most of whom live payday to payday, it was a hard, expensive lesson that would affect us the rest of our time on the job. For me, it was particularly hard. I was to be married a few weeks later to Noreen Carroll, whose father was a sergeant in the 28th Precinct in Harlem.
In addition to loosing two weeks’ pay, the job action caused huge friction between those officers who, out of conscience, refused to participate and those who did. There was some ugliness and some vandalism to the conscientious officers’ lockers. That ugliness remained my most significant memory and proved quite valuable when I had to handle another police “job action” in 1986, when I was the commander of the 5th Precinct in Chinatown.
Stopping the Dougie Walshes
In 1971, Patrick Murphy, the new reform police commissioner, put together a group of top police executives that included his deputy commissioner for community affairs, Benjamin Ward. The group was asked to study the issue of police use of deadly physical force, specifically when police officers discharge their weapons in the line of duty. Police shootings were the matches that lit the fuses of much of the civil unrest that occurred in city after city throughout the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s. The committee came up with a series of recommendations, which were then put into a police directive.
The directive set up the procedures for how and who would conduct an investigation whenever a police officer discharged his weapon, regardless of whether or not he wounded/killed someone, and whether or not it was intentional or accidental. The directive also listed certain situations in which an officer was forbidden from discharging his weapon. The most controversial of these new guidelines prohibited a police officer from “discharging his weapon at or from a moving vehicle, unless the occupants of the other vehicle are using deadly physical force against the officer or another person, by means other than the vehicle.” In other words, a police officer could not shoot at a vehicle that was coming toward him unless the occupants of the vehicle were using deadly physical force (shooting at the officer). If the officer felt his life was in danger from the approaching car, then he should get out of the way!
While the policy was crafted and ready to go, it was never implemented for fear of a backlash from the police union. Into the early 1970s, police officers were being gunned down in the streets on an almost regular basis. Therefore, the union would have had little problem rallying the public, press, and politicians to support their cause. Six years earlier, the police union had roundly defeated a voter referendum on the establishment of a civilian complaint review board.
It is important to note that there is never a good time to implement a controversial policy. However, implementing controversial policies after a controversy is sure to generate more controversy.
In August 1972, an eleven-year-old African American boy was shot and killed by an NYPD officer while he was fleeing a stolen car in Staten Island. The media ran with the story, and as a result, racial tensions reached a boiling point. The police commissioner directed Ben Ward to go to Staten Island to gauge the temperature of the community. Ward spent two days listening to and speaking with community residents and leaders, assuring them that an appropriate investigation would follow.
In 1985, while discussing the issue of police shootings with Ward, who was now police commissioner, he informed me that upon his return to headquarters from those two days in Staten Island, he reported his findings to the police commissioner and recommended the implementation of the deadly physical force policy that had been developed a year prior. The police commissioner, looking to relieve the public pressure, concurred. In less than two weeks, the policy was announced to the public, and it went a long way to assuage the concerns of the black community. Meanwhile, the police union objected strenuously, feeling that the NYPD had caved in to community pressure and, as a result, was jeopardizing the ability of police officers to defend themselves. They also feared that the top brass had “rushed through” the creation of a radical policy in the days following the shooting of the eleven-year-old boy.
The irony was that the policy had actually been developed in 1971, a full year prior to the shooting. But because the top brass feared that then was not the right time to institute the policy, they sat on it, waiting for the right time to arrive. There is almost never a right time to institute radical policy change: you just institute it. However, there can always be a wrong time—such as immediately following the shooting of an eleven-year-old boy. In situations like that, people are invariably going to allow their own ideas and prejudices to influence their opinion of the change.
The development and implementation of the deadly physical force policy has two final lessons: First, if you've taken the time to study and discuss a new, radical policy change then decide not to implement it, that needs to be explained. Second, when you implement radical policy change without explanation and rationale, do not be surprised if the recipients of that information (police officers, the public, and the press) all come to entirely different conclusions concerning that policy.
Many in the black community felt that the policy would help reduce the number of African Americans killed by police; many in the white community felt that the police department was succumbing to community pressure and jeopardizing the safety of its officers. The media, depending upon their political leaning, came up with their own understanding of the policy.
The “don't shoot at a vehicle” part of the new directive was discussed ad nauseam among the officers in the 44th Precinct. The one thing we all agreed upon was that the cause of the policy was Dougie Walsh. Dougie had a habit of shooting at cars that drove toward him. Also at cars that drove away from him. What we didn't realize is that every precinct in the city had a Dougie Walsh who shot at cars on a pretty regular basis.
The other much-discussed part of the directive dealt with forbidding officers to shoot at fleeing felons. The wisdom of this particular section was upheld in 1985 when the Supreme Court of the United States, in the landmark decision Garner v. Tennessee, forbade shooting at unarmed fleeing felons. The court justices used the NYPD policy as part of their legal rationale.
I did not appreciate how effective the policy was until the early 1980s, when I was assigned as a young lieutenant to the Chief of Operations Office at police headquarters. In l983, there was a series of congressional hearings on police brutality regarding deadly shootings by members of the NYPD. The hearings were racially charged, and my boss, the chief of operations, asked me to do some research on the recent history of police shootings in the city. When I looked at the numbers, they were startling, especially the effect of the deadly physical force directive that was sent out in August 1972.
In 1971, the last year before the firearms directive was issued, the NYPD recorded more than eight hundred incidents of a police officer discharging his weapon, whether a person was wounded/killed or not, whether the discharge was intentional or accidental. Ninety to one hundred people were killed as a result of police bullets.
The firearms discharges for the first eight months of 1972 (about two-thirds of the year) look similar to the numbers for 1971. However, when you track the firearms discharge numbers for the last four months of 1972 (after the directive was implemented), there is an immediate and dramatic decline of somewhere around 40 percent. For 1973, the first full year of the firearms directive, overall shootings were reduced to between five hundred and six hundred, with about sixty-six civilians killed as a result.
Over the next thirty-five years, the shooting numbers continued to decline to the point where the number of civilians killed by police officers is around 12 per year and the number of overall shootings has dropped to fewer than 150. The bottom line is that when an organization produces a good, sound policy on a critical matter—in this case, deadly physical force—and combines the policy with other changes such as training, the results can be remarkable.
I am sure there are some who would argue that the restrictive shooting policy implemented by the NYPD was specific to New York City and that
