Blue on Blue Page 10
Which brings up the biggest problem I think the old IAD had: its people. As I said earlier, there were some good investigators in IAD, but frankly they were the exceptions. Why would any good cop or investigator want a job that would brand him forever as a “rat” among his fellow cops? Why would any good cop or investigator join a unit that rightly or wrongly was despised as a dumping ground for incompetents and shirkers? The answer was, they wouldn’t join such a unit.
And the result was that bad cops like Dowd and his buddies stayed on the street for far too long.
So in 1992, to stave off some of the political heat from the Dowd scandal, Mayor David Dinkins, true to historical form, appointed a special commission to investigate corruption in the NYPD. It was called the Mollen Commission, after its chairman, a former judge named Milton Mollen, but the commission’s formal title left no doubt where it was headed. The title was “Commission to Investigate Allegations of Police Corruption and the Anti-Corruption Procedures of the Police Department.” It was clear that the Mollen Commission was going to home in on the failures of IAD—and in the process make a case for an outside civilian agency to take over all corruption and misconduct investigations and enforcement within the Department.
The Department wanted no part of that, and with good reason. Civilians are not cops, they can never truly understand police work, they’re not trained investigators, and thus they can never effectively understand and combat police corruption. Despite its troubled history with corruption, the Department was determined to prove that it could police itself.
So to steal a march on the Mollen Commission, Police Commissioner Lee Brown assigned his second in command, First Deputy Commissioner Ray Kelly—who a few months later would replace Brown as commissioner—to conduct his own investigation and come up with a plan to revamp and improve Internal Affairs.
Which he did. The changes Ray Kelly eventually made to Internal Affairs were dramatic, even revolutionary. For one thing, he did away with the old Field Internal Affairs Units and changed the Internal Affairs Division (IAD) to the Internal Affairs Bureau (IAB)—which was far more than just a name change. Before, IAD had been just one of three divisions in the Bureau of Inspectional Services, which reported to the chief of department, who in turn reported to the police commissioner; in other words, there were two levels of bureaucracy between Internal Affairs and the commissioner. As a “bureau,” the new Internal Affairs Bureau was on equal footing with other enforcement bureaus—Detective Bureau, Organized Crime Control Bureau, and so on—and the IAB chief reported directly to the commissioner. And if you need something from the top guy, which is better? To ask your boss to ask his boss to ask the big boss—or to ask the big boss yourself?
The new IAB was a centralized command that was responsible for investigating all allegations of corruption and serious misconduct within the NYPD. For the first time, IAB also investigated all police shootings involving injuries or death and other serious but nonfatal “use of force” incidents involving cops. Minor violations of Department rules and policies—the “white socks” cases—were left to “Investigation Units” within the various NYPD Patrol Boroughs and to “Integrity Control Officers” within the precincts. To run IAB, Kelly brought in a civilian, Walter Mack Jr., a former federal prosecutor and, like Kelly, a former Marine combat commander in Vietnam, as deputy commissioner for internal affairs.
Commissioner Kelly also promised—and delivered—more money, more people, and better equipment for IAB, a promise that his successors would also honor. Eventually the IAB staff tripled from about two hundred fifty people to almost seven hundred fifty—making it the biggest police department internal anticorruption and anti–police misconduct operation in the world. We also had a $2 million annual budget (not including salaries) to pay for special equipment and other investigation expenses.
Of course, reorganizing a bureaucracy and throwing money at a problem is relatively simple. But Kelly understood that all that would mean nothing without a fundamental change in the culture, not only within Internal Affairs but also in the Department rank and file’s perception of Internal Affairs. Kelly knew that Internal Affairs would never be loved—that would be too much to expect. Nor would it be enough if Internal Affairs was simply feared, although that’s a necessary part of it. No, to be effective, the cops who work in Internal Affairs also have to be respected within the Department.
But how do you accomplish that in a police department that had always regarded Internal Affairs cops as a bunch of cheese-eating rats?
Some of us had an idea.
* * *
It’s the fall of 1992, months before my meeting with Commissioner Ray Kelly that put me into IAB, and news about the Seven-Five corruption scandal and the newly created Mollen Commission is in the air. The scandal has also spread to the Seven-Three, my old precinct, where a gang of fifteen rogue cops known as “The Morgue Boys”—they would meet during the midnight shift at an abandoned coffin manufacturing factory to plan their scores—will soon be arrested for ripping off drug dealers and stealing money and guns. And although it’s not public knowledge yet, the investigation has also spread to the 30th Precinct in Harlem, the precinct that soon will be known as “The Dirty Thirty.”
Like every other NYPD cop, I’ve been following all this in the papers and on the TV news and through the usual Department gossip machine. It’s embarrassing to see these crooked cops paraded before the public, to see my Department being humiliated this way. But I’m still happily in charge of the Cadet Corps program, and I haven’t been personally involved in any of it.
Then one day I’m in my Cadet Corps office on the seventh floor of the Police Academy when I get a call from Mike Farrell, the NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Policy and Planning. I’d first met Mike at the Police Management Institute, which is a kind of mini-MBA program offered by Columbia University. Now Mike starts telling me about how amid all the scandals, Kelly, who has just been named police commissioner by Mayor Dinkins, is planning to remake Internal Affairs. They’re putting together an informal group to study the various issues involved—and will I help?
Mike is a brilliant guy, and I like him a lot, but I’m instantly wary. This is just an advisory group, right? I ask him. I’m not actually going to be sent to Internal Affairs, right?
No, no, Mike says, nothing like that. We’re just trying to develop some new ideas.
Well, in that case, okay, sure, I tell him. Glad to help out.
(Months later, after the commissioner sent me to IAB, Mike laughingly admitted that he’d sandbagged me. After I got over my initial urge to strangle him, I laughed about it, too.)
One of the tasks I have for the advisory group is to run some focus groups of cops to find out what their thinking is on integrity issues and Internal Affairs. So I ask the computer guys to start picking names out of the Department’s personnel records—ordinary beat cops, detectives, sergeants, lieutenants, about six hundred in all, all chosen at random. Over the next six months or so I bring them in to the Academy in groups of twelve or fifteen and sit them down around a conference table. I introduce myself, and tell them that while I have my assistant here to take notes, it’s all completely anonymous. We aren’t videotaping this session, and no one will ever know what they say here—promise, Scout’s honor. All we want to do is listen to what they have to say about integrity issues and Internal Affairs.
Of course, being cops, they’re suspicious. Why have I been called in here? Is this some kind of IAD recruiting session? Am I under investigation for something? And who’s this deputy inspector with the big mustache anyway?
So at first nobody wants to say anything. They’re studying their shoes or staring up at the ceiling, as silent and motionless as an oil painting. But I’ve been teaching classes for years at John Jay, and I know how to nudge them along. I ask one young cop what he thinks about IAD, and of course he hems and haws and then he says: Well, I guess they’re just doing their jobs.
And what else is he go
ing to say to some strange DI he doesn’t even know? But as soon as he says it, another young cop at the far end of the table will mutter under his breath: Bullshit! And then I’ll bounce it over to him: What, you disagree? And he’ll say: Well, uh, yeah, maybe they’re doing their jobs—but why is IAD always trying to catch you for small stuff, like not wearing your hat or taking too long for meal? Don’t they have anything better to do? And then I’ll bounce it over to another cop, and he’ll take it a little further: Yeah, those IAD guys don’t know what it’s like on the street. They just want to get other cops jammed up.
And once you finally get a bunch of cops talking, you can’t shut them up. All I have to do is sit back and listen.
Yeah, those IAD guys really suck, they say. They’re a bunch of losers, they say. As investigators they couldn’t find their own asses with both hands. They’re only in IAD because they’re afraid to be on the street. Yeah, or they got jammed up and ratted out other cops to save their skins and IAD is the only unit that’ll take ’em. With all the real criminals out there, why would any cop want to put other cops in jail? What a bunch of assholes!
And so on in every focus group we run. They really just document what everybody already knows: Everybody hates the Internal Affairs Division, just as they always have.
And the focus groups are equally unanimous when I throw out the question: Would you ever consider working for Internal Affairs? In virtually every case, the response is: Me? Work for IAD? I’d drop my papers first! In other words, they’d quit.
It’s understandable. Traditionally, for a cop to volunteer to work for Internal Affairs is to be forever separated from the NYPD brotherhood. Once you voluntarily start investigating other cops, you’re a rat—end of story. Old friends will turn their backs on you, and their wives will turn their backs on your wife. Cops who’ve known you for years will spit on the ground and walk away if you say hello. You aren’t going to be invited to Christmas parties or retirement rackets—because hey, who wants a rat at a party?
And it’s not like you can volunteer to work for IAD for a while and then go back to being a regular cop. IAD is like the roach motel—once you check in, you can never really check out. If you try to go back to a precinct or other command, once they know you were with IAD—which they’ll find out before you even unpack your stuff into your locker—you’ll be shunned, ostracized. Even scrupulously honest cops won’t want to work with you, because, well, once a rat, always a rat—and how do I know this former IAD asshole isn’t going to turn me in for some bullshit petty violation of the Patrol Guide? The other cops will start calling you “Ben” or “Willard,” like the rat movies, and maybe they’ll smear cheese over your locker, or hang a dead rat over it. That’s been known to happen—more than once. Who wants to go through that?
So given all that, how do you get good cops to work for Internal Affairs when the good cops all tell you that they’d rather quit than work even one day for Internal Affairs? How do you get the best people into the new IAB?
The answer is simple: You don’t give them a choice.
You draft them.
Which is exactly what the new IAB did. At the end of 1992, Kelly sends shock waves through the entire Department by announcing that as of January 1, 1993, the start-up date for the newly reorganized Internal Affairs Bureau, fifteen handpicked first grade detectives from the Detective Bureau and the Organized Crime Control Bureau, some of the best and most respected detectives in the Department, will be assigned to Internal Affairs for a two-year hitch. First grade detectives! Being sent to Internal Affairs! It’s unheard of.
Of course, the other bureau chiefs go ballistic—You’re stealing our best guys!—which is what Kelly intended. He knows that if he just asks the bureau chiefs to send some good people to Internal Affairs, who are they going to send? Sure, they’ll promise to send their best people, and then they’re going to cull out every incompetent, lazy burnout they can and cheerfully send him off to IAB. No way Kelly’s going to play that game. He’s sending a message: There’s a new IAB in town.
And those fifteen handpicked detectives aren’t going to be the last good cops that IAB steals, either. From now on, IAB will get first pick of all the sergeants and lieutenants who want to move into investigative supervisory positions. (Most IAB investigators are sergeants or lieutenants.) IAB will sit down with their personnel files and say: We’re taking this guy, and that guy, and that gal, no, we don’t want this guy, but this guy looks pretty good . . . And whether they like it or not, suddenly they’re in IAB for the next two years or so. (Later, after years of complaints by other bureau chiefs, we finally had to change it so that IAB only got the first pick on a rotating basis, sort of like a pro sports draft system.)
And the new IAB’s draft authority doesn’t just cover those lieutenants and sergeants; it’s Department-wide. If we need, say, an investigator who speaks Urdu, or one with accounting experience, or a cop who used to be a barber, we can search the Department’s personnel records for someone with those skills and draft her, too. Or if we need some good instructors for the IAB training course, people who know how to teach, we’ll draft them out of the Academy. The bottom line is that if IAB needs you, most of the time—unless you have a really, really good reason, or a really major “hook”—we get you. You’re drafted. And the commissioner will back us up.
In fact, within a few years, as we gradually rotate out the old IAD guys, virtually everybody who works in IAB is a draftee—me included.
As you might expect, the people who get drafted into IAB bitch and moan about it; they try everything they can to wiggle out of it. Meanwhile, their fellow cops treat the news like there’s been a death in the family—and then they thank God that they weren’t drafted into the hated IAB.
I understood how they felt. After I was named Chief of the Internal Affairs Bureau in 1996, a three-star rank, I would meet with every new group of draftees. I’d commiserate with them about their fate—Yeah, I know you didn’t ask to be here, but hey, I was drafted into IAB, too—and then I would explain what the new IAB is all about.
Forget what you knew about the old Internal Affairs Division, I tell them. We aren’t going to send you out looking for cops who take a few extra minutes to go back on the air after finishing a radio run, or any other chicken-shit stuff; that’s somebody else’s problem. You’re going to be working important, complex investigations against seriously bad cops, and you’re also going to be protecting the good cops against false allegations. Think about it: If you’re an honest cop and there’s an allegation against you, who would you want working the case? Some burnout who’s only in Internal Affairs because no one else wants him, and who’s just counting down the days until he drops his retirement papers and moves to Fort Lauderdale? Or someone like you, someone who was handpicked by us because he’s the best of the best? IAB is an elite unit, I tell them, because no one gets to choose to join it. We choose you. And we know you’re going to act like professionals and do a professional job.
And then after the pep talk, I make them two promises:
First, I tell them, you’re going to be better for having been here. You’re going to undergo two weeks of special IAB training, which will teach you the unique skills you’re going to need to conduct investigations of other cops—and if you can learn how to run a surveillance on a cop, someone who knows the same tricks you do, how much better are you going to be when you need to run a surveillance on some street mutt after you go back to the squad? And after that, we’re also going to send you to specialized training classes—assault/homicide investigation classes, sexual assault investigation classes, narcotics, electronic surveillance, and so on—so that when you leave here you’re going to have an impressive résumé that you wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else. The bottom line, I tell them, is that IAB is going to be good for your career.
And second, I tell them, when you leave after two years, if you’ve done a good job, we’re going to do everything we can to get you where you wa
nt to go. Detective Bureau? OCCB? Intelligence Division? We’ll do our best to land you there—and in most cases, we’ll succeed.
Of course, they’re cops, with cops’ natural suspicions, so most of them initially don’t believe a word of it. The resistance is greatest among the draftees who come from cop families, guys whose fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers were cops, guys who’ve grown up hearing that any cop who would investigate other cops is a miserable cheese-eating rat. The other draftees have some of that attitude as well, but at least it didn’t come to them through their mother’s milk, so they’re a little easier to convince.
But even though most of them will never stop bitching and moaning about being drafted into IAB—actually, it’s when cops stop bitching and moaning that you start to worry—eventually most will come around and prove themselves to be first-rate investigators and supervisors. In fact, in all my time as IAB chief I only had one draftee who seriously bucked the system.
He’s a sergeant, and on the very first day, after I make my speech, he stands up and says: I don’t want to be here, and nobody can make me! I figure he’s just sounding off, saying out loud what the rest of them are thinking. He’s got a good record—we wouldn’t have picked him if he didn’t—and besides, it takes some stones for a sergeant to talk to a three-star chief that way. So I brush it off.
But as the IAB training course goes on, this guy is constantly dogging off, not paying attention, muttering under his breath; in the end, he intentionally fails the IAB training course exam. Who knows? Maybe he’s one of those mother’s milk cops who’ll never see Internal Affairs as anything but the rat squad. Or maybe he’s got some integrity issues of his own in his past, and he’s afraid if he works for IAB they may come out. Whatever the reason, I don’t want this guy in IAB anymore.