for allowing the scandal to erupt. The session lasted over an hour and was one of those “career-threatening” sessions. The message to the attending chiefs was simple and clear: Get back to your commands and make sure your captains understand that this shit is serious and that careers will be made or broken depending on how it is handled.
When Chief Kerins got back to his office, he summoned all his captains and inspectors to his conference room. “Gentlemen,” he began, “I have just returned from a session with the Divine Trinity [the police commissioner, first deputy commissioner, and chief of department]. They are like cornered rats ready to strike out at anything or anyone that causes them problems. They are serious and they are scared. They think their jobs are in jeopardy. And if their jobs are in jeopardy, your job is in jeopardy! We need to make sure our corruption skirts are clean and that we have the proper integrity programs in place. In case you all forgot, CORRUPTION is your number one priority! Finally, gentlemen, the commissioner reminded us that neither a political administration nor a police administration has ever been taken out as a result of a rise in crime. However, a corruption scandal can take out both!”
After the meeting we all knew that corruption would once again become the top priority for everyone in the NYPD. Careers would be made and broken on how the individual midlevel and senior officers dealt with it. I think we all knew that with corruption now the number one priority, our gains in fighting crime would wane.
It didn't take long. With the advent of the crack epidemic and the loss of our focus, crime rose, and for the remainder of the decade, it rose dramatically each successive year. By 1990, New York City reported its highest homicide rate in its history, with 2,245 people killed. To put those statistics in context, let's compare them with the sectarian killing in Northern Ireland. “The Troubles” began in 1969; by 1990, some 3,000 people had been killed. In twenty-one years of sectarian violence a total of 3,000 were killed, while New York City came close to matching those numbers in one year, 1990.
The final irony was that while police corruption was now the number one priority, that didn't mean there would be no more corruption. In fact, corruption continued, and a series of scandals in the early 1990s resulted in the new mayor, David Dinkins, establishing another commission to investigate police corruption—the Mollen Commission (after Judge Milton Mollen, the commission's chairman). This followed New York City's familiar pattern of establishing such a corruption panel every twenty years or so.
The Mollen Commission, like those before it, conducted its investigations, held its very public hearings, assembled its self-congratulatory press conferences announcing this or that arrest, made its predictable recommendations in voluminous detail, and facilitated the future careers of the commission staff. Everyone won. The politicians could feel good because they had “finally” dealt a deathblow to police corruption. The press gloated over its role in “uncovering” police corruption and exposing it to the public. The commission and its supporters took