Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing by Joe Domanick Page B

protection. “There are going to be situations where people are without assistance,” he replied. “That’s just the facts of life.”

Bill Bratton, New York City, Early 1990s
    As L.A. continued to burn on Daryl Gates’s watch, three thousand miles away another police chief was taking center stage in another renowned American city. His name was William J. Bratton. And unlike Gates, Bratton liked new, outside-the-box ideas. Studied them, invited them, championed them; recognized that new crime prevention strategies were desperately needed by police departments across an urban America seething with racial fear and animosity. Nowhere was this truer than the agency that Bratton had taken charge of in early 1990: the New City Transit Police Department (NYTPD).
    The NYTPD was then independent of the New York Police Department, and its primary mission was to protect thethree and a half million daily riders of New York’s heavily traveled subway system—amission in which it was failing.Transit crime had risen by 25 percent a year for the past three years—twice the rate of crime in New York City as a whole—androbberies were growing at two and a half times the rate of those in the city, which itself was experiencing record-high crime numbers. The department’s3,500 officers, moreover, were demoralized, and looked it.
    They were also ill-equipped, as well as ill-used, by an old, tired leadership cadre whose policies focused on reacting to crimes after they occurred, as opposed to trying to systematically reduce or prevent them.
    Meanwhile, thousands of homeless people were living in cardboard packing-box bedrooms on the far ends of subway platforms, and hundreds were becoming sick or dying after being bitten by rats, bitten by frost, or killed by speeding trains.
    Simultaneously, subway riders were jumping over turnstyle subway entrances at the rate of about170,000 a day. Often panhandlers and hustlers would cover turnstyle token-slots with gum or wet paper so tokens couldn’t be inserted. Then they’d hold open the entry gate and demand tokens from the already harried riders.
    Aboveground, New York and the NYPD were absorbed in their own ongoing crisis.The city’s 1989 homicide rate of 1,905 had set a sorry record, one promptly broken the following year with an astounding2,245 murders. Nor was that the whole story. In 1993, a year of 1,946 killings in the city, a total of more than 5,800 people had been shot.
    Seven hundred thousand serious crimes had been committed in New York in 1989—one crime for about every ten residents. Increasingly, New Yorkers were feeling overwhelmed by muggers, street corner crack dealers, crackheads, and crack wars, a record number of auto break-ins, in-your-face street hookers, sometimes violent, often mentally ill homeless people urinating and defecating on the city’s sidewalks, and menacing squeegee men demanding a buck at every red light for rubbing your windshield with a rag that was often dirtier than your windshield.
    All of this was compounded by the city’s geography. Unlike car-centric Angelenos, New Yorkers of all working and professional classes and races converged in the city’s subway cars or on its crowded streets. Mostly black and brown young men living in improvised areas of theBronx, Brooklyn, and Queens were hopping on subway trains and “going to work,” as they called it, robbing and terrorizing their fellow riders. At the same time African-Americans entering white ethnic neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens were being viciously beaten by impromptu gangs of raging young white men.
    Few of the city’s residents had any faith in the city’s police to effectively intervene. In many ways the NYPD had never recovered from the self-inflicted blow it suffered in the late 1960s and early 1970s when it was racked by a deeply rooted corruption scandal. Hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of dollars in graft was being paid by heroin and other drug dealers to street