What the NYPD Needs
Does Ray Kelly have what it takes?.

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.