Beat Cop to Top Cop. John F. Timoney

Unit. These plainclothes officers worked for the division inspector (two ranks above captain) and were responsible for the enforcement of the vice and gambling laws as well as assorted other laws, especially those involving the illegal sale of alcoholic beverages. Their job was to enforce those laws, in the words of Mr. Dooley (the fictional character created by the nineteenth-century satirist Finley Peter Dunne), “meant to control the pleasures of the poor.”

      As a police trainee I learned pretty fast that plainclothes officers were different from other police officers. They only worked nights, and not every night. So on a Thursday or Friday, they would enter the station house at one o’clock in the morning escorted by three or four ladies of the night who were wearing bracelets, but not the sort you buy in a jewelry store. They would deposit their charges in the holding cells and then proceed to the “124 room” (the clerical office) to type their reports. I watched this routine on a regular basis from my seat behind the telephone switchboard, where I answered calls from citizens who, at that time of night, were mostly inebriated.

      After a few months on the switchboard, I was assigned to the 124 room one night because I could type. (I had taken typing at Cardinal Hayes High School.) That night, a couple of plainclothesmen entered the station with their female charges. They secured the arrested women in the holding cells and then came into the 124 room to type their arrest reports. Or so I assumed.

      One of the plainclothes detectives came in wearing rings and assorted pieces of other jewelry and an open-collar shirt.

      “Hey, kid, I can't type. Can you knock off these reports for me?” He put two dollars next to the typewriter. I dutifully typed the reports (six 5 x 7 sheets of heavy card stock alternating with carbon paper) and other assorted paperwork. When the reports were finished, the plainclothes officers retrieved their paperwork and their girls and headed outside to a waiting prisoner wagon for a trip to night court.

      With the two dollars in hand, I walked over to my lieutenant, a silver-haired old Irishman with over thirty years in the department, who was barely awake and seemed bored by the whole arrest routine. When I showed him the two dollars, he responded, “Don't worry about it. They'll make that back in overtime.”

      Some weeks later, the same plainclothes officers entered the station house at 5:00 A.M. This time they had in tow three or four guys who wore the same bracelets the ladies of the night had worn. In addition, they brought in box after box of liquor bottles and multiple cases of beer. They informed the lieutenant that they had just hit a “bottle club” on Third Avenue. The lieutenant nodded and handed them a stack of vouchers (property inventory reports) in addition to the normal arrest reports. A plainclothes officer came into the 124 room, where I was once again assigned, with the arrest reports and vouchers and placed five dollars next to the typewriter. He said, “Hey, kid, can you knock these off in a hurry? We gotta get to court before eight.” For a guy making $112 every two weeks ($1.40 per hour), a five-dollar tip for typing someone else's report was astonishing.

      The Third Division Plainclothes Unit was probably the most infamous plainclothes unit in the city. It had a long and storied history dating back to before the Depression. In December 1968, at 157 West Fifty-seventh Street, two people (a man and a woman) were shot and killed and a third was seriously injured inside an apartment in this luxury building. It was believed that the victims were involved in some kind of prostitution ring and that the shooter was a member of the NYPD—Bill Phillips, a former Third Division plainclothes detective. Phillips was later tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for the crime.

      Also in late 1968, an address book was found inside a telephone booth and then turned over to a newspaper reporter. A front-page story with the names and addresses of bars and restaurants that were listed in the address book and that had given payoff money to the police appeared in the next day's paper—“proof” there had been a “pad.” (Pad was the slang for payoff. Those using police vernacular would refer to this guy or that place being “on the pad.”)

      When the story broke, a duty captain was visiting the precinct and engaged the desk lieutenant in conversation regarding the address book. Half jokingly, he said to the lieutenant, “Look here, it says this restaurant paid a hundred dollars, yet the son of a bitch told us he was only getting fifty from that place. The lying bastard was holding out!”

      Sitting there at the telephone switchboard and listening to the conversation, I was amused and yet a bit shocked at the casualness of the captain's conversation. But I must admit I was not surprised. The whole idea of pads and payoffs just seemed part of the everyday culture of the NYPD, and even a young, impressionable police trainee was privy to such conversations.

      A few years later, the hearings of the Knapp Commission on police corruption were televised. The hearings featured numerous NYPD personalities, including the famous Frank Serpico. The plainclothes officers of the Third Division were also featured prominently in these hearings.

      The net effect of the Knapp Commission changed the NYPD forever, and for the good. By and large, the recommendations of the commission were the right ones, including the notion of paying police officers better salaries and encouraging the education of young police officers. However, there was one particular downside to the recommendations. It made sense to recommend the elimination of plainclothes officers and the corruption they bred by establishing a centralized unit for narcotics and vice enforcement called the Organized Crime Control Bureau. But the unintended consequence of this recommendation was that local police officers were discouraged from enforcing narcotics, gambling, and other quality-of-life violations. This led to troubling situations where open-air drug markets flourished because, in order to prevent police corruption, uniformed police officers were strongly discouraged from making narcotics arrests. The irony is that average citizens, particularly those in tough neighborhoods, who observed open-air drug dealing going on even as police car after police car drove by, reached the understandable conclusion that the cops were being paid off to look the other way. Over the next twenty years, I must have heard that complaint at community meetings at least a hundred times.

      The commission's recommendation to remove the NYPD from regulatory enforcement of the ABC (Alcohol Beverage Control) laws was aimed at ending the corruption potential from licensed and unlicensed premises. However, the unintended consequence of this allowed licensed and unlicensed premises to run amok and engage in more serious criminal violations, such as assaults, shootings, and drug dealing. This seemed to me not the best way to run a police department. Because we were fearful of corruption, we prohibited and discouraged police officers from engaging in activities at which they could be corrupted; yet we still had periodic episodes of corruption. The point is that police departments should never shy away from enforcing the law due to a fear of corruption. The bottom line is that you enforce the law, and if there is a corruption problem, you deal with the corruption problem. Years later, this would become one of the central tenets of Commissioner Bill Bratton's administration.

      What I most remember of these early days was the atmosphere of the time, the zeitgeist of the late 1960s. The Vietnam War was in full bloom and with it the antiwar protests in every major city, especially New York City. In April 1968, Martin Luther King was killed, which resulted in civil unrest in most major cities across the United States. Months later, Bobby Kennedy was also killed.

      The protests and civil unrest preoccupied the NYPD to the detriment of ordinary policing. It was policing by crisis. Hundreds or thousands of police could be handling antiwar protests in Midtown Manhattan, then head up to deal with the unrest and riots at Columbia University, and then later head to riots in the various African American neighborhoods in the city. There was a real feeling that Armageddon was at hand.

       The Police Academy

      Civil unrest and protests affected not only the ordinary policing of the neighborhoods but also training at the police academy. In February 1969, I was transferred from the 17th Precinct to the police academy to begin my six months of training to become a full-fledged NYPD police officer. The academy didn't have the feel of a regular school or college. Rather, it looked and felt more like a military boot camp mobilizing for war. Thousands of officers were going through the training, and the facility's capacity was always an issue. Incredibly, the academy operated seven days a week, from 6:00 A.M. to midnight.