NYPD Cancels Bet On How Low It Can Go

When Police Commissioner Ray Kelly abruptly informed a City Council hearing on police anti-terrorism efforts Feb. 10 that he was going to have to cancel a police class due to be inducted next January, it was hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

Council Public Safety Committee Chairman Peter Vallone Jr. opted for Column B, protesting that forgoing the class would leave the NYPD dangerously short of officers by next year, when he said the force could dip to as few as 32,000. That was about where the city's then-three police forces (Housing and Transit cops were in separate departments at the time) were in 1990. Then, after a series of high-profile murders prompted a New York Post headline, "Dave, Do Something," Mayor David Dinkins and Mr. Vallone's father, who was then the City Council Speaker, put together the ambitious police hiring program that a decade later would find nearly 41,000 cops in the NYPD.

Timed With An Eye on Washington?

A more-cynical veteran of city government scoffed at Mr. Kelly's announcement, however, pointing out that it came as last-minute wrangling was in full swing in Washington over how much aid the city might receive from the Federal stimulus bill.

PLAYING THE NUMBERS: City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (left) is among those concerned that the NYPD is already shorthanded and that any further reductions in personnel could cause a serious increase in crime. Michael Jacobson, who before serving as Correction Commissioner was a city budget official who focused on police staffing, said it's difficult to gauge at what point the department would be stretched so thin that 'all hell would break loose.'

"How transparent can that be?" he said. "Why not talk about the 2041 class?"

Even before the stimulus deal was announced the following day and the Mayor returned from Washington on a late-afternoon flight to breathlessly announce at La Guardia Airport that the city was receiving enough money that he might not only reinstate the police class but call off a possible 15,000 school layoffs as well, there was a truckload of logic to support the cynic's-eye view.

The most-obvious aspect was this: since when does the city abandon police classes based on the economy 11 months in advance? It was not until last November that Mr. Bloomberg declared he was throwing in the towel on a class due to enter the Police Academy in January, and even there, a lastminute deal was worked out with the Council that produced a scaled-down class of 275 officers last month.

And so no one—including the younger Vallone and Patrolmen's Benevolent Association President Pat Lynch, who reacted to Mr. Kelly's cancellation with a statement that the road to municipal ruin was paved with the decimation of the NYPD's ranks—should have been surprised by how quickly things changed for future members of New York's Finest.

Occasionally city government is rocked by startling changes of fortune, such as the week in October 1990 when Mr. Dinkins announced a relatively generous contract settlement with the United Federation of Teachers on a Monday and a major expansion of the police forces that Wednesday, and by Thursday was warning that he might have to lay off 15,000 workers because of a plummeting budget.

Playing 4 Hands of Budget Poker

This, however, wasn't one of those times. Rather, it's as if the city is engaged in four separate but related high-stakes poker games—one with the Feds, another with state government, a third with the Council and the final one with the unions. It bluffs, it blusters, and tries to conceal its winnings in one game to set up victories in others.

And so when he returned from Washington, a euphoric Mr. Bloomberg didn't retract a statement he made earlier that day—during a series of joint lobbying appearances he made with, of all people, United Federation of Teachers Chief Operating Officer Michael Mulgrew—that he would have to lay off thousands of workers if the municipal unions didn't agree to have employees pay 10 percent of their basic health-care costs. The need for that, too, might have been rendered inoperative by the size of the city's share of the stimulus package, but he sure wasn't going to say so. It's one thing to let city residents know they can breathe a sigh of relief that they won't be losing cops or Teachers, but what does he gain from reassuring his own workforce that it's no longer a choice between their jobs and their benefits in the current pristine condition?

One veteran union official, who spoke conditioned on anonymity, said, "Everybody's playing their own games. When you see what the stimulus bill is all about—and nobody's going to fully know that until [this] week— and what the state budget is all about, then they'll get down to brass tacks."

Mark Rosenthal, the president of Local 983 of District Council 37, spoke for more than a few union leaders when he said, "I'm 110 percent against giving back any benefits." He wondered why the Mayor hadn't proposed an early-retirement incentive program as a painless way of cutting the city payroll.

From the Mayor's standpoint, though, that makes no sense, not only because he'd like to gain some health concession from the unions but due to the budget dance now being conducted at waltz tempo in Albany. It's tough to argue that you're desperately in need of more aid if you're simultaneously exempting your unions from making the kind of hard choices that Governor Paterson is presenting to the state's unions.

When Do Cuts Really Hurt?

The Council hearing last week raised an interesting question, however soon it quickly became moot, about whether the NYPD could afford to make further cuts in a uniformed force that currently is roughly 5,500 officers below its peak of 40,800 in early 2001, Rudy Giuliani's last year as Mayor.

Michael Jacobson, the director of the Vera Institute of Justice, has a unique perspective on the matter. He was the city budget official with responsibility for police staffing at the time that the "Safe Streets, Safe City" program put together by the Dinkins administration in tandem with the Council began 19 years ago. He later got the practical experience of running a law-enforcement agency as a well-regarded Correction Commissioner under Mr. Giuliani.

He said of Mr. Kelly, who was Police Commissioner during Mr. Dinkins's last two years in office, "He's managed to do a fabulous job with a 13-percent decrease in the number of officers he has. Crime's down, no terrorism [strikes], all that stuff."

That doesn't mean, Mr. Jacobson said, that the department could continue cutting uniformed personnel without any adverse impact. "What point does it turn around?" he asked rhetorically. "Thirty-two thousand, thirty-one? Ray is the person who could answer that, and you have to figure he would tell the Mayor if he thought they were reaching that point. But no one can tell you with empirical certainty that, for example, when it goes below 28,500, all hell's gonna break loose."

Drop Started Before Force Grew

And that's because it's hard to pinpoint the extent to which the build-up of the force throughout the 1990s was primarily responsible for the dramatic drop in crime over the course of the decade. Mr. Jacobson lent support to the theories of those who believe that a decline in crack use as young people became aware of just how dangerous the drug was played a big role, saying of the drop in crime that began during the latter half of Mr. Dinkins's tenure, "You felt the decrease before a lot of those new cops were out of the Academy, and then it accelerated."

Part of the reason was more-aggressive and smarter enforcement, with the aggression during the Giuliani years also having the side-effect of antagonizing many minority residents who resented being eyed and sometimes handled like they were suspects in their own neighborhoods. Mr. Kelly, given freer rein by Mr. Bloomberg than his predecessors had under Mr. Giuliani, has managed to tone down the hostility level, although there is still an undercurrent of anger about the number of stop-and-frisks that younger minority residents are subjected to in some areas.

Cast Wide Net Where the Crime Is

The NYPD's response is that the stop-and-frisks are proportionate to who is committing the violent crimes in the city. There is reason to believe that, even if cops are sometimes lessselective than they should be, it is right: you just have to consider the murders that make the tabloids and the ethnic composition of the neighborhoods where they occur to understand why there would be more-aggressive enforcement in some minority areas.

But that also speaks to why in some of those neighborhoods the perception about the crime problem varies significantly from the view in most parts of the city. The slight increase in the murder rate citywide last year was felt most acutely in those neighborhoods.

It remains to be seen whether that is a harbinger of greater trouble to come, of the kind that impresses itself on the consciousness of the city as a whole, as it did two decades ago, when car break-ins were common even in "good" neighborhoods and gold chainsnatching on the subway was as likely to occur on a train in midtown as out in Brownsville or East New York.

Perception Counts

Contrary to what has become conventional wisdom in New York, crime didn't spiral out of control during Mr. Dinkins's first year in office; the murder rate was already over 2,000 during Ed Koch's last three years as Mayor. What created the perception that led Time Magazine to refer to New York on its cover as "Dodge City" was the murder of a Utah tourist in a midtown subway station and several incidents in which small children were fatally shot by crack gangs with aim that was even worse than their intentions.

A recurrence of such high-profile murders would be enough to end the questions about how low can the NYPD go through canceled or reduced police classes without public safety taking a literal hit. Commissioner Kelly would undoubtedly prefer that it never reaches that stage.