The most detrimental effect of the “steady shifts” was a loss of camaraderie. Officers on one shift literally did not know officers who worked an opposite shift. In addition, there was a loss of familiarity with the ways in which the character of a specific geographical area could vary depending on the time of day or the day of the week.
Take, for example, the 47th Precinct. This was a mainly residential precinct with a large working and middle-class African American population. There was also an Irish section in the northwest part of the precinct called Woodlawn. During the day, the precinct was a typical quiet residential area. However, at night, when people were home from work, it looked quite different. Then on the weekends, there were bars and clubs that were very active in the evening and early-morning hours. Finally, two large hospitals brought outsiders into the area either as patients or visitors. At night, the air was permeated by the sound of ambulance sirens as they raced to and from the hospital carrying shooting and stabbing victims. Depending on the time of day or the day of the week, an officer might find himself investigating a stolen trash can cover or questioning a person with multiple gunshot wounds in the hospital emergency room.
Years later, in 1994, when I was the chief of department, I was conducting roll call at the 47th Precinct. The difficulty with the steady shift was well illustrated when a very young officer informed me that he had been out of the police academy for only one year and was working a steady shift of 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., with weekends off. There were two immediate problems with this. First, the notion of a new police officer working banker's hours seemed incredible to me. In the past, a police officer would have had to have ten years under his belt before ever being considered for a steady day shift. Second, and more important, when I asked the police officer if he had ever been in the precinct at 11:00 P.M. on a Friday or Saturday night, he replied that he had not. That was an eye-opener. Here we had a police officer whose training was one dimensional. He knew only how to deal with a quiet residential precinct; his most serious encounter during the course of a shift was to issue tickets to parked cars for not obeying the alternate side parking regulations so the sanitation workers could clean the streets.
The Strike
In January 1971, a court ruled against the police union, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (PBA), in a case regarding pay and work conditions. The ruling led to an immediate wildcat strike that began in the 43rd Precinct and spread to other precincts in the Bronx and then to all of the precincts throughout the city. Police officers refused to go out on the streets for a full five days. Normally, such an action might have been effective in persuading the city to come to the bargaining table and do the right thing. Unfortunately, this strike was one of the great lessons of all time for most police officers. When things that can go wrong do go wrong, it is referred to as Murphy's Law. In the case of this police strike, another law was at work—“O'toole's Law”—which stated that Murphy was an optimist!
A few things made the 1971 strike a complete disaster and affected the way police officers would react in future labor disputes, all to the benefit of the city. First, the PBA is one of five police unions, and it represents only uniformed police officers. Another union represents detectives; another, sergeants; another, lieutenants; and another, captains and those with higher ranks. Thus, the additional four unions’ membership was available to fill in for the striking police officers. Second, uniformed police officers who were still on probation, over a thousand in all, did not have to take part in the strike or job action since they could have and would have been fired. Third, there were some police officers (a few very brave officers) whose conscience did not allow them to take part in the job action.
When we began the job action, the city reacted immediately and put all the detectives, sergeants, lieutenants, and nonparticipating police officers on twelve-hour shifts, with no days off. Under normal conditions, the 44th Precinct put on the streets about ten two-officer cars, a few foot beats, and a few special posts. During the strike, they were able to deploy about twelve sector cars and fill all the foot patrols and special posts, which meant more officers than normal were working the streets. At the same time, the temperature for that week never went above twenty degrees. Not only was there no crime, there were no people on the streets to “miss” their regular police officers.
The job action lasted five days, and we returned to work with our tails between our collective legs. But the city was not finished with us. The city invoked the New York State Taylor Law, which forbids police officers from striking. We responded that it hadn't really been a strike, since all officers had shown up for work, stood roll call, and then merely stayed in their station houses during their shifts. The city's position that it was a strike was upheld, and we were docked two days’ pay for every day we did not hit the streets. For police officers, most of whom live payday to payday, it was a hard, expensive lesson that would affect us the rest of our time on the job. For me, it was particularly hard. I was to be married a few weeks later to Noreen Carroll, whose father was a sergeant in the 28th Precinct in Harlem.
In addition to loosing two weeks’ pay, the job action caused huge friction between those officers who, out of conscience, refused to participate and those who did. There was some ugliness and some vandalism to the conscientious officers’ lockers. That ugliness remained my most significant memory and proved quite valuable when I had to handle another police “job action” in 1986, when I was the commander of the 5th Precinct in Chinatown.
Stopping the Dougie Walshes
In 1971, Patrick Murphy, the new reform police commissioner, put together a group of top police executives that included his deputy commissioner for community affairs, Benjamin Ward. The group was asked to study the issue of police use of deadly physical force, specifically when police officers discharge their weapons in the line of duty. Police shootings were the matches that lit the fuses of much of the civil unrest that occurred in city after city throughout the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s. The committee came up with a series of recommendations, which were then put into a police directive.
The directive set up the procedures for how and who would conduct an investigation whenever a police officer discharged his weapon, regardless of whether or not he wounded/killed someone, and whether or not it was intentional or accidental. The directive also listed certain situations in which an officer was forbidden from discharging his weapon. The most controversial of these new guidelines prohibited a police officer from “discharging his weapon at or from a moving vehicle, unless the occupants of the other vehicle are using deadly physical force against the officer or another person, by means other than the vehicle.” In other words, a police officer could not shoot at a vehicle that was coming toward him unless the occupants of the vehicle were using deadly physical force (shooting at the officer). If the officer felt his life was in danger from the approaching car, then he should get out of the way!
While the policy was crafted and ready to go, it was never implemented for fear of a backlash from the police union. Into the early 1970s, police officers were being gunned down in the streets on an almost regular basis. Therefore, the union would have had little problem rallying the public, press, and politicians to support their cause. Six years earlier, the police union had roundly defeated a voter referendum on the establishment of a civilian complaint review board.
It is important to note that there is never a good time to implement a controversial policy. However, implementing controversial policies after a controversy is sure to generate more controversy.
In August 1972, an eleven-year-old African American boy was shot and killed by an NYPD officer while he was fleeing a stolen car in Staten Island. The media ran with the story, and as a result, racial tensions reached a boiling point. The police commissioner directed Ben Ward to go to Staten Island to gauge the temperature of the community. Ward spent two days listening to and speaking with community residents and leaders, assuring them that an appropriate investigation would follow.
In 1985, while discussing the issue of police shootings with Ward, who was now police commissioner, he informed me that upon