In an interview on Policing

The Crime Fighter by Jack Maple

Jack Maple worked with me in the NYPD. This is his autobiography, about his early years as a police officer, sergeant, and lieutenant. He takes the lessons he learned, expands on them and describes how he eventually created the 1994 revolution in policing that led to the historic and dramatic decline in crime in New York City. He was a brilliant thinker and the book is funny, witty but also serious. What is profound about the book is its simplicity. For example, most violent crime occurs in minority neighbourhoods. Yet sometimes, police officer allocations will lean in favour of the business community or centre city district due to greater population density. However, Jack believed that you put the cops where they are most needed. And in most cities, that is the minority communities. It is common-sense policing.

There was nothing revolutionary in what we did to reduce crime in New York. It was sometimes about understanding the criminal mind. If 50 per cent of shootings are drug-related then you will have more impact if you have narcotics as well as homicide units working on them, if you have a more coherent strategy, not just locking up junkies.

Also, the violence doesn’t happen evenly – drug-related homicides are never single events. You’d get related shootings going back and forth over the course of six months, a year, three or four killed, 11 shot. The notion is that if you get in early on the first shooting, especially if the guy isn’t killed, and you treat a shooting in the leg as seriously as if he had been killed, then you can break the cycle.

But can you get people to co-operate?

People always say that. But the answer is, the detectives have to work hard. For example, when a guy gets shot in the leg in a drug deal and he refuses to co-operate, that shouldn’t end the case. If the same guy were shot and killed, he couldn’t co-operate, could he? Yet in homicides we have an 80 per cent solve rate where we have a dead person, who is clearly not co-operative and can’t even give us a description of who did it. So the answer is: work hard.  Use your creative genius. And break down internal barriers within the police department. Typically, a homicide is investigated by homicide detectives, by themselves. However, if you have a homicide that is drug related wouldn’t it make sense to involve detectives from the drug squad? Now, drug squad detectives will tell you, ‘We don’t do homicides, we do drugs.’ It’s the job of top management to let everyone know that, while we may have some specialists within the policing organisation, there is nobody so special that they can’t chip in and help out on a case. That, in fact, may have been the one area that was least understood and certainly least written about regarding the NYPD miracle. That is, getting all of the units in the department to play along well together in the crime sandbox. Jack explains this in his book as only Jack can. With insight, sarcasm, self-effacing humour, and plain old common sense. 

I used to come to New York when I was little in the 1970s and my dad said, ‘Never go into Central Park, it’s dangerous.’ Now it’s safe even at night. Is that you?

Yes. That’s the part that got most attention, the Quality of Life programme.

Is that the same as Zero Tolerance?

That’s what the press often call it. So, for example, in the nice neighbourhood of the West Village you’d get kids coming in from the suburbs, normally well-behaved kids, but they’d get off the train at 7 o’clock and by ten they’d be drunk. We’d see fights and robberies. So, instead of waiting for 10 o’clock, we’d give the kids a summons and send them home after their first beer. There was a dramatic reduction in assaults, fights and robberies. The same with the subway turnstile jumpers. Not every fare evader is using the subway to commit crime, but every person using the subway to commit crime evades the fare. What we did was to prevent them from getting on the subway in the first place. In Central Park we put patrols out there making sure that the people in the park were there for legitimate reasons. When we targeted low-level marijuana dealers, people said: ‘What’s the big deal? He’s on his own.’ But I can guarantee you that one low-level dealer is in competition with another low-level dealer and before long some innocent woman gets shot in cross fire.