The New York City Police Department, its Crime Control Strategies and Organizational Changes, 1970-2009

Abstract

Over the last two decades, New York City has witnessed historic drops in crime. Numerous explanations for this crime decline have been discussed, and the New York City Police Department (NYPD) has been central to that debate, most notably because of the adoption of order maintenance policing and the implementation of Compstat. While those developments in the early 1990s are clearly important for understanding the potential role of the NYPD in the crime decline, those changes did not occur in a vacuum. This paper adopts an historical framework that places the role of the NYPD in the crime decline in the larger context of the department’s history, culture, and key events over a nearly 40-year span. This perspective suggests that many of the crime control strategies implemented by the NYPD over that time have been driven by internal and external crises, and that these strategies have also produced unintended consequences. With the historical analysis as a backdrop, the paper considers the ongoing debate over stop, question and frisk practices, and their disproportionate impact on minority residents, as the next potential crisis for the NYPD. The paper concludes with a discussion of the historical framework as a foundation for initiating a comparative dialog across law enforcement agencies regarding crime control strategies, their impact, and their consequences.

Keywords:

• New York City Police Department
• New York crime decline

Notes

1. Murphy developed a command discipline system which allowed supervisors and commanders to sanction their officers without initiating the formal departmental trial process (Fyfe & Kane, 2006).

2. The department also continued its efforts toward professionalism, perhaps best exemplified by the initiation of its drug testing program in 1985 for all applicants and probationary officers. The program was expanded in 1986 to include officers starting specialized assignments, and random testing was introduced for 10% of sworn staff and all officers assigned to OCCB in 1989. By 1993, 20% of uniformed personnel were randomly tested and drug tests were a requirement for promotion to the rank of sergeant and above (Fyfe & Kane, 2006).

3. Compstat was selected by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University for its prestigious Innovations in Government award in 1996.

4. It was not uncommon for commanders to be re-assigned when they failed to adequately respond to crime problems.

5. These strategic plans included: focusing on getting guns off the streets; curbing youth violence in the schools and on the streets; driving drug dealers out of New York City; breaking the cycle of domestic violence; reclaiming public spaces; reducing auto-related crime; rooting out corruption; reclaiming the roads; fostering courtesy and professionalism and respect; and bringing fugitives to justice (Smith & Bratton, 2001). Commissioner Bratton laid out the first eight strategic objectives. The last two were added by Commissioner Safir a few years later.

6. Wintemute (2006) also noted that more than half of the cases brought forward by the Street Crime Unit were dismissed rather than prosecuted.

7. TNT was highly controversial and widely deemed to be ineffective (see McCabe, 2009; Smith, Sviridoff, Sadd, Curtis, & Grinc, 1993).

8. Part of this increase is associated with Operation Condor, which began in 1999 as an aggressive narcotics enforcement program. Condor used up to 1,000 officers per day to flood drug-infested areas of the city and target low-level drug transactions (Geller & Fagan, 2010). The program came under intense scrutiny because of its aggressive tactics, and because of the controversial shooting of Patrick Dorismond in 2000.

9. In 2003, there were 627 guns recovered out of a total of 160,851 stops. In 2008, there were 824 guns recovered out of a total of 540,320 stops.

10. Commissioner Kelly hired several high-level individuals with experience in counterterrorism, including Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence David Cohen, a former Operations Chief in the Central Intelligence Agency.

11. The NYPD also expanded its use of hot spots policing during this time period through the implementation of Operation Impact. The Operation began with an analysis of crime patterns to identify concentrated hot spots of violent crime, called Impact Zones (Smith & Purtell, 2007). The crux of Operation Impact involves the deployment of nearly all members of recently graduated NYPD Academy classes to the Impact Zones. Given that NYPD academy classes routinely exceed 1,000 officers, the Operation brings to bear a large amount of departmental resources to relatively small areas of concentrated violent crime. In its first full year of operation (2004), officers assigned to Operation Impact made 33,438 arrests and issued 360,308 summonses (Smith & Purtell, 2007).

12. The author thanks David Weisburd for proposing this analogy.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael D. White

Michael D. White is an associate professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University, and is associate director of ASU’s Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety. He received his PhD in criminal justice from Temple University in 1999. Prior to entering academia, he worked as a deputy sheriff in Pennsylvania. His primary research interests involve the police, including use of force, training, and misconduct. His recent work has been published in Justice Quarterly, Criminology and Public Policy, Crime and Delinquency, and Criminal Justice and Behavior. Correspondence to: M. D. White, Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety, Arizona State University, 411 N Central Ave Suite 600, mail code 4420, Phoenix, AZ 85004-0685, USA. E-mail: [email protected]