Broken
By: The Big Roundtable
Tags: Brooklyn, Big Reads, Poverty

Over the past twenty years, meanwhile, East New York has been a kind of policing test kitchen. Numerous programs and initiatives come and go — CPOP (Community Police Officer Program); SNAG (Street Narcotics and Gun); the Street Crimes Unit; Weed and Seed, a federal program started in 1998; an East New York Urban Youth Corps program called PACT (Police and Community Together); the Community Security Initiative (CSI), where office working the streets would try to develop rapport with the locals; the Federal Trespass Affidavit Program, in which landlords of private apartment houses entered into an agreement with police that allowed officers to conduct vertical patrols from ground floors to the roofs; Community-Based Response Teams (CBRTs), consisting of police officers and probation officers who conducted unannounced home visits, curfew checks, car spot checks; Tactical Narcotics Teams (TNTs); The East New York United for Safety Project, funded by the CDC and bringing together Victim Services, the New York City Department of Health, the Cypress Hills Development Corporation, the East New York Urban Corporation, and the United Community Center, as well as an evaluation team from New York University and The Blue Group, a highly structured intensive-group-counseling-and-therapy outfit.

In 2007 there was Operation Impact, with a special variation for the high crime zone of East New York called Operation Trident that divided the neighborhood’s 5.6 square miles into three separate areas, each under a different Police Captain. Then Operation Takeback, in which 200 officers working 4 p.m. to midnight conducted high-visibility uniformed patrol around locations identified as hotspots.

Today there is Operation Crew Cut (going after gangs or crews); the All Out Program, in which 330 extra officers are assigned to high crime precincts; the NYPD Firearms Suppression Division; Audio Shoot Tracking technology, such as the Shot Stopper System; a Facial Recognition Unit, in which Intel officers scan mug shots of known criminals with pictures from social media, surveillance cameras, and anywhere else police can find images; a Shooting Incident Crisis Management System piloted in the five neighborhoods where gun violence is highest, East New York being at the top of the list; a Cure Violence Program (a public health approach: gun violence can be compared to a communicable disease). As for technology, there are SkyWatch Observation Towers, which rise out of a van to about twenty-five feet, equipped with a spotlight and four cameras (one pointed in each direction). There are police officer body cameras, too, in a pilot program launched in six high crime precincts (including the 75th).

The police, public officials, and media drumbeat the idea that crime is down in the city from the bad old days, usually focusing on the murder rate. Murder is down everywhere. Criminologists and public affairs experts who study the NYPD say it is important to remember that murder, arguably the most violent crime, was a relatively rare occurrence even at its peak in 1990. There were 2,200 homicides in 1990, in a city of 7,305,000. In 1990, the 75th Precinct had 109 murders, the highest in the city. In 2014 it had twenty-one murders, still the highest in the city.

Some police history is in order.

In 1992, Mayor David Dinkins established the Mollen Commission, a twenty-person staff of attorneys and investigators, to investigate NYPD corruption and, in particular, an officer named Michael Dowd and his precinct — the 75th in East New York.

The commission held two weeks of public hearings and Dowd was the star witness, with a criminal career as a police officer that spanned six years beginning in 1985 when he was cited for threatening his wife and engaging in sex with prostitutes in the local Bailey’s Bar. On March 4, 1986 the NYPD had opened a case on Dowd and his then-partner, Gerard Dubois, based on an allegation received from the 75th Precinct’s commanding officer, Deputy Inspector Kevin Farrell, that Dowd and Dubois stole money from drug dealers, prisoners, and deceased persons. Four days after the initiation of the Dowd and Dubois investigation, the Internal Affairs Division opened another investigation into allegations of brutality by Dowd and other 75th Precinct officers.

What emerged in testimony is that by the summer of 1987, Dowd and his new partner, Kenneth Eurell, were on the payroll of a major drug organization, taking $8,000 a week in return for protection, information, and assistance. The 75th had a gathering location known as “The Pool” — an isolated inlet near Jamaica Bay where Dowd and as many as fifteen other officers from his crew would gather — while on duty — to drink, shoot their guns, meet their girlfriends, and plan future criminal activities.

Dowd testified that he and his crew — including Officers Dubois, Henry “Chickie” Guevara, Jeffrey Guzzo, Brian Spencer, Walter Yurkiw, Henry Jackson, and others — had for more than a year been routinely involved in stealing money and drugs from street dealers and by otherwise “stealing almost every opportunity that presented itself.”

Dowd, Yurkiw, Guzzo, and Guevara, with the aid of drug dealer accomplices, were committing armed robberies in East New York (for money, drugs, and to assist the drug gang he was protecting by intimidating competing dealers and disrupting the business of rival drug traffickers). The NYPD, Internal Affairs, or related agencies received sixteen separate allegations implicating Michael Dowd and his associates. But after six years of investigations, every case against Dowd was closed as unsubstantiated, “despite overwhelming evidence,” the Mollen Commission notes. Dowd was rated as a good cop on performance reviews.

Photo by Anna Hiatt

Then in May of 1992, Suffolk County Police arrested six New York City police officers assigned to two different Brooklyn precincts — including Dowd and Eurell, who were by this time selling cocaine in Suffolk County, where Dowd’s brother was a police officer.

The Mollen Commission focused, insightfully and powerfully, on the issue of policing, especially in high crime and minority neighborhoods. They found that the 75th was a dumping ground for corrupt or deadwood cops. As the Mollen Commission put it:

One group [of police officers] in particular … from Brooklyn North believed that their Patrol Borough is considered a ‘dumping ground’ within the agency. They stated that they are regarded by officers from other Boroughs, as well as by the Department’s executive cadre, as a collection of misfits, incompetents, malingerers, and undesirables inhabiting a series of ‘shithouses.’ This perception coexists with, and perhaps has created, a strong group identity marked by an undercurrent of perverse pride in their deviant status. Many officers reported that Department commanders often assigned sergeants and other supervisors to high-crime precincts without regard to prior experience, training or the needs of the particular command. Too often, inexperienced, probationary sergeants were assigned to busy corruption-prone precincts where experienced and proven supervisors were most needed. This practice is even more alarming because the Department also often sent those officers with disciplinary problems, those most susceptible to corruption and most in need of effective supervision, to these crime-ridden precincts — which are widely perceived as the Department’s ‘dumping grounds.’ Indeed, one method of dealing with corruption was simply to transfer problem officers to unattractive assignments including, crime-ridden precincts. This ‘dumping ground’ method of discipline punishes the community more than the problem officers by assigning them to the very precincts where the opportunities for corruption most abound, where the need for talented, committed officers is the greatest, and where minority populations often reside.

The Mollen Commission also found a definite correlation between brutality and corruption — brutality in whatever form, including unnecessary force, abuse of authority, and discourtesy in civilian interactions. The commission found that brutality is also used “as a rite of initiation to prove that an officer is a tough or ‘good cop,’ one who can be accepted and trusted by his fellow officers not to report wrongdoing. Dowd, like other officers, reported that brutality strengthened the bonds of loyalty and silence among officers and thus fostered corruption tolerance.”

Dowd served twelve years in prison. In 2015 a documentary was released, The Seven Five, reuniting for the first time Dowd with his former partner — in crime fighting and in crime — and the man who “ratted on him,” Kenneth Eurell. As one reviewer noted, hearing Dowd “pour out the details almost seems like a pleasure to him at times.”

Another reviewer put the entertainment value of the film into context: “Mr. Dowd’s vehement narration does have, at times, a vague Joe-Pesci-in-GoodFellas feel, which is amusing only if you ignore the historical record. In 1988, when Mr. Dowd was still on the force, an estimated 100 people were murdered in East New York [actually 105, a record]. Those dead should haunt The Seven Five, which instead breezes through its crimes while tossing out grim images of unidentified black and brown bodies.”

Is any of this relevant today? One of the Mollen Commission’s concluding criticisms was the adversarial behavior of the police union, the PBA, which is still criticized today. (Consider, too, a June 22, 2015 article in the New York Post containing this quote from a police source: “Three or four officers were sent to a certain precinct in Brooklyn and instead of going and walking foot posts, they up and retired.” The precinct is the 75th. In all the time I spent in East New York, I never saw an NYPD foot patrol.)

The Mollen Commission most of all emphasized the need for an external independent monitor with real power and oversight, pointing out that for the last century the New York City police force has been plagued by serious corruption/misconduct problems roughly every twenty years, like clockwork (before Mollen there was the Knapp Commission in the ‘70s). The department cleans up after each censure. But without an external watchdog agency, Mollen argued, the department would backslide.

Today there is still no independent oversight entity with real teeth in NYC — and here we are twenty years out from Mollen. If corruption emerges now, it will likely be in a different form than in Dowd’s day and the department and the public might be just as slow to recognize it. So every amber light bears watching.

In April 2015, the NYPD’s Inspector General released a report “calling for the NYPD to upgrade its method of grading cops, starting with how it looks at the number and substance of misconduct suits filed against individual officers.” In the last five fiscal years, 15,000 lawsuits have been filed against the NYPD, costing taxpayers $202 million in jury verdicts and settlements. In 2013 alone, settlements and judgments against NYPD cost the City $137.2 million. In April 2014, NYPD removed an officer from street duty who reportedly had been sued twenty-eight times and had cost the city at least $884,000 in settlements.