The irony was that the policy had actually been developed in 1971, a full year prior to the shooting. But because the top brass feared that then was not the right time to institute the policy, they sat on it, waiting for the right time to arrive. There is almost never a right time to institute radical policy change: you just institute it. However, there can always be a wrong time—such as immediately following the shooting of an eleven-year-old boy. In situations like that, people are invariably going to allow their own ideas and prejudices to influence their opinion of the change.
The development and implementation of the deadly physical force policy has two final lessons: First, if you've taken the time to study and discuss a new, radical policy change then decide not to implement it, that needs to be explained. Second, when you implement radical policy change without explanation and rationale, do not be surprised if the recipients of that information (police officers, the public, and the press) all come to entirely different conclusions concerning that policy.
Many in the black community felt that the policy would help reduce the number of African Americans killed by police; many in the white community felt that the police department was succumbing to community pressure and jeopardizing the safety of its officers. The media, depending upon their political leaning, came up with their own understanding of the policy.
The “don't shoot at a vehicle” part of the new directive was discussed ad nauseam among the officers in the 44th Precinct. The one thing we all agreed upon was that the cause of the policy was Dougie Walsh. Dougie had a habit of shooting at cars that drove toward him. Also at cars that drove away from him. What we didn't realize is that every precinct in the city had a Dougie Walsh who shot at cars on a pretty regular basis.
The other much-discussed part of the directive dealt with forbidding officers to shoot at fleeing felons. The wisdom of this particular section was upheld in 1985 when the Supreme Court of the United States, in the landmark decision Garner v. Tennessee, forbade shooting at unarmed fleeing felons. The court justices used the NYPD policy as part of their legal rationale.
I did not appreciate how effective the policy was until the early 1980s, when I was assigned as a young lieutenant to the Chief of Operations Office at police headquarters. In l983, there was a series of congressional hearings on police brutality regarding deadly shootings by members of the NYPD. The hearings were racially charged, and my boss, the chief of operations, asked me to do some research on the recent history of police shootings in the city. When I looked at the numbers, they were startling, especially the effect of the deadly physical force directive that was sent out in August 1972.
In 1971, the last year before the firearms directive was issued, the NYPD recorded more than eight hundred incidents of a police officer discharging his weapon, whether a person was wounded/killed or not, whether the discharge was intentional or accidental. Ninety to one hundred people were killed as a result of police bullets.
The firearms discharges for the first eight months of 1972 (about two-thirds of the year) look similar to the numbers for 1971. However, when you track the firearms discharge numbers for the last four months of 1972 (after the directive was implemented), there is an immediate and dramatic decline of somewhere around 40 percent. For 1973, the first full year of the firearms directive, overall shootings were reduced to between five hundred and six hundred, with about sixty-six civilians killed as a result.
Over the next thirty-five years, the shooting numbers continued to decline to the point where the number of civilians killed by police officers is around 12 per year and the number of overall shootings has dropped to fewer than 150. The bottom line is that when an organization produces a good, sound policy on a critical matter—in this case, deadly physical force—and combines the policy with other changes such as training, the results can be remarkable.
I am sure there are some who would argue that the restrictive shooting policy implemented by the NYPD was specific to New York City and that the policy may not work in other police departments. Some years later, I would get to test that theory as the commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department and later still as the chief of the Miami Police Department. The policy worked as intended; it reduced police shootings and killings dramatically.
Fourth Platoon
When the new shooting policy hit the streets, I was a member of the 44th Precinct's Fourth Platoon. The Fourth Platoon was started two years earlier as an effort to address the increase in violent crime in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Up until that point, police officers worked three rotating platoons: 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., 4:00 P.M. to midnight, and midnight to 8:00 A.M. (the “late tour”). There were equal numbers of officers in all three platoons, so the same number of officers were on at 2:00 in the afternoon as were on at 2:00 in the morning, even though the workload and demand for police service was completely different at those two times.
The Fourth Platoon consisted of about forty volunteers from the three rotating shifts. This platoon worked from 6:00 P.M. to 2:00 A.M., as an overlap shift, to get additional police officers on the street during the peak crime hours. On the first day of the Fourth Platoon, TV cameras showed up at precincts throughout the city to film the roll calls to great fanfare and public interest. The Fourth Platoon was going to be the silver bullet that drove down crime and assuaged people's fears. How many times over the next thirty years did I participate in unveiling new anticrime initiatives that were hailed as the silver bullet to end this or start that? The reality is that in policing there is no silver bullet. What is required to reduce crime is hard work and creative thinking.
In any event, after joining the Fourth Platoon it became clear to me that while we looked very good in uniform out on the streets, I was not so sure we were very effective as “crime fighters.” Twenty to thirty of us would attend roll call, get our assignments, and then drive our private cars to our foot beat, sometimes as far as a mile away from the precinct. (By the way, riding in a private vehicle while in uniform was a violation of the NYPD's policy and procedures that everyone engaged in.) There were no handheld, portable radios at that time, so you walked your beat and checked in with the station once an hour using the police call box at your post. For example, I was given patrol post 27, with a ten ring and a 2100 meal. That meant I walked 170th Street from Jerome Avenue to the Grand Concourse. I would ring the station house at ten past every hour. And at nine o’clock (2100 hours, military time), I would take a meal. You were expected to be on your post for the entire eight hours (except during the meal period). However, your supervising sergeant would let you know when he would be coming around to see you. He would say, “Timoney, I'll give you a ‘see’ at 8:30 P.M., so you had better be on your post.”
Since there were no portable radios, the only crime you could fight was what you saw in front of you or what a resident of the neighborhood brought to your attention. I often found myself noticing three or four police cars (which were equipped with radios) speeding past with sirens blaring and lights flashing, responding to a robbery in progress at, say, 169th Street and Walton Avenue, one block from my post. But it could have been thirty blocks since there was no communication. Nonetheless, the appearance of police officers in uniform on foot had a greatly reassuring effect on the general public.
The lack of portable radios and the danger that entailed became quite evident in 1970 and 1971 when a number of police officers were shot and killed by members of the Black Liberation Army (BLA). The BLA was determined to overthrow the government of the United States and used the killing of police officers as a means to its end. As a result of these shootings, the police department rushed to acquire portable, handheld radios, and within a year or so they became part of our daily equipment. Although the 44th