Crime Rates Down but Profiling Continues

January 4, 2009

Police Polish Image, but Concerns Persist
By MICHAEL POWELL

These can be seen as grand days for the New York City police force. Crime rates remain at or near historic lows, Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has unfurled new anticrime and antiterror initiatives, and visiting dignitaries salute his department as the nation’s best.

As police recruits — a majority are nonwhite — gathered for training at the Apollo Theater in Harlem recently, a black activist praised the commissioner as an all-time great.

Yet the department has gained no immunity from the concerns that troubled it in years past, although fewer prominent New Yorkers speak out now. In December, the Brooklyn district attorney obtained an indictment of an officer accused of using his baton to sodomize a man.

A little over two years ago, undercover officers fired a hail of 50 bullets outside a Queens nightclub, killing Sean Bell only hours before he was to be married.

Police officers frisked more than 500,000 New Yorkers in 2008, more than 80 percent of them young black or Latino men. The police arrest only 4 percent of those whom they frisk.

Since 2002, federal judges have suppressed guns as evidence in more than 20 cases after finding New York police officers’ testimony to be unreliable, inconsistent or false; but the Police Department does not monitor such cases. In 2008, the Police Department declined to pursue 42 percent of the cases in which the independent Civilian Complaint Review Board issued a finding of police misconduct.

A decade ago, when Rudolph W. Giuliani was mayor, police shootings and the frisking of 80,000 young men a year stirred citywide outrage.

David A. Paterson, (today the NY Governor)then a state senator, and former Mayor David N. Dinkins submitted to arrest in demonstrations outside Police Headquarters.

The City Council held hearings and The New York Times wrote of “a yawning chasm” between officers and the citizens they served.

In the New York City of 2008, the political class rarely seemed to challenge the police.

Explaining why is a complicated matter, as is any attempt to draw the measure of a heavily armed force of 36,000 officers, men and women tasked with safeguarding the nation’s largest city against terrorists and criminals, not to mention dealing with the distraught and the mentally unbalanced.

Part of the answer is that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Mr. Kelly have worked hard to explain themselves to the public and disarm their critics.

Where Mr. Giuliani barred City Hall’s gates and doors against prominent black clergymen like the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, the current mayor and commissioner usher these critics into their offices.

Mr. Bloomberg has voiced his displeasure at some police shootings; when a police officer mistakenly shot Timothy Stansbury Jr., 19, on a rooftop in 2004, the mayor attended and spoke at the teenager’s funeral. (New York records fewer fatal police shootings than most other large cities.)

Councilman Albert Vann of Brooklyn, an often-fierce police critic, declared the mayor’s eulogy a “defining moment.”
“Things,” he said, “can happen differently in this city.”

And Mr. Kelly projects an incorruptible brio.
“So who do I speak to? I speak to a lot of people,” Mr. Kelly said in an interview in his spacious office atop 1 Police Plaza. “I go to mosques, I go to synagogues, I go anywhere and take questions and answers.”

But muted voices speak also to a different New York, whiter and more middle-class, chastened by the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and more tolerant of tough tactics to tamp down crime.

“There is a post-traumatic dynamic,” noted Eugene J. O’Donnell, a professor of law and police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former police officer. “Once you’ve seen what the city was 20 years ago, or the terror attacks, you’re not cavalier about going back.”

When Mr. Kelly’s department delayed for years in turning over legally mandated reports recording the number of police stop-and-frisks, the New York Civil Liberties Union — rather than the leadership of the City Council — pushed for release of the data.

When reports showed that police frisks rose after the Sean Bell shooting, Peter F. Vallone Jr., the Council’s public safety chairman, applauded. The department, he said, cannot cave to “political correctness.”

“You can’t listen to the people who attack the department,” Mr. Vallone said in an interview. “Over all, this is the best police force in the world.”

Limits to Forgiveness

That the New York Police Department is more strategically adept and technologically sophisticated than most in the United States is widely accepted in academic circles.

But problems that have plagued the department for a century, from narcotics corruption to accusations that police too often use harsh — even fatal — tactics in handling emotionally disturbed people, have not disappeared.

History suggests that New Yorkers are not endlessly forgiving. Mayor Edward I. Koch and Mayor Giuliani ended up politically wounded by the perception that they gave the police too long a leash. As New York tips into recession, and Mr. Bloomberg seeks a third term, the politics of crime and policing remain difficult to predict.

“Giuliani was everyone’s favorite devil and an easy target,” said Michael Meyers, executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, which has clashed with both liberals and conservatives. “Bloomberg and Kelly somehow have charmed everyone into believing all those problems went away.”

Many black and Latino New Yorkers still express a wary and conflicted view of the police. Young black men on a college campus in Queens spoke of the churn in their stomach as a cop approaches; some spoke of swallowing rage as officers patted them down.

Councilman James Sanders Jr. represents a swath of southeast Queens that extends from Laurelton to Far Rockaway and encompasses neat homes and housing projects. The decline of crime, he notes, has opened doors for his constituents; they can barbecue and walk children to school, and fewer of their sons wind up dead. But so many young men now complain of humiliating police searches that he keeps a stack of complaint forms on his desk.

“There is no question that we have seen a sea change in police-community relations since Rudy Giuliani’s administration,” he said. “There’s also no question that we have light years to go before we can say that the problems have been resolved.”

In Mr. Kelly’s mind’s eye, two defining moments linger. There was the crack-fueled crime wave of the 1980s and early ’90s.

And there was the terror attack on the World Trade Center.

The department he has fashioned reflects those concerns. He has built a 1,000-member intelligence division, attracted former Central Intelligence Agency officials and scholars in residence, and invested in computers and data mining.

The city has a thousand surveillance cameras spread across Lower Manhattan. His intelligence analysts speak Urdu, Pashto, Farsi and Hindi and travel to Mumbai and Spain to sift evidence. (One-quarter of the new police class was born outside the United States.)

Mr. Kelly recently exchanged dueling letters with the United States attorney general, Michael B. Mukasey. The police commissioner argued, improbably, that the Bush administration was overly cautious about submitting surveillance requests for special court approval. “Not only would your approach violate the law,” Mr. Mukasey replied, “it would make New York” less safe.

“Under Commissioner Kelly, the police see everything through a terrorism prism,” said Christopher Dunn, associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “And the public has been more willing to accept aggressive policing in this climate.”

Ask Mr. Kelly about this and he shrugs. Every intelligence report he sees shows New York in the terrorist cross hairs.
“We’ve certainly ramped it up — we simply have to do everything we can do,” he says.

Mr. Kelly acknowledges the strain this puts on his police force, which has shrunk by 5,000 from a high of 41,000 officers. He has responded with programs like Operation Impact, twinning rookies with seasoned officers in high-crime neighborhoods.

A Real Time Crime Center allows trained officers to rummage databases from parole to nicknames and tattoos, giving investigators information at the crime scene. And, using citywide databases on robbery complaints, the department’s housing bureau has zeroed in on troubled teenagers and their families and has driven down crime in housing projects.

“There’s no doubt we’re trying to do more with less,” Mr. Kelly said.

He does not hesitate to apply a police clamp, either, as the broader city experienced during the 2004 Republican National Convention.

Mr. Kelly and Mr. Bloomberg defend such occasionally tough tactics as necessary. It is not just civil libertarians who disagree. During the week of the convention, officers arrested more than 1,800 people, often in highly disputed circumstances. The police held many for two days before arraignment.

“If I’m disappointed with the mayor and the commissioner, it’s that they haven’t moved beyond the notion of the garrison city,” said Mr. O’Donnell, the former prosecutor. “We should be able to be a safe city and a decent city.”

Under Suspicion

Bibash Malakar knows he fits the profile, which is to say he’s a young black man who happens to live in a working-class neighborhood in Queens. He majors in criminal justice at York College. A year ago, this 18-year-old says he stepped out of Bryant High School and clasped hands with a Latino friend and a white buddy.

A few moments later, he recalls, police officers put him against a wall and patted him down for drugs. Why me? he asked.

Yours looked like a drug dealer’s handshake, they replied.
“When I was younger, I never looked at cops and thought, ‘Those are the bad guys,’ ” he said. “They were the good guys. But they started to look at me like I was the bad guy and everything changed.”

That this is anecdotal evidence is indisputable. But interviews at York College two years apart found that 22 out of 23 black male students reported being stopped by the police, often more than a half-dozen times. Sometimes, they said, officers drew their guns, and sometimes they forced the young men face down on the sidewalk.

Few police tactics stir more controversy than stop-and-frisks.

Along with a spike in marijuana arrests in black neighborhoods — there has been no corresponding crackdown in white neighborhoods where, studies suggest, marijuana use is at least as heavy — these tactics could account for rising complaints to the review board these past five years.

‘A Slippery Slope’

State Senator Bill Perkins of Harlem served in the 1990s on the City Council, where he was a persistent critic of Mr. Giuliani. He appreciates the tonal improvement but he does no cartwheels. His precinct in Harlem has roughly the same crime rate as an Upper West Side precinct; yet the police frisk vastly more youths in his neighborhood.

“I believe it’s worse than under Giuliani because we expected so much better now,” Mr. Perkins said. “We are on a slippery slope. Respectful relations between police and the community should be a strong measure of success in any civilized society.”

Mr. Kelly acknowledges there is a complicated moral calculus at play. He notes that the race and ethnicity of those whom the police stop reflect closely the race and ethnicity of those who commit felonies, and those suffering as well.

And police training now puts much emphasis on understanding different cultures — on Dec. 18, recruits sat in the Apollo Theater and heard Mr. Sharpton and the civil rights advocate and former talk show host Bob Law speak with great frankness of black hostility to police tactics.

But frisks, Mr. Kelly says, make criminals think twice about carrying guns. “I can understand if you have done nothing wrong, you can feel a loss of time, a loss of dignity,” he said. “And I understand that we are not winning great popularity, and if that’s your point, we accept that.
“But we are saving lives.”

Dennis C. Smith, a professor at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, says his studies show that mass frisks significantly ratchet down crime.

But Jeffrey A. Fagan, professor of law and public health at the Center for Crime, Community and Law at Columbia University Law School, studied the tactic for Attorney General Eliot Spitzer in the 1990s and found it corrosive.

“Middle-class New Yorkers enjoy a sense of security, but it’s being paid for at the expense of extraordinarily inefficient stops of young black males,” Professor Fagan asserted. Deputy Mayor Dennis M. Walcott lives in the predominantly Caribbean neighborhood of Cambria Heights, Queens, and he summarized the moral complication.

On Nov. 11, three blocks from his home, a young man was gunned down on a troubled corner. Residents demanded a vigorous police presence, and the department complied, and just as quickly their sons began to complain of being stopped.
The street violence slowed, too.

“We struggle with the duality of wanting a safe neighborhood and police who are respectful of our children,” he says. “It’s an inherent challenge and I’m not sure there’s an easy answer.”

Abba Bhattarai contributed reporting.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company