Free Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing by Joe Domanick

transferred out of the chief’s office, he began looking around for a new opportunity.
    He found it in 1983 when a corruption scandal arose at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, and he replaced its police chief. The MBTAP was a small, underfunded department, haphazardly led and badly equipped, but the scandal brought attention, and with it significant money from the state to change the situation. And Bratton did. He was then invited to join a select group of police executives, public officials, and academics developing innovative community policing strategies at the Executive Session on Policing at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Around the same time, he was honored with a prestigious award by a newly formed organization of law enforcement professionals and prominent social scientists known as the Police Executive Research Forum. The award got him noticed, and in 1990—one year before the Rodney King beating—he accepted the job of chief of the NYTP. By then, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers had come to view their subways as a series of dark holes—each one submerged in air so dank and foul you felt the need to hold your breathwhen you entered; each desecrated by discordant Magic Marker graffiti and encrusted in a coat of grime that sapped your soul; and many so unsafe that you feared mugging or harassment every time you stepped into them. That was the feeling. And there was truth to all of it.
    But it was not necessarily the whole story. As Bratton later wrote in Turnaround , by 1990 the Transit Authority “had virtuallywiped out graffiti on the trains.” InTA focus groups, women interviewed believed that 30 percent of the city’s crimes were committed on subways, and 40 to 50 percent of its murders. In fact, only3 percent of felonies occurred in subways and only between 1 and 2 percent of homicides. But people felt trapped in subways, where there was no place to run.
    Other focus groups found that manytransit officers were deeply demoralized and hated their jobs. Many were assigned to stand by a subway station’s turnstyles and make sure nobody evaded paying a fare. It was security guard work, and essentially fruitless. There weren’t enough subway cops on any work shift to cover all the subway entrances, so someone determined not to pay could just walk a few blocks down to the next station. What they wanted to do, the officers said, was to protect the public.
    Bratton gave them their wish. He started out by reforming officer training, forcing the transit police brass out of their city-owned, take-home cars and into the subways to travel to work in uniform, just as he was doing. Then he replaced a broken-down communication system with one that actually worked both inside and outside the subways, and identified and rapidly promoted talented, smart, ambitious people.
    He formed teams of officers to lie in wait and arrest fare-beaters. To avoid flooding the jails with fare-beaters for twenty-four to forty-eight hours as they waited to be arraigned, he ordered the immediate release of those who’d been unarmed and had no outstanding arrest warrants. Missing the subsequent court date, however, would trigger rearrest at their homes. Decoy units were also formed to attract and arrest would-be muggers, and gangs of muggers were targeted and broken up. Many were repeat offenders, who started receiving far stiffer sentences than previously. Thirty months later, when Bratton resigned as chief,felony subway crimes haddecreased by over 20 percent, robberies by 40 percent, and fare evasions by 50 percent.
    During this time, Bratton also introduced and championed social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling’s contentious but highly influential “Broken Windows” theory of crime. Such crimes as public drunkenness, aggressive panhandling, street prostitution, and loitering, Wilson and Kelling argued in a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article entitled “Broken Windows: The Police and