Deadly Stereotypes
During my first year in the 44th Precinct, I learned another lesson: stereotypes can fuel crime. The predominantly Jewish area of the 44th included the Grand Concourse and its surrounding streets. By 1970, the Jews who remained there were largely elderly, many of them Holocaust survivors. Unfortunately, young thugs in the area believed that “the old Jews had lots of money.” For a three-or four-year period, a number of these elderly Jews were the victims of nasty crimes, including push-in robberies, where the elderly person would be followed to his door and then pushed into his apartment, where he was then robbed and sometimes gratuitously assaulted, especially if he said he had no money. As a detective explained, “One group of thugs used to remove the shoes of their elderly victims because it was a known fact that is where they hid their money.”
The borough commander of the Bronx at the time was a two-star chief who happened to be Jewish. He devised a Borough Robbery Report mimeograph form that all reporting officers had to complete, in addition to the regular crime report, whenever a robbery was committed. The Borough Robbery Report asked for the age, race, and, more important, the religious identity of the victim. To the best of my knowledge, nobody ever asked why we were required to fill out the additional borough report. We were cops and did what we were told.
The rationale behind the Borough Robbery Report became clear one Saturday morning while I was walking my assigned foot beat along 170th Street. I received a call from the desk officer of the precinct directing me to report to the borough headquarters, which was located on the second floor of the 46th Precinct, just north of the 44th. When I arrived, I joined a group of more than a half dozen young officers who had come from the other precincts in the borough. We were there to meet with the borough commander—a two-star chief! This was unusual, to say the least.
The borough commander instructed us to go through our precincts’ Borough Robbery Reports and compile a chart, by religion, of the victims of the robberies. Once I finished the chart for the 44th Precinct, the numbers spoke for themselves: Jews had made up a disproportionate share of all robbery victims for the prior three years. From speaking with the other young officers, it was my sense that all of the precincts with significant elderly Jewish populations were similar. Once we finished, we were directed to return to our various precincts. Nothing more was said. Nothing more needed to be said. It was apparent that the Jewish two-star chief was just trying to confirm his suspicion that the old Jews around the Grand Concourse neighborhoods were disproportionately the victims of certain violent crimes.
Two years later, I was assigned to the 44th Precinct Anti-Crime Unit. This was a select group of officers in civilian clothes assigned to make robbery arrests on the streets of the South Bronx. While I was in this unit, the borough chief's suspicions were corroborated. Sometimes after we made a robbery arrest, while debriefing the prisoner, we would ask him, out of curiosity, why he had committed the crime. At times these young men would be quite honest in their rationale. The reason they targeted their victim was because he/she was Jewish and “you know the Jews have money!”
Another lesson I learned while patrolling the South Bronx was just how powerful individual police officers are and how they often don't even realize it. As a young police officer in 1969, like other young officers in the city, I was given the less desirable assignments: watching over a DOA (dead on arrival), taking an emotionally disturbed person—an EDP—to the hospital, or guarding the broken window of a store that had been burgled. Every once in a while, on the day or evening shifts, I would get to ride in a car with a partner, and it was like being a “real cop.”
However, due to personnel shortages on the overnight shift (midnight to 8:00 A.M.), I almost always got to ride in a police car with a partner. After a few months of riding on the late shift, a few things became apparent. First, after about 1:00 A.M., just one hour into the shift, the radio went dead. There were very few calls for service, and thus the next seven hours were often boring, with nothing to do. Idle hands are the devil's handiwork, my mother used to tell us. Second, one night I was riding with another young officer (he was probably the same age as me, twenty-one). Sometime during the shift he turned to me and said, “Can you believe this? Here we are, just the two of us, and WE ARE IN CHARGE. Jesus!” It was true. While there was a sergeant working with us, we rarely saw him or knew where he was at any given moment. Thus, two young men, still wet behind the ears, were in charge of a rather large geographical area. We could take a life or make an arrest or just make someone's life miserable. What power!
This notion of the power of the officers working the graveyard shift took on more sinister and damaging implications as the NYPD moved to the practice of “steady tours” of duty. As I mentioned earlier, when I first entered the NYPD, police officers assigned to police precincts worked rotating shifts, three in all, around the clock, each week a different shift. Thus, an officer never became “too comfortable” in any one shift. Clearly, however, working weekly rotating shifts was difficult, and some officers would take almost a week to recover from the graveyard shift.
In the mid-1970s, police human resources experts began to make arguments for “steady shifts,” particularly in reference to the graveyard shift. The NYPD responded by creating a “steady late shift” (graveyard shift), and a second rotating shift for 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. and four P.M. to midnight. In other words, a police officer would work one week of 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., followed by a week of 4:00 P.M. to midnight. These new working “charts” seemed to please most. Now you had individuals who worked the graveyard shift because they chose to.
However, the unintended consequences of a good idea were realized some years later as scandal after scandal erupted within the NYPD. The vast majority of times these scandals involved officers working the steady graveyard shifts. Not only did these officers have the power to do good, they also had the power to do bad. And there was plenty of time to do either, since the police radio became quiet after 1:00 or 2:00 A.M. Additionally, there was less supervision on these shifts. While sergeants and sometimes a lieutenant were assigned to these shifts, it was very unlikely that a police officer would run across a captain or other high-ranking official at 3:00 in the morning. At 3:00 in the afternoon it was, however, always possible to encounter a high-boss, even one from another precinct or headquarters unit.
With this power and lack of supervision, some of the officers on the graveyard shift began to fall into cliques. Often, they seemed to develop a Lord of the Flies mentality with their own mores and code of conduct, with informal leaders and followers. It sometimes appeared to me that these officers even looked “different” from the regular officers who worked during the daytime hours. They seemed pale and tired, either from working their second job during the daylight hours or, more likely, from spending hours sitting in a courtroom waiting for their case from the previous night to be called.
Some years later, in the mid-1980s, police human resources began to argue for “steady shifts” for all shifts. Thus, a police officer would work steady 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., or 4:00 P.M. to midnight, or midnight to 8:00 A.M. Human resources argued that such a system would be beneficial. Productivity would increase. Morale would increase. Sick time would go down. These arguments were bought hook, line, and sinker, and the “steady shifts” were implemented.
A few years later, in 1990, Inspector Mike Julian, assigned to the Research and Planning Division, conducted a short study on the benefits of these shifts. None of the supposed benefits was evident. In fact, it could be argued that the direct opposite happened. Productivity, in terms of arrests, went down. You started to find police officers who were scheduled to get off work at 4:00 P.M. going home to watch their children while their wives went to work at night. Stories were legend of police officers not getting “involved” in anything near the end of their shift (from about 2:00