How many policemen in nyc

To the cop on the beat, one explanation covers virtually every situation: politics. Any decision that involves any degree of controversy is chalked up to politics. In particular, cops complain that they are constantly undermined by political concessions to neighborhood and minority groups, particularly when the cops have had to use force—sometimes deadly force—and the community turns up the political heat.

The city has gone downhill. It used to be that there were certain parts of New York that looked seedy and run-down. Now, say the cops, every borough has a section that looks like that. The police are even wondering if the deterioration has gone so far that it is hopeless to think about bringing the city back. Civilianization will mean that uniformed police can move out of clerical and other support jobs and be replaced by civilians who will do the job at less expense with the same quality.

Standards have fallen. According to the cops, the emphasis on recruiting women and minorities has led to lower standards. They said that women are both weaker physically and less likely to respond to situations involving danger.

In the case of minorities, both black and white cops felt that the department had lowered its overall standards to attract more minority candidates. Drugs are the difference. Throughout the ride-along, the one constant theme was the prevalence of drugs and the change drugs had made in the neighborhood and in crime.

All night long, as we cruised the precinct, both cops talked about the drug dealers who were standing on the street corners. The cops looked at the drug dealers; the drug dealers looked at the cops. Each knew what the other was doing. Cops in the middle. They are concerned about allegations of improper behavior from other cops, from citizens, and from supervisors. People are addicted to And CPOP will be expensive to implement. CPOP also blurs the line between social work and policing.

Real police work entails responding to calls and being in on arrests. It means earning your living by the level of activity in your precinct.

Good cops know how to handle people. Cops know what it takes to be a good cop. Cops know who is and who is not a good cop. There are cops, I was told, who can give the same guy three summonses and leave him smiling.

And there are cops with Napoleonic complexes who will cause a riot over a single traffic ticket. It will take support from above to make community policing work.

The cops were willing to give the idea of community policing a chance. But they were clear on one point: if it is going to work, cops on patrol must have support from their supervisors. They need to feel that, if they go out and try to work with the community and if something goes wrong, headquarters will back them up. Otherwise, the cops will once again feel like they are caught in the middle.

When we first started having police in America, we actually had more of a community-oriented policing style, exemplified by the old cop on the beat who knew people. He was an integral part of the community.

He was able to maintain order, and most parts of the community respected him. Perhaps not in the black community, where the police were part of a system of discrimination and segregation, but in most parts of the community, the cop was respected. That changed because of corruption, because politicians interfered in the operations of the police, and because of mobilization, putting cops in cars. We adopted the professional model of policing, an approach that intentionally detached the police from the community.

We just pulled up in our cars, and we only want the facts. Along with that mentality came a move toward management based on command-and-control, a paramilitary approach to management. Managers in companies know all about organizational pyramids and rigid lines of reporting. As paramilitary organizations, police departments follow that same model but to an even greater extent. It allows them very little discretion.

I remember when I was a cop on the beat back in the s. But there was no opportunity for me to use any of it. Anything I did was prescribed for me. Everything should be predictable. We need rules and regulations that cover everything. And if a police officer violates one, then the system catches him or her.

I look at the police mission in a context broader than what the textbooks say about protecting life and property by making arrests. We have hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week service. So my mission is to use the resources of the department to improve the quality of life of the citizens of this city. To me that means community policing. It means a cop back on the beat, the way it used to be. There are two major tenets to community policing. The first is problem solving.

Officers are trained and empowered to solve problems, rather than merely responding to incidents over and over again. Again, just as companies are finding new ways for customers to participate in improvement, we have a virtually untapped resource of community groups, the private sector, and other city agencies, all of which can help us do community problem solving.

People today are more concerned about what happens in the neighborhoods and, at the same time, relying less on government and doing more themselves to improve the quality of life.

They realize that crime is a community problem, not just a police problem. Not many police chiefs have tried to change the culture of their organization. Most of them are products of their own departments. Success is based on their ability to conform. So change has not been a top priority. In fact, coming in as an outsider, I think I have a better chance to succeed with community policing. I have more experience with other police departments.

I can protect the operational integrity of the department from political interference. The mayor does not try to interfere in running the department, and nobody else can. Officers should never have to worry about the politics of doing their jobs. Up to now, community policing has been viewed as a program. But the whole rest of the organization went about its business, doing everything else exactly the way it had been done before. My goal is to change all those systems to be supportive of community policing and not supportive of our traditional way of doing business.

What would you point to if you wanted people to have some idea of what community policing looks like and how it works? It was first tried out in in one precinct, and when I got here every precinct had 10 CPOP officers. CPOP is viewed as a foot patrol program.

I want every officer in this department to operate under the concept of community policing, not just those on patrol. That means detectives, it means Narcotics.

It means abandoning and eliminating many of the specialized units. In fact, by reassigning people from special units and restructuring the entire patrol force, we will increase the number of officers engaged in community policing by more than 30 times from where it was when I started.

Have you got a plan for implementing community policing in New York? We recently completed a staffing plan that calls for 17, officers and 3, detectives to provide services with community policing as our dominant style. Our plan is to take one precinct—the 72nd, which is located in the Sunset Park section of the Bronx, and make it a model precinct. That means training, new roles, and looking at different performance evaluation systems.

That means a new reward system. That means integrating everything in the precinct into the community policing philosophy and getting a snapshot now of what the whole thing will look like in four years.

In the other 74 precincts, we will implement all aspects of community policing possible with existing resources. There really is no manual that describes how to implement community policing. Despite some significant differences, the most important principles of strategic management apply to the public sector as well as to the private. Managers in both sectors strive to create value for shareholders and customers, taxpayers and service users; build and exploit the distinctive competencies of their organizations; and transform their organizations in the face of new challenges, problems, and opportunities.

In addition, to be successful, an organizational strategy in the public sector must meet three criteria. First, it must define a goal or purpose that, if achieved, would be worth the cost to the public. Third, it must be doable. If any of these criteria are not met, the strategy will fail. It is the application of these basic principles that has catapulted Lee Brown to a position of national leadership in policing. More than any other police executive, he has seen the limitations of the past strategy of policing and envisioned and pursued a new one.

To see the quality and scope of his vision, it is useful to compare the old strategy with the new. To accomplish their central goal, the police relied on three, key operational tactics: patrolling the streets, responding rapidly to calls for service, and conducting retrospective investigations to identify and apprehend criminal offenders. Over time, police departments organized and invested in their capabilities to optimize their performance in these areas.

This strategy found support among the citizens and their representatives since it seemed to promise relief from criminal victimization. The police were focused on a problem that concerned the community, and it seemed plausible that their tactics would deal with that problem effectively.

But the tactics had one additional advantage: they seemed to economize on the use of public authority and to protect citizen privacy. Because the tactics are reactive, they ensure that the police intrude only on those occasions where crimes have been committed and where citizens have invited them to intervene. Taken together, these elements constitute a remarkably coherent and successful organizational strategy—one that has endured for more than a generation throughout the country.

But it is exactly this strategy that Lee Brown is now challenging, based on some increasingly apparent weaknesses of the old and some promises of the new. It is possible, of course, to lay this failure at the door of prosecutors who fail to convict and judges who fail to sentence.

Or to claim that social forces have driven up crime rates. But the far more damaging news is that systematic research and experimentation have shown that the tactics on which the police rely simply do not do the job. Increasing the level of random patrol by a factor of two has no effect on criminal activity or on community confidence: most citizens cannot even tell when the number of patrolling vehicles has been doubled.

Nor does increasing the speed of response result in increased arrests; the time between the incidence of the crime and the call to the police is too long. And retrospective investigation turns out to be a discouragingly weak tool in dealing with crimes committed among strangers.

Usually, retrospective investigations only work well when victims or witnesses can tell detectives who committed the crimes. The police have assumed that fear was a lesser problem than actual criminal victimization and that fear could be reduced only by putting serious criminals behind bars. In fact, fear itself is just as costly as criminal victimization. It impoverishes the quality of life in urban areas, and it undermines the economic and social activities that hold neighborhoods together.

Moreover, fear is more commonly triggered by noisy teenagers, minor vandalism, dark streets, and littered hallways than by serious crimes. Police tactics such as foot patrol can reduce fear even if these tactics do not reduce serious criminal victimization. Traditional police tactics, in contrast, tend to miss an important part of the problem for which the police are responsible—the promotion of community security.

The third important crack is less widely noted but potentially far more significant: public policing is losing market share to various forms of private security. There are now more uniformed private security guards in the United States than public police officers. Public police officers are increasingly selling their off-duty time to private interests. And many citizens who cannot afford to buy private guards have bought guns, dogs, and locks to supplement police protection.

Even worse, it creates the prospect of an uneven distribution of protection. The public police could become an institution that only poor people value. These limits of professional crime fighting indicate the need for a change in strategy. They also point in a particular direction: toward a close engagement between the police and the citizens. That goal is the principal aim of the strategy of community policing.

Community policing aims not simply to reduce crime and criminal victimization, though that remains the core objective. Added to that are the goals of preventing crime by discovering and acting on the immediate conditions that seem to precipitate crime, reducing fear and promoting a sense of security by increasing the felt presence of police in local areas, and dealing more effectively with the variety of social emergencies that stimulate calls to the police, thus strengthening the relationship to the community.

Beyond the political appeal of crime control, community policing makes the police more responsive to the concerns of citizens. The police will also offer to help with community problems.

The operational methods of policing change from the reactive methods of patrol, rapid response, and criminal investigation to pro-active methods of problem solving. Instead of treating each call as a separate incident, the police will look for the problems that underlie recurrent calls.

They will also look for situations that can be mediated or where other public agencies can help. There are lots of reasons to believe that the new strategy of community policing will be successful in enhancing security and reducing crime. But there are also many uncertainties. The police culture is a very powerful one that places a premium on making arrests.

Community policing is not soft on crime. A good community police officer will make more arrests than the regular beat officer because he or she will get more information. Let me give you an example from Houston. He pulled people together so successfully that they even gave their neighborhood a name. In a way, he created the community.

In this area, there was a rash of break-ins where the burglars were armed and showed no hesitancy to shoot. People handed out flyers describing the pattern of the crimes and what to look for. As a result, one citizen called in because of some suspicious circumstances, and we caught the burglars. Instead of blaming the police, the citizens joined the police. That would never have happened under traditional policing.

Under traditional policing, there would have been a lot of scared people, a lot of finger pointing, but no progress toward solving the problem. Community policing is based on the realization that most crimes are solved with information that comes from people. In policing, as in business, change always starts with a vision. My vision is community policing as our dominant style. Then, we must change our culture to match our vision. Detective Traci L.

Police Officer William G. Detective John F. Police Officer Ronald G. Becker, Jr. Sergeant Garrett S. Lieutenant Christopher M. Police Officer Richard G. Police Officer Peter O. Detective Alick W. Detective Peter John Figoski. Sergeant Jacqueline C. Detective Annetta G. Police Officer Sherman Abrams. Police Officer Karen E.

Detective Fermin Sonny Archer, Jr. Police Officer Martin Tom. Police Officer Alain K. Sergeant Harold John Smith. Detective Kevin Anthony Czartoryski. Police Officer Robert M. Police Officer David Mahmoud. Lieutenant Jacqueline McCarthy. Detective Joseph Edward Seabrook.

Police Officer Robert V. Oswain, Jr. Police Officer Frank M. Lieutenant Carlos J. Sergeant Charles J. Police Officer Robert C. Inspector Donald G. Police Officer Renee Dunbar.

Detective Michael P. Police Officer Richard Jakubowsky. Detective Omar J. Police Officer Robert A. Zane, Jr. Lieutenant Brian S. Captain Peter L. Police Officer Vito S.

Inspector Richard Daniel Winter. Police Officer Robert J. Police Officer Gary Gerald Mausberg. Police Officer Edward J. Police Officer Allison Marie Palmer. Detective John E. Sergeant Edward Doyle "Ned" Thompson. Detective William J. Sergeant Michael W. Police Officer Frank Gerard Macri. Sergeant Claire T.

Police Officer Robert Bernard Helmke. Police Officer Madeline Carlo. Detective Russel Timoshenko. Detective Robert W. Detective Kevin George Hawkins. Sergeant Michael B. Police Officer Louise M. Detective Roberto L. Police Officer Daniel Charles Conroy. Captain Edward Charles Gilpin. Police Officer Angelo Peluso, Jr. Police Officer Kevin M. Detective Sandra Y. Police Officer Francis J. School Safety Agent Vivian A.

Detective Daniel Enchautegui. Detective Dillon H. Police Officer Ronald Evan Weintraub. Police Officer Thomas Gerard Brophy. Police Officer James Junior Godbee. Police Officer William Rivera. Detective Robert L. Detective Patrick H. Police Officer Edward M. Sergeant Keith A. Police Officer Scott M. Detective William B. Titus, Jr. Detective Thomas Francis Weiner, Jr.

Lieutenant Robert Daniel Rice. Detective James Verneuil Nemorin. Detective Rodney J. Police Officer Disdale O. New York City Police Department. Cannon, Jr. Thomas, Jr. Miller, Jr. Abruzzo, Jr. Bugdin, Jr. Donovan, Jr. Ramos, Jr. Johnson, Jr. Burns, Jr. Sergeant Louis R. Detective John A. Detective Corey J. It will merely stop good people from wanting to become police officers.

April 24, pm Updated April 24, pm. Christopher Sadowski. Share This Article. Post was not sent - check your email addresses!