It’s rough when a championship team seems to break down overnight, as New York has seen in recent years with the baseball Yankees and the football Giants.
And now it appears to be happening with the NYPD.
Not long ago, the men who today run the Police Department were hailed as stars who’d helped revolutionize policing. Now they can’t seem to catch a break.
Rank-and-file cops openly boo the mayor. The federal courts, the City Council and other agencies keep grabbing for power over the department.
And promises by the NYPD’s high command for a complete re-engineering of the department and retraining of the force are at great risk of looking like jokes.
As part of the re-engineering, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton announced that a single unit would be used to counter both terrorists and protesters.
Everyone was stunned. Would peaceful protesters be confronted by cops with helmets, machine guns and tear gas? The commissioner claimed he’d been misunderstood, and the plan was quickly withdrawn.
Then there are those assurances that the patrol force would be completely retrained.
In practice, this amounted to three days of lectures at the Police Academy — where some officers have allegedly fallen asleep and others wrote negative reviews when issued questionnaires.
The right way to retrain cops is to have them work in the field under excellent leaders. The notion that three days of lectures can change longstanding practices in American policing is ludicrous.
A former chief, once among the brightest stars in the department, recently returned to the NYPD after a 20-year hiatus.
Tasked to find ways to decrease violence between police officers and citizens, he reportedly came up with a solution that calls for cops to take a mint to relax whenever they feel like swearing.
Supposedly it was said at one of the three-day sessions (though now officially denied) that a police officer who is feeling angry with a citizen should close his eyes, take a mint and count to 10.
As some cops noted, closing your eyes in the midst of a physical confrontation may well lead to someone counting 10 over you.
Why is the NYPD no longer the NYPD?
Start with the terrorist problem. When Bratton was last commissioner, only a handful of New York cops worked the terrorism beat.
Since 9/11, at least 1,000 officers do, and many more whenever the threat is elevated. Counterterrorism also takes a disproportionate number of outstanding officers away from routine policing.
This suggests the city needs more cops. What will it take for the mayor to say so?
The department also increasingly seems unable to react to new situations, such as the fact that it can’t carry out either “stop and frisk” or “Broken Windows” policing at anything like its previous rate.
The answer is to find new programs both cops and the community can agree on.
The right way to retrain cops is to have them work in the field under excellent leaders.
One thing that cries for action is gun violence.
Last year gangs and other hoodlums shot 7 percent more people than the year before, and this year we’re already up by nearly a fourth. If this problem isn’t tackled soon, it will translate into an increase in murders.
Property thieves are also getting bolder. In the last year, 73 ATMs have been heisted (some by cars pulling them out) despite the fact that many are in busy, well-lit areas. A couple of cases have occurred in daylight hours.
A few professional gangs are obviously behind these crimes — but the cops can’t seem to run them down.
Police work in New York, like its sports teams, needs strong public support. But that backing can’t be just feel-good words.
On the other hand, the department must also be careful how it presents itself. The image of cops popping mints and falling asleep will make the NYPD look ridiculous.
New York can go on well enough if the Yankees must take a few years to rebuild.
But the city is in peril if the generation that led American policing to new heights gets untracked.
Whether the answer is new talent, new strategies or both, the NYPD needs a serious plan for a comeback.
Thomas A. Reppetto is the past president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City and a former commander of detectives in the Chicago Police Department.