Bill Bratton and compstat. The effective use of computers by the police is changing the face of our cities. A potential Pulitzer prize article in today's NYT.
August 8, 2004
THE PRECINCT | LIFE IN THE FIFTH
Policing a City Where Streets Are Less Mean
By MICHAEL WILSON
The little fish are dried and laid out flat and look more like bookmarks than creatures that once swam in water, just another in a galaxy of species on the sidewalks of Chinatown that the police lieutenant - a neighborhood girl back when the girls were all Parisis and Ciprianos and Russos - cannot identify by name or purpose.
"Who's in charge here?" she bellows, deep-voiced, into the store. Curious passers-by join the crowd on the corner of Mott and Grand Streets. She couldn't care less if the fish are dead or still flapping or an endangered species or made of uranium: they are stacked on the sidewalk without a permit, and this store has been warned before.
"You don't want to listen?" the lieutenant, Carolyn Fanale, hollers at a man inside. "This is what happens." She sweeps her hand through the air toward the rows of fish and bark and mushrooms hard as stones. "Gone!" She calls over her radio for more officers and a van to cart the stuff off. An old lady pauses near a box. "Touch anything, you'll be arrested for obstruction," Lieutenant Fanale warns. The lady takes off.
Most striking about this scene is not that such friction exists between city and shopkeeper over sidewalk space, or that language and cultural barriers remain so impenetrable between the police and the policed in 21st-century Manhattan, or that a sizable chunk of a store's inventory can be seized so swiftly.
Look at the police officer, or more precisely, her rank. Ten years ago, a lieutenant would have been scoffed at or reprimanded for going door to door on Mott Street in search of unlicensed produce vendors, knockoff purses and kebab carts parked too close to the curb: "Don't you have something better to do? Shouldn't you be out catching bad guys?''
But this is the job in one Manhattan precinct, 10 years after crime in the city began its precipitous drop. All but gone are the chalk outlines, the cooling bodies draped in plastic. The command to "move along, folks, nothing to see here" has taken on a new meaning: there truly is nothing to see. Instead, police officers pursue a variety of tasks that just a decade ago, when 2,000 New Yorkers were killed each year, would have seemed unimaginably minor. The drop in crime has reshaped the face of policing in ways small and large, obvious and surprising.
At the heart of the changes is Compstat, a means of statistically analyzing where and when crimes are occurring, a new philosophy that transformed crime-fighting in 1994 and is, today, as deeply embedded in the identity of the Police Department as its badges. Compstat is the boss who never goes home, never takes a day off. Compstat decides when officers sleep. A little spike in a precinct's numbers sends squads of officers to the night shift.
"Compstat's like religion," Lieutenant Fanale says. "It's a really, really good idea, like religion. But you get people involved, and it gets all screwed up."
To spend months with the men and women of the Fifth Precinct is to see how Compstat and the changes it has wrought have altered the lives of those who protect the city. But it is also to see something more: How even amid this radical reshaping, the world of the policeman and the policewoman remains uniquely insular, a family of eccentrics and characters moving through the corridors of an ancient building and the crowded, narrow streets surrounding it.
There is affection and teasing, celebration and disappointment, resentment and frustration. Personal lives are open and exposed. Here is Lieutenant Fanale's dream of a new baby; an officer's wait for a promotion; a rookie's first assignment, all unfolding in a fast-moving montage of crowds and tourists in the roiling heart of downtown Manhattan.
The Station House
The Fifth Precinct: Houston Street down to the Brooklyn Bridge, from Broadway over past the Bowery, to Allen. Chinatown, the courthouses, Little Italy, slivers of SoHo and the Lower East Side. When the station house, the city's oldest, was built on Elizabeth Street, in 1881, it was just a block or so north of the teeming Five Points, a motley intersection of streets that spread out like Bill the Butcher's fingers in the 2002 film "Gangs of New York." In the movie, to convey the menace of the place, he clamped that open hand into a tight fist.
Today, that hand would be getting a manicure on Spring Street, or offering menus to passing tourists on Mulberry, or clipping the velvet rope back in place behind long legs scooting on Manolo Blahniks into the nightclub Blvd for a glimpse of the guy who won "The Apprentice."
The precinct is home to 57,199 people and is roughly 66 percent Asian, according to the 2000 census, up almost 11 percent from 1990, and 16 percent white, down almost 9 percent. Chinatown versus Little Italy, Chinatown winning.
Chinatown: an island within an island, where blocks stretch without a word of English heard or seen. Like the Italians before them, its population has a historical wariness of the authorities here, and residents, especially the elderly, are notorious for not reporting crimes, the police officers say.
The week's crime log reads like the police blotter in a country newspaper: "States she was having drinks at the bar with her purse at her feet. She reached for it to get her sweater and noticed it was gone." Officer feels something bounce off his chest and observes marijuana cigarette, tossed from window of vehicle stuck in traffic. Teenage boys steal Yu-Gi-Oh! cards - Pokémon-type prints of cartoon characters that are worth some money - from Asian children.
To be sure, there are many precincts with more crimes, and several with even fewer; and the Fifth Precinct has enjoyed the same wave of prosperity that has changed the city as much as any crime-fighting tool. But the Fifth is more typical than not.
Like the officers in all precincts, those in the Fifth are constantly reminded to watch out for suspicious behavior in the post-9/11 world. Since the terror alert last week, officers from other precincts have been called to Canal Street, a Lower Manhattan traffic artery. An officer is always posted at the Brooklyn Bridge, although that post is kept far busier by people trying to jump off than by those trying to knock it down.
Inside, the station house has changed remarkably little. They used to keep the corpses in a white-tiled room in the back. Now the room holds office supplies. The men and women who arrive in handcuffs face the duty officer across a tall wooden desk older than their grandparents. Beneath their shuffling feet, the floor creaks.
There are a handful of computers on the first floor. Some even work. "Do not use computer," warns a sticky note on one. "Has a virus." When someone discovered that one officer had a personal Web page, his photograph was printed dozens of times on adhesive paper and stuck all over the station house, and then all over the precinct, on stop signs, on deli walls.
Two captains, 7 lieutenants, 19 sergeants, 6 detectives, and 123 officers, about one in five of them a woman. There are three shifts: days, evenings and midnights. Within those shifts, more shifts. The officers on the peddler squad know the labyrinth of codes determining who can sell what, where. The "midnight conditions," or cabaret officers, spend most of their energies answering the inevitable noise complaints of a city that sleeps on top of its bars and restaurants.
Anticrime officers wear baggy Starter jerseys that hang low over the guns and radios. They patrol in a police car disguised as a taxicab, complete with the number and light on top. It does not pass close scrutiny - two white guys, both riding up front? - but people still flag it.
No one will admit to a quota, but everyone is expected to make one arrest per quarter, four a year.
Years ago, somebody moved the door to the precinct commander's office on the first floor a few feet to the right, creating a little alcove, to eliminate the clear shot of a potential assassin. Inside the room, before a working gas fireplace and a framed law degree, is Capt. William Matusiak.
The Boss
Violent crime in the precinct has dropped 70 percent since 1993, the first year recorded by the Compstat system. It is Captain Matusiak's job to keep that number down, and make it even lower. He is the precinct's 23rd commanding officer since 1969, when its official liaison to the Asian community, Shuck Seid, 78, began keeping track.
Across from Captain Matusiak's desk is the wipe-off board of the week's crimes, a more important view of the precinct than a picture window twice its size: assault, robbery, grand larceny, auto theft, burglary, rape and murder. The last two are less frequent than parades. This year's only killing so far was on Jan. 17. Xiang Ving Jiang was shot to death on East Broadway. At this time in 1994, there were nine.
The captain, 41, has a reserved parking spot out front and lives 52 miles away, in northern Westchester. Sometimes he sacks out in a little bed in the office. He puffs a cigar and looks at a little spike of seven grand larcenies, defined as thefts of goods worth more than $1,000. "No good," he says. "No good." For a break, he stands on the station's front steps, watching police officers come and go.
He was No. 2, the executive officer, in the Sixth Precinct in the West Village and in the Ninth Precinct in the East Village. This is his first precinct command, a position seen as a rung for up-and-comers, keeping the shine on a little facet of the crown jewel of the New York City Police Department's boroughs: Manhattan South.
He drives through the precinct. A homeless man is slouched on the sidewalk. "Look at this guy," the captain says, and flags down an officer on a scooter. "Do me a favor. Move that guy, the bag guy," he says.
"We move him, and he just comes back someplace else," the uniform replies.
Captain Matusiak drives off, only to see another derelict man pushing several carts up the Bowery. "Look at this guy."
He thinks about what it must have been like to be the commanding officer of the precinct when he became a beat officer 20 years ago: "It would have been a much nicer job. They worried about crime, but they didn't worry about crime like I worry about crime. They worried about summonses, corruption. They weren't so focused on reducing crime. That's something Compstat did. I mean, don't get me wrong. It's a good thing, but it's an odd thing."
"I was on vacation last week. I was on the phone for hours, worrying about every complaint report," he says. "I guess I'm still going through that insecurity. Am I worthy? Am I doing enough?"
Sometimes, he has to put a man somewhere, like one night in April, when he sent Nicky Lau to the Café Habana on Prince Street. The bartender handed a Corona to Mr. Lau, who set it on the bar without taking a sip and stepped outside. Mr. Lau, a police cadet in a precinct in Queens, is 18.
An unmarked sedan pulled up, and Lieutenant Fanale called the bartender outside to issue a summons.
Under-age-drinking operations are not unusual in a precinct stacked with bars, nightclubs and dives. But in this instance, Captain Matusiak was not particularly worried about teenagers drinking at Habana. He wanted the owner's full attention.
Here is the problem: The cafe gets crowded. Women hang purses on the backs of their chairs. In the cramped space, the purses are stolen. The women file police reports. The thefts are automatic grand larcenies whenever credit cards are taken. The grand larcenies are recorded in the week's Compstat tally, and if that list is too long, the precinct commander is called to 1 Police Plaza for a grilling and a scolding. Too many scoldings, and a precinct commander finds himself assigned someplace else.
A few days after Mr. Lau ordered his beer, the cafe's owner showed up at the station house and sat across the desk from Captain Matusiak. The owner was worried; the captain consoled him.
"Last night was, I'm sure, a one-shot deal," Captain Matusiak said before getting to the point: "You've got to help us out with the unattended property. We're getting killed at your place."
There has not been a purse reported stolen since.
Once a month, people who live or work in the precinct are invited to the station house to speak up about their problems or concerns. At the April community meeting, for example, a woman raised her hand toward the end with a complaint. An ice cream truck passed - and often stopped - in front of her apartment building every day, playing its song at high volume. She had written down the truck's license plate number.
Before Captain Matusiak could answer, a second woman raised her hand and said that as a matter of fact, she had the same problem, and had also written down the license number, but it was a different truck.
A uniformed officer stepped forward and said: "I took care of him today. You won't have a problem with him anymore. You have a problem, you call me personally. I'll take care of it."
Afterward, disbelief spread quickly among the officers. "Crime's been down," said Sgt. Sean Looney, a community affairs officer, "but the other complaints haven't gone anywhere. It used to be, 'Hey, there's guys with guns going to shoot them off,' and now it's Mister Softee playing his music."
Ten years ago, someone complaining about ice cream trucks would have been laughed out of the room. Ten years ago, an officer who promised to take care of it would have been marked for life, still hearing about it at his retirement party: Hey, Officer Ice Cream.
Police officers sat around after the meeting. Maytag repairmen in bulletproof vests.
One asked, "What's the world coming to?"
And another answered, "We've got to bring crime back."
The Floor Manager
If Captain Matusiak is like the C.E.O. of a small business, then his floor manager is Lieutenant Fanale, with three years in the precinct, and a lifetime. She was just months old when she was whisked home to Elizabeth Street 40 years ago after she was adopted in what she calls, proudly, a "borderline black-marketish" exchange of healthy baby and dead presidents in the Bronx. Her grandparents sold fruit from carts in this neighborhood.
"What surprises me is that the city has prospered so much that it's not the violent crimes that are happening in excess," she says.
Lieutenant Fanale is a lesbian, and she likes provoking the red-cheeked Irish rookies who arrive in the spring. Out of earshot of the other officers, she says: "I'm so out in this job. That's the greatest part of this job. I'm free to be me, and that makes me a better person, a better boss."
Her personal life has never been more on display than right now: Everyone in the precinct knows that Lieutenant Fanale is trying to become a mother.
In March, she began her latest round of hormone therapy to stimulate egg production, so that some eggs may be extracted, impregnated with sperm from a bank in California, and placed into her uterus. The last time, the embryos did not survive. Before that, six attempts at artificial insemination failed.
The lieutenant's latest on-the-job headache is an older woman who lives on Grand and Mott Streets, her window looking down on a congested corner. She regularly calls and writes to complain about the street peddlers selling compact discs or jewelry or fruit or soup without permits - so many that some sidewalks are practically impassable - and claims that the Fifth Precinct looks the other way.
"I'm not going to arrest an 80-year-old woman for selling bras on Mott Street," Lieutenant Fanale says. "I'm not going to be the next one on the cover of The Daily News, writing a summons for sitting on a milk crate." She explained this to the woman. "You know what she said to me? 'I'll support you.' "
Minutes later, the lieutenant is rampaging down Mott Street, shouting over an open cardboard box of frozen fish for sale on the sidewalk without a permit. "You don't speak English?" she shouts at the proprietor. "O.K., then I'll stop talking." She lifts the heavy box of ice and seafood and hurls it into the store. Sales girls jump. "Do you understand what 'inside' means now?"
Were her grandparents selling their fruit today, she would have to chase them off.
Late one night, Lieutenant Fanale sits in the passenger seat of her unmarked car, waiting for the undercover cadet to enter a pool hall that is not supposed to be selling alcohol, but may be anyway. Beside her is Officer Jacqueline Peters, her driver and friend since the lieutenant arrived in the Fifth. "I wish Sonny would get here with my shots," the lieutenant says. She left her hormone injections back at the precinct house. The officer finally calls her cellphone.
"I'm on the corner of Eldridge and Hester," Lieutenant Fanale says. She hangs up and chuckles. "It's like a drug transaction."
Another unmarked car pulls up. An officer, Richie Stellmann, leans out with a paper bag. "We got the goods," he says, passing it over and driving away.
Her driver, Officer Peters, takes the needles and small bottles that Lieutenant Fanale hands her and arranges them on the keyboard of the laptop computer between the front seats. Working in the pale glow of the screen, she draws liquid from the bottles into the syringe, tapping the tube with a fingernail to get the bubbles out. "You know somebody's going to call this in," the lieutenant says. " 'They're shooting up in the car and they're wearing N.Y.P.D. jackets.' "
END OF PART ONE |
