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 aymond
Kelly seems to have everything a New York City mayor could ask for
in a police commissioner: political courage, a record of reducing
crime and the international law-enforcement experience New York
City will need to fight terrorism. Judging from Kelly's resume —
which includes a previous tenure as New York City Police Commissioner
from 1992-1994, stint in a sub-cabinet post at the Treasury Department,
the near-impossible task of rebuilding Haiti's police force, a job
running the customs service and a vice presidency at Interpol —
it's easy to see why mayor-elect Michael Bloomberg decided that
Kelly should run the world's largest urban police agency. Given
the challenges he faces, however, all this experience may not ensure
Kelly's success.
Were it not
for his political courage during 1991's Crown Heights Riots, Kelly
probably would be collecting a fat paychecks and taking three-hour,
three-martini lunches as a rainmaker for a private security firm.
The riots began when the Lubavitcher Rebbe's motorcade accidentally
killed a black seven-year-old. Lead by gang members, area residents
(nearly all of them black) exploded into a three-day orgy of crime
against the Brooklyn neighborhood's Jewish residents and businesses.
Police first seemed helpless against the rioting and Mayor David
Dinkins showed little resolve. Amidst this chaos, Kelly, then the
number-two official in the police department but a political non-entity,
arrived at the scene and took command. While around two hundred
businesses burned and one Jewish student died, the riots could have
been far worse. Dinkins, working to salvage his anti-crime credentials,
put Kelly in charge of NYPD a few months later.
New York City's
epic drop in crime began under Kelly. After a decade of continuous
increase, crime fell about 1 percent in 1992, 3 percent in 1993
and 12 percent in 1994. (Although Giuliani appointee William Bratton
and his team deserve much of the credit for the 1994 drop.) Kelly
also won plaudits for rethinking procedures at customs service in
the wake of corruption scandals and accusations of racial profiling.
While he did manage to do away with the uniformed street gangs that
passed for police in Haiti, the educated force of so-called "professors"
which replaced them proved unable to control crime or gain community
respect.
Still, Kelly's
record shows plenty of willingness to rethink individual procedures
and innovate when necessary. Being in charge of the New York City
Police Department, however, is not a matter of public relations
or even figuring out the best tactics to fight crime. It's a personnel-management
challenge. NYPD has over 40,000 police officers and around 20,000
civilians; more than twice as many employees as the second biggest
American police agency. In a reversal of the typical corporate decision
making roles, police officers with lower ranks have more discretion
than those in the top brass: Ordinary street cops can kill citizens
in defense of public safety while a chief of police must answer
to politicians, civic groups, and unions for everything a department
does.
Many police
chiefs manage people through force of personality. The size of New
York's police department makes that impossible. As James Lardner
and Thomas Reppetto show in their book NYPD:
A City and Its Police, New York City's police department
has seen a series of reform administrations followed by a descent
into scandal and corruption because so few chiefs understand that
personnel management techniques stand at the center of the task.
Bratton and 1960s reformer Pat Murphy — the two post World
War II commissioners who made the greatest contributions to the
departments' tactics and structure — both confronted the job
as a management challenge. Kelly's career, however, shows plenty
of courage and a willingness to introduce new tactics and fix individual
problems: not a record for drastically remaking organizations.
Unfortunately,
for New York, that's not what the city needs. Right now, NYPD needs
to transform itself in two ways. First it needs to prepare itself
for terrorist attack. Nearly all police departments are doing this
but, given New York's prominence, it's almost certain terrorists
will target it again. Second, NYPD needs to revise a crime-fighting
strategy that cannot work in a time of declining budgets. In recent
years, the department become has reliant on paying officers overtime
to disrupt petty street corner crime and drug dealing. Doing such
quality-of-life enforcement without a strong commitment to building
criminal conspiracy cases and creating partnerships with residents
works only when the city can afford the massive overtime expenses.
Remaking the
city's police department to confront these challenges represents
a massive management undertaking and pulling it off successfully
will require a type of police leadership that only comes along a
few times a century. Ray Kelly is a good man and an able law-enforcement
executive but little in his career shows willingness to drastically
reshape the agencies he has headed.
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