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Feeling Scorn on the Beat and Pressure From Above
December 26, 2000
In each of these places, and across every rank, the darkened mood of the New York Police Department has become obvious. The isolated dissatisfactions that were once just muttered have now swelled into a growl of discontent. "Everybody was disheartened," said Officer Peter Maher, recalling what it was like in Manhattan's 34th Precinct before he quit the force four months ago. He disregarded a pending promotion to sergeant last August to take another police job, in Rockland County. "Every day in the papers, people were bashing the cops. It became very hard to do your job." In the annals of the Police Department, low morale is a problem that predates the patrol car. But officers and senior supervisors in commands across the city say they have seldom seen it worse. In dozens of interviews over the last several months, they described a dispirited force that has watched hundreds of colleagues flee in recent months, retiring to take on second careers or quitting in disgust long before they qualify for a full pension. For patrol officers, much of the disenchantment grows from a painful irony: many of them believe the same aggressive crackdowns that drastically cut crime and earned them accolades were stretched too far, that the push to punish infractions of every variety undercut their discretion and made them feel unpopular, even despised, in neighborhoods they helped make safer. For many senior officers, the unceasing, sometimes exhausting pressure to produce ever-impressive declines in crime has also given success a sour taste. Some say they have left crime-fighting strategy sessions furious about slights they received from supervisors who dismissed yesterday's achievements as old news. And pay has become an enormous sore point. Officers who were once among the highest paid police in the country now earn less than their counterparts in Bridgeport, Conn., or Newark. The most pressing concern about the slumping morale is that it has exacerbated the personnel crisis the 41,000-member department is facing, even as it enjoys remarkable success in cutting crime. Retirements are up 60 percent this year, and although there are a number of reasons for the surge, low morale has clearly been a key one. Similarly, union officials say the department's difficulty in recruiting this year, when it was unable to fill a Police Academy class for the first time in memory, was affected by the fact that so many officers are now reluctant to recommend the job. Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik, who has been in the job four months, has said that improving morale is one of his primary goals. But he says the problem is often overstated. Morale was much worse, he said, during the Dinkins administration. Mr. Kerik, who was an officer at the time, said many officers a decade ago felt that they were not truly empowered to fight crime. He recalled being scolded by superiors, for example, after arresting a man who had dropped a bag of marijuana right in front of him. Only narcotics officers, he was told, were supposed to make such arrests. "You want to talk about devastating morale," he said. "That's devastating morale." But while he insists the problem of morale is a modest one, Mr. Kerik has been concerned about it enough to have taken several steps to deal with it, steps both ceremonial and concrete. He has held informal dinners with officers and made impromptu visits to station houses where he has tried to impress on officers that he remembers the perils and annoyances of the job. He has made the renovation of decrepit station houses a priority and is credited with relaxing the bureaucracy that has held up many transfers. "Morale is on the rise," he said. "I think it is doing good. I think it could do better." Measuring morale is a tricky business, in part because when police labor leaders are in the midst of contract negotiations, as they are now, they often strategically highlight discontent. Beyond that, grousing about the job has long been a kind of practiced staple of New York police culture. And there are events on the police calendar, celebratory days when white-gloved officers about to be promoted are showered with applause from family and friends, when officers say the job still seems like a noble adventure. But veteran officers say the mood has been growing bleaker for several years, beginning with a 1995 labor contract that included a two-year wage freeze and continuing through the public scrutiny of police practices that followed the torture of Abner Louima and the shooting of Amadou Diallo. However imprecise, or even nostalgic, these impressions are, they are bolstered by statistics that lend some weight to the view that police morale has sunk. If not for Operation Condor, an overtime initiative that has paid officers an extra $100 million this year to work a sixth day, arrests would be down 15 percent this year compared to last. Several commanders said they viewed the statistic as an indication that some demoralized officers on the street have become less productive. The number of lieutenants taking the captain's test has dropped precipitously, a development union officials cite as evidence that supervisors are avoiding the pressures of senior command. In 1990, 80 percent of the lieutenants took the test. Last year, only 54 percent of the 1,635 lieutenants took the test. But police officials said they were unconvinced. The clearest measure of police productivity, they said, is the crime rate, and that has continued to drop — by 6 percent this year. "The people who want to be a cop, the good cops out there," said Mr. Kerik, "they could have contract issues, the negativity with the community, but when the radio blares and somebody is in trouble, or there is a fire, or there is something going on, those guys are going." The
Pressure It is an idea so successful that it has been exported to police departments around the world: the Compstat meeting, at which commanders are grilled about crime in their jurisdictions before a dais of bosses in Police Headquarters. To its many admirers, Compstat, with its use of computers to map crime patterns and rates, has been pivotal to the reduction in crime since its introduction at the start of the Giuliani administration. They say it gave commanders a chance to exchange ideas on strategy and created a culture of accountability in which supervisors who achieved the best numbers were rewarded. But many commanders say Compstat evolved into an often humiliating experience that seemed more like hazing than brainstorming. Supervisors say they have been screamed at, or picked apart about details in crime patterns they could not possibly remember. Some have lost their commands. And even those who have succeeded say they get flustered because, as crime has slowed to a trickle, they are unsure how they can possibly get it down further. "Initially, when it started, it worked well," one Bronx commander said of Compstat. "It woke everybody up. Now they are out of their minds. It's ugly." Sgt. Michael McNally of the 44th Precinct in the Bronx quit the force in September, in part because he said the demands had become unreasonable. "With the bosses, there was such a pressure to produce that it made the job almost inhumane," he said. "They want you to treat the public with respect, which most cops did. But respect didn't come from the top down." Mr. Kerik said he was trying to improve the relationship between bosses and subordinates by emphasizing the need to treat officers with professional respect. But union officials said some veteran officers are so put off by the pressure of command now that they are doing what once would have been virtually unthinkable, avoiding promotions. A lieutenant in the Transit Division said he avoided moving to the Patrol Division, which is a higher-profile unit of the department, because lieutenants there are more closely questioned at Compstat. "I didn't want to have to get dragged down and get slapped around," he said. And in the department's detective division, veteran investigators said the risk of failing to meet unrealistic demands for reducing crime ever further felt so great that many qualified detectives no longer fought for the jobs of heading precinct squads. As a result, squads are increasingly supervised by officers from the Patrol Division, who have less investigative experience. Police officials deny any problems in attracting candidates for promotion. They said fewer lieutenants were taking the captain's test because of their overtime earnings, which are unavailable to captains. Union officials disagreed. "The overtime for lieutenants has always existed," said John Driscoll, president of the Captains Endowment Association, which represents many supervisory officers. "So why didn't this happen years ago? The answer is that back then captains were not getting treated so terribly." The
Derision When recruits talk about why they chose a police career, they often say they did it to help people. And the officers who have reclaimed many of the crime-ridden streets of New York say they feel sure they have helped people immeasurably. But many also say they are disliked on the very streets they helped reclaim. Sometimes, the resentment can seem raw and familiar. "More people come forward now and yell when you are arresting somebody," said a Bronx officer who spent several years in the 41st Precinct. "They say the arrest was race generated, that `If that was a white boy, would he be going to jail?' Or they say, `Don't torture him. Don't do to him what you did to Diallo and Louima.' I'd say once a week you hear one of their names." When officers describe why they feel unappreciated, the news media is usually identified as a culprit. Reporters undermined public support for the police, they say, by portraying isolated incidents of brutality as the norm. Many officers also believe politicians have used incidents of misconduct or misjudgment in sensational ways to inflame the public's opinion of the police, particularly among the city's minority residents. But many also blame a department that they say went overboard in its enforcement efforts, worrying too much about minor offenses and summons totals and too little about public sentiment in the neighborhoods they patrol. From 1991 through 1999, the number of felony arrests fell by 17 percent, in large part because serious crimes dwindled. During the same period, the number of misdemeanor arrests rose by 64 percent. This year, marijuana-related arrests have increased by 39 percent and Criminal Court summonses for offenses like public drinking and loitering are up 16 percent. Many officers say they were forced to pursue quality-of-life offenses with such vigor that it made their efforts seem petty or discriminatory. One officer recalled how depressed a colleague was after returning from an assignment in Jackson Heights, Queens, in which he was directed to give out tickets to men drinking beer on their stoops after work. "These guys were outside again because we made it safe," the officer said. "They're thrilled the cops are here, and now you're walking up and giving them a summons." And that recollection, variations of which were echoed repeatedly in conversations with officers over the last several months, captures one of the greatest frustrations felt by officers. Officers say that to feel estranged from and deeply mistrusted by the very people they made safe denies them one of the job's greatest satisfactions. Even Louis Anemone, a former chief of department who was seen by many officers as an unrelenting taskmaster, said he believed the core mission of catching serious felons got lost at times in the pursuit of productivity. He cited an initiative in Brooklyn in 1998 to stop ride-by shootings by men on bicycles. Bicycle check points were set up where, on the pretense of issuing safety summonses, officers were able to seize illegal guns. Soon, however, the program was exported to other precincts where, Mr. Anemone said, it evolved into largely a bicycle summons program, and was tarred as a petty way to ticket people for riding bicycles that lacked bells. "Never, ever, was this supposed to be about numbers," Mr. Anemone said. Mr. Kerik acknowledged that many officers believed many New Yorkers, especially blacks and Latinos, did not like them. He called it a huge misconception he was trying to correct. "I have been in those communities," he said. "I have talked to those community councils and sat with the civic boards and community boards, and the first thing they ask for is more cops." But Mr. Kerik defended the wisdom of pushing for higher numbers, and called quality-of-life enforcement effective. At the same time, he said, the department needs to adjust when a crime pattern ebbs and relocates. At some point, he said, the question arises: "Why now are we hassling people with bikes without bells? It's time to move on." The
Paycheck Many officers and commanders say the city could solve a giant chunk of its morale problem by raising pay. The starting salary for New York officers, $31,305, now lags behind that paid in many cities, and pay is one of the largest obstacles to attracting recruits. And the importance of using pay to stem the exodus from the department can hardly be understated when a quarter of the force will become eligible for retirement over the next five years. Many officers speak with bitterness about their salaries, in part because they say their standard of living fell even as their workload and accomplishments rose. To illustrate, one lieutenant recalled a night two years ago, soon after he had returned to patrol duties in Queens from a desk job. A report came over the radio, he said, announcing that intruders had just fled a home they had invaded. "In the old days," the lieutenant said, "we used to go out, take the report and broadcast the description." This time, he said, all units were given detailed instructions and they responded like a well-oiled machine to capture the suspects. Several patrol cars responded immediately. Others rushed to prearranged locations on the neighborhood's perimeter to begin searching cars for possible suspects. The precinct then revised its patrol pattern to put still more cars in areas the invaders were expected to drive through. "It was like a modern police department," the lieutenant said. "It was modern in everything but pay." Mr. Kerik has repeatedly said he supports a raise. But contract negotiations are stalled, and the figure the mayor has mentioned as a possible yearly raise, 2.5 percent, is about a tenth of what the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association is demanding. In recent days, city officials have said labor unions will have to scale back their expectations because the city is facing a budget deficit in the coming fiscal year. It is not clear, however, that the city's financial rationale means much to officers, for whom pay has become an emotional issue. Officer Raymond Menell said he quit the department last month after 21 years because he came to view his take-home pay of about $660 a week as an insult. He had suffered a heart attack 10 years ago, but decided against filing for a disability pension and an easier life because, he said: "I love the Police Department. I love being a cop." But he never got over the sting of the last police contract, in which officers did not receive a raise in two of the pact's five years. "We
did what we were told to do," he said, "and to give
us zeros, that was a slap in the face." |
he
problem is apparent at retirement parties in catering halls and
the back rooms of bars, where New York City police officers toast
the good fortune of their departing colleagues. Or at Police
Headquarters, where officers openly proclaim their bitterness
toward the job in elevators crowded with bosses. Or in decaying
station houses, where supervisors program desktop computers to
measure their time left to retirement, down to the minute.
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