THE SECRETS OF NEW YORK CITY’S POLICING SUCCESS

The Big Apple’s new top cop on how to protect citizens from both street crime and terrorism

By William McGurn

The Wall Street Journal
January 27, 2017

When James O’Neill first put on the blue uniform and gold badge of law enforcement, it was
1983, and he was a rookie with the New York City Transit Police, riding the subways from 8
p.m. until 4 a.m. Those were the bad old days of buildings encrusted in grime and graffiti, parks
and public places overrun by the homeless, and a murder rate rising relentlessly.

“In the 1980s and 1990s,” Mr. O’Neill recalls, “the police were just holding on.

New York is different today. In 1983 there were 1,622 murders in the city—and the peak was still years away. In 2016 the city reported only 335 murders, and Mr. O’Neill says total shootings
were below 1,000 for the first time in the city’s modern history.

As the journal City & State noted, New York now has “one-fifth the crime of 1990 with a million more people.” It’s not the only thing that’s changed. That rookie transit officer is now Gotham’s top cop.

On its own, the success of New York’s Finest in bringing down murder and other violent crime is a remarkable achievement. What makes it more extraordinary is how hard it seems to be for
other big cities to replicate. A month ago The Wall Street Journal released a survey that found 16
of the nation’s 20 largest police departments reported more murders in 2016 than the year before.

The city grabbing the most attention is Chicago. Other, smaller towns (Detroit, New Orleans, St.
Louis) have even higher levels of murder relative to population, but there’s good reason to focus
on the Windy City. The liberal Brennan Center for Justice reports that Chicago’s skyrocketing
murder count—762 in 2016, up from 480 in 2015—accounts for nearly half the homicide
increase in the nation’s 30 largest cities. This week President Trump focused attention on
Chicago when he threatened on Twitter to “send in the Feds” if local officials fail to address the
“horrible ‘carnage.’ ”

In a meeting Tuesday with Wall Street Journal editors, Commissioner O’Neill declined to
comment on the Chicago police. But the Windy City’s troubles go beyond the cops. For example, while in New York someone convicted of carrying a loaded firearm faces a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 3½ years, in Chicago the law gives judges more discretion, which they use to give gun offenders lighter sentences.

In 2011 Mayor Rahm Emanuel brought in an NYPD vet, Garry McCarthy, as police
superintendent. For 2014 Chicago police reported the lowest number of homicides in almost 50
years, though the total remained over 400 throughout Mr. McCarthy’s tenure and in 2012 had
swelled to more than 500. In any case, Mr. McCarthy was sacked in 2015 after a horrendous
video emerged showing a Chicago police officer firing 16 shots into a man who did not appear a
threat.

The video set off a perfect storm that has contributed to the current mayhem. The officer faces
charges of first-degree murder. On its way out the door, President Obama’s Justice Department
dropped a report accusing Chicago cops of a “pattern or practice” of unconstitutional force.
In response, Chicago cops have shied away from enforcing the law, because they fear becoming
the next face on the evening news. Mr. Emanuel said in 2015 that they had gone “fetal.” Carnage
is exactly the right word for the result. Not a month into the new year, theChicago
Tribune reports there have already been 45 homicides.

Mr. Trump is probably wrong to believe the feds have the answer. But his tweet does point to a
big question: What is the secret sauce in the NYPD’s recipe?

One big part of New York’s success is the acknowledgment that most violent crimes occur in
poor and minority areas. That means people living in those neighborhoods will have more
interactions with police, whether it’s a stop-and-frisk or an early morning raid on a neighbor’s
apartment. It also means, because of demographics, that the stops, searches and arrests will
disproportionately affect black and Latino men.

The answer is not to deny this reality, but to make extra efforts to enlist the law-abiding on the
side of the police. That’s why Ray Kelly, the NYPD commissioner under MayorMike
Bloomberg, spent almost all his Sundays in the city’s black churches.

Mr. O’Neill is building on that outreach in his own way. “After we do a takedown”—an arrest
—“we go in the next day and have a briefing with the community,” he says. “We let them know
exactly what transpired—why we came in there at 4:30 in the morning, why we took out 30
people, and what they were up to.”

It comes under the larger heading of what he calls “neighborhood policing.” For the
commissioner, it’s the next logical stage in the revolution in strategy and tactics the NYPD
kicked off in the 1990s: helping cops get better at identifying who the bad guys are, where they
live, and how to stop them before they can commit more violence. “A very small percentage of
the population,” Mr. O’Neill says, is committing most of the violent crime. Which means the key
to keeping cities safe is to figure out who they are, and focus cops and resources on them.

Bill Bratton took the first big step toward smarter policing during his first stint as New York’s
police commissioner from 1994 to 1996. Mr. Bratton introduced CompStat, a computerized
system that tracks even the smallest crimes. Over the years it has been refined with more data.
Officers constantly analyze and debate what it reveals about crime trends and how the police
should respond.

“If you talk to any of the precinct commanders,” says Mr. O’Neill, “they now know down to the
block and the house who is causing the problems and the last time they had contact with the
police.” Recent statistics, he adds, show that shootings and arrests are trending down while gun
seizures are up—suggesting that the NYPD is focusing its efforts on the right people.

In the past, the commissioner says, a new officer would graduate from the academy and be
dropped in a tough location without connections or knowledge. Though the presence of uniforms
helped drive crime down in the short term, in the long term it reduced cops to little more than
“wooden soldiers.”

Today about one-fifth of the city’s uniformed officers serve as “steady-sector cops,” meaning
they are assigned to a particular locale and expected to interact with the community. “The beauty
of neighborhood policing is that you have the same cops in the same places every day,” says Mr.
O’Neill. “So they know whether the kids coming down the street are coming home from high
school or about to sell weed or narcotics.”

Because of their roots in the neighborhood, Mr. O’Neill says, these cops “are the ones who take
it most personally” when they see, say, graffiti on the side of a school or gang markings on street
signs.

The other part of smart policing is recognizing when the facts on the ground have changed. Take
gangs. “In 2015 we found the No. 1 shooting motive was gangs,” the commissioner says. “First
time that ever happened. So we had to figure out what we were going to do about it.” The police
say gangs have also shifted their emphasis from selling drugs to stealing credit cards and other
forms of identity theft.

But it turns out the gangbangers have a weakness. “These gang members, that’s their whole life,”
says the commissioner. “They have nothing else.” Often that means bragging about their exploits
on social media, especially Facebook—which makes it easier for cops monitoring those sites to
know which bad guy is doing what.

Along with ordinary street crime, the NYPD faces a special challenge from terrorism. Whatever
else has changed since Sept. 11, 2001, New York’s attraction as a target for radical Islamists has
not diminished. Four months ago a bombing in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood wounded 31
people. In 2010 a car bomb in Times Square might have killed hundreds but failed to go off.

Since 9/11, the commissioner says, 21 terror plots on New York have been recorded—with all
but these two thwarted before anything could happen.

Terrorists themselves have changed too. The kind of attack executed on 9/11—by operatives sent
in from abroad—has yielded to homegrown terrorists who are either enabled (e.g., instructed on
techniques) or simply inspired by Islamist groups.

Again, the key to good policing is more-precise knowledge of who’s likely to act. Visitors to
radical websites may leave clues. Police say the homegrown terrorist is generally someone who
hasn’t succeeded in his career, in romance or in some other life goal.

Take Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder Boston bomber brother, who wanted to box for the U.S.
Olympic team—but could not because he was a permanent resident, not a U.S. citizen. In a
similar way, the Orlando shooter wanted to be a policeman. Young men, angry when their
dreams are thwarted, go searching for an alternative path to valor, says John Miller, the NYPD’s
deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism: “The scientific term for it is ‘loser.’ ”

But as the NYPD gets smarter, so are the Islamists. Al Qaeda has Inspire, an online, English-
language magazine that publishes instructions on bomb-making and other terror skills. Islamic
State has a similar periodical, Rumiyah.

“After the Chelsea bombing, Inspire came out with an after-action report,” Mr. Miller recalls. He
sums up its take on the bombing as “good to do in New York, good to do during U.N. General
Assembly, and good to do in Chelsea, a hot, up-and-coming neighborhood.” But the attacker was
criticized for placing the bomb in a dumpster, “because people don’t hang out by garbage cans.”

Mr. Miller is understandably troubled by such sophistication. “When you see this level of
inspiration, instruction and critique,” he says, “that’s way more useful info than we’d like to see
out there.”

Then again, nobody ever said policing a big city would be easy. The department often faces
lawsuits from groups like the New York Civil Liberties Union. Mayor Bill de Blasiocampaigned
in 2013 on an anticop line, and in December 2014, when two officers were assassinated after
days of antipolice protests, some cops turned their backs on the mayor at the hospital. Things
have since calmed down, and Mr. O’Neill says the mayor has given police the resources they’ve
asked for.

In the decades since Officer O’Neill first donned the uniform, cops have gone from tapping their
nightsticks to communicate to using smartphones for the latest crime intel in real time.
Commissioner O’Neill promises more is coming. “It’s not going to happen overnight—big ships
turn slowly—but if we stop evolving, we won’t be able to do our jobs.”