"It's not our habit to invite people with easy jobs," Yale School of Management (Yale SOM) professor Douglas Rae told a packed lecture hall Jan. 21 in introducing New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir.
As part of the Yale SOM "Perspectives on Leadership" lecture series, Safir came to campus to talk about "The Challenges of Managing the World's Largest Police Force."
Some of those unique challenges, noted Rae, include having to negotiate with six unions representing some 54,000 employees, 42,000 of whom carry guns to work.
Unlike the CEO of a major corporation, the police commissioner can't partake of profits and can't offer his employees stock options, Rae reminded the many future managers in the audience. "He has an average of 8 million 'customers' daily. ... Some of his customers pay for his services; others don't. They all have to be served just the same way. ... and he has a tough boss," Rae said, referring to New York's outspoken mayor, Rudolph Giuliani.
"I do have a tough boss," Safir noted at the beginning of his talk. "But Rudolph Giuliani is the kind of administrator you need in New York City." In fact, Safir contends, it was Giuliani's reputation for toughness on crime that won him the election over David Dinkins in 1993.
"In the Seventies and Eighties New York City was known as the 'Capital of Crime,'" Safir said. "Today we just call it the 'Capital of the World,'" he boasted, noting that was how the Pope described the city on his last visit there.
How the city turned from "Crime Capital" to the nation's number-one tourist destination -- where the hotel occupancy rate grew from 65 percent in 1995 to its present 85 percent -- is, according to Safir, the result of the efforts of his department with strong support from the Giuliani administration.
Safir's generous budget of $3.2 billion, which he again credits to the mayor's office, is a major factor in the New York Police Department's (NYPD) success story, said Safir. When Giuliani took over in 1994, he reduced every agency in the city by 20%, with the notable exception of the police department, Safir recalled, noting that the Mayor reasoned that no one would invest money in a city perceived as dangerous so making New York safe became a top priority.
Regular meetings of precinct heads, a state-of-the-art crime-tracking system, called COMCAST, and a new standard for measuring "successful" policing all also contribute to the accomplishments of the NYPD in recent years, Safir said.
No longer is the number of arrests the definitive way of measuring achievement, said Safir. In determining accountability, he explained, it is better to look at the reduction of the number of crimes in a given precinct. Civilian complaints are also taken into consideration on an individual basis, he noted.
Safir also explained another governing principle that has been adopted with good outcome by the police department: the so-called "broken-window theory." According to this principle, one neglected broken pane in a neighborhood can engender a general contempt for property that will eventually result in many more windows being broken deliberately.
It was in applying this theory that Safir issued a major crackdown on what many consider a trivial crime, jumping subway turnstiles. "In 1994, 214,000 people jumped turnstiles," he reported. "It was an Olympic sport." Not only did police significantly reduce the numbers of fare evaders, but, more importantly, they discovered that among the offenders were many criminals who had previous warrants for much bigger crimes.
Other signs of the recent accomplishments of the NYPD that Safir pointed to include the eradication of "squeegy" people from the streets, the absence of "No Radio" signs in the windshields of parked cars and a 61% reduction in the number of car thefts from 1993 to 1999.
Safir holds drug trafficking to be the major source of crime in New York, and has implemented rigorous tactics to drive drug dealers out of the city. He uses a "holistic" approach, going after dealers, users and anyone at the peripheries of the drug trade -- from shops selling drug paraphernalia to landlords renting to traffickers.
While not using the term "community policing," he described police involvement with particular streets, enlisting the help of residents and reestablishing neighborhood pride as other useful strategies to combat crime.
In the question-and-answer session following his talk, Safir tackled a number of topics, from the Abner Louima police brutality case (he would have fired the perpetrators immediately) to the Diallo shooting (he contends that the accidental shooting could have happened to any police officer) to throwing unauthorized vagrants out of homeless shelters on the coldest nights of the year (he believes arresting those who prey on other city residents protects those residents and says the practice gives the vagrants a nice warm bed anyway, in jail.)
And, finally, to another question, Safir responded that, yes, he does watch the television show "NYPD Blue," and he "loves it."
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