#127 The Crime Machine, Part I

Hey, quick warning before we start the show, this week's story has a couple vivid descriptions of sexual violence. They're both in the second part of the story, but if that's not something you want to hear, this might be a good one to skip. Okay. From Gimlet, this is reply all, and PJ vote. At 33 years old, after years of working in a meat market, Pedro Serrano switched careers. He'll never forget his first day of the new job. Where did you get sent? The Full World Precent, that's 138th Street, and Alexander Nebronx. So now, we go then to Full World Precent, eyes wide, I'm a 33-year-old, old man, but I feel like I'm a rookie. This is brand new. If you have a changed job, then feel funny that first month, et cetera. That time's 100, because you have a gun and radios. They sent me to a very active area in regards to crime, a lot of crime everywhere. What kind of crime? You name it. I mean, it's everything, there's robberies, there's rapes, there's larcenies, there's salts. You name it. I mean, whatever is out there, it's out there. The thing that was weird about the job was that Pedro's bosses didn't really seem to want him to pursue the actual violent, serious crimes that he saw. What they wanted to do instead was just to write summonses. Summonses are just the tickets that cops give out for the low-level stuff, misdemeanors. You'd give a summons to a guy drinking beer in the street or riding his bike on the sidewalk. There's a lot of pressured to write summonses. One of the ones that never leave my head was, it was all the time, order to write five. You had to, you have over time, but you got to come back with five summons or get that with. I'll explain that later. Well, we're driving around and the senior guy stops and says, all right, this is one. It's really early in the morning, the streets are almost completely empty. It's hard to even find a person, let alone somebody doing something wrong. Their boss is pointing at this man who's just standing on the sidewalk alone outside his store, but the van stops. Some guy jumps out and is one guy in front of a woodega doing absolutely nothing. They gave him a summons for block and pedestrian traffic. We were just shaking our heads and I was like, why did you give him block and pedestrian traffic? And they just start laughing. I'm like, oh wow. All right. So we move on. Peter says the next stop was this Mexican man who was just sitting alone on a stoop. They wrote him up for the exact same thing, blocking pedestrian traffic. And this was the whole night until all of us, so like 4 or 5, it was in the van until everyone had five. Peter was so confused by what had happened that night. He actually went home and looked up the definition of blocking pedestrian traffic. These guys had not been blocking pedestrian traffic. This was absurd. And Peter didn't know it, but all over the city cops were getting pushed in the exact same way to aggressively write summons as to people for doing seemingly nothing. I talked to another cop, this guy in Brooklyn named Edwin Raymond. After the Academy, I would run into offices that I was an Academy with and it would be, oh, hey, what's up? Are you still that transit? And the third question, without fail, the third question was always, what did they want from you guys over there? That's how much this is part of the culture. Week to week, the summons as Edwin was being told to write could change. One week, they might want turn-style jumpers. Another week, they want open containers. And they tell them the reason we're having you do this is because when you summons people, it's an opportunity to check if they have a warrant. And if they do, you can arrest them because it means they committed a serious crime. It made sense to them. You see, at first I felt good because when someone would have a warrant, I felt good. I was like, okay, you had a warrant until one day it was just, the girl looked like she was 10. And she was in my arrest. I arrested someone else for something. But she was in the cells. And I said, you know, in girl, like, what are you doing here? Like, oh, like me and my friends, we went through the turn-style together. As I was your friend, oh, my friends, she got a summons and they arrested me. I said, for what? How do you? 16. I said, but for what? This is just going through the turn-style with your friends, like, yeah. Edwin, it didn't make sense that this girl was in jail just for sneaking through a subway turn-style. He asked her, are you sure you're not leaving something out? Observe the North American dad, 50s, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana and offer a Peter's in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, dang, that's a good offer. The highest form of approval, no haggling, no hassle, no one called him boss. He's still on the couch, astonishing. Sell your car today on Carvana.com, pick up these may apply. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. Did you get the off-salt hard time, no? So that's when I said, you know, I saw who a resting officer was, I said, yo, what would you get her for? Oh, she, um, she had a warrant. I said, warrant, they said for what? I don't know. Like, I don't care. She has a warrant. I got my collar. You know, I'm meeting my quota. So everyone goes back to the girl, still just trying to figure out what happened? So I said, um, did you ever receive a summons? So it's like, what's that? Is it a ticket? It's like, yeah, when on my birthday, on her 16th birthday, there's a few months after, I said, what happened? I went to the movies with my friend. We walked out of the movie and I also said, didn't I tell you guys to get away from the corner and just gave all of us tickets? And as a 16 year old, the last thing she's thinking about is going to court to handle the ticket. So what had happened was she ignored the summons and the summons had turned into a bench warrant. And once you had a bench warrant, if a cop stopped you, they put you in jail. Which made everyone feel like, wait a minute, like the whole point of these stops is we're specifying bad guys with warrants, not just people who ignored their summons, like, what is going on here? That's when I started saying, I got to look into these warrants. So now when I was stopping folks running their names and doing a little bit of research into the warrants, I said, what the fuck is this? It was summonses from my colleagues outside of the transit system who were just trying to meet their own quotas. So it just, it was like, self-appetuating. Everyone in Pedro didn't know each other, but they were having the same problem and they were asking their bosses the same question. What is going on here? Why can't we just do normal, honest policing? And the answer was always the same. The reason all this is happening is because of ComSTAP. This computer program that the NYPD uses to measure every single cop and tell them in excruciating detail how to do their job. Their bosses didn't like ComSTAP. They tell them, I know it's not fair, but I have to do what ComSTAP says. Because if I don't, they'll just punish me. So do what you're supposed to do, and let me try to protect us. The thing they couldn't figure out was why the system existed in the first place. And if all their bosses hated it, who liked it? Who wanted things to be the way that they were? So a year ago, I started trying to answer this question. And it turns out ComSTAP really just comes from the brain of this one person, a person who was not at all the person I was imagining. He was this idealistic, grouchy, smart, weirdo, with a very complicated brain. His name was Jack Maple. And the machine that he first designed 25 years ago was so different from the machine that Pedro and Edwin would encounter. Jack's machine was supposed to do nothing less than save the city of New York. And before things got bad, it did. A few years before he died, Jackson sat down with his reporter named Chris Mitchell. He wanted to help writing his life story. There's over 20 hours of these tapes, and since I found him last year, I've listened them over and over again. And I've also talked to a lot of the people who are closest to Jack, trying to understand what it was he thought he was building. So I have the real story how it started. So I'll tell you the real story. This is Bill Courtney. He's retired cop. All right. So I became a trans cop in 1983. You just can't understand how bad it was back then. I don't know like when you were born 85. Okay. When you were five years old, New York City was a horror show. This is W-I-M-F. And the murder rate just keeps on rising. It was just one horrific event after the next. As a police officer with a gun, I felt like I was a victim, just living in this city. Get up in the morning, and as you got close to getting to work, your heart would start pumping. You'd start thinking like, what's going to happen tonight? There was a lawlessness out in the streets. And it's just unfold in front of you as you turn the corner and walk right into a robbery. Or walk into a guy holding somebody at gunpoint or a stabbing who is right. right there. This is just like Mayhem. Non-stop. People screaming and yelling. Someone coming running around the corner and you know woman holding the strap of her purse which is now gone and a bruise on her eye. Just non-stop craziness. People see you, stopping the tracks, take off running. You take off running after them and you don't even know why. And you come home and you lock yourself in your apartment and you pray that nothing bad happens to you or your kids. It really was a horrible place to live. All day, every day, bill shut up to work and just felt the overwhelming feeling that for all the work he did, none of it was really going to make a difference. We'd rest people for not paying their fairs. We'd give out numerous summonses for everything from urinating to disorderly conduct. It meant nothing. And nobody knew what to do to make it better. The only person with any optimism about the situation was Jack Maple. Jack was a sergeant in charge of Billy's squad and Jack was convinced that everything wrong with New York City could be fixed if only they would put Jack Maple in charge of it. Jack's boss is had a different belief. They believe that Jack was delusional. The guy walked around like he thought he was a character from a 1930s detective movie. People didn't like the way he dressed, didn't like the way he stood up to him. So Jack wore like spats, a bowl of hat, a sport coat with baggy pants and shades. And he looked like Evergie Robinson meets Truman Capote or something, I don't know. In the New York City Police Department in the 1980s, Jack was like the equivalent of that kid who just wears a suit to school every day for no reason. And what made this even more ridiculous was that Jack was a transit cop. Transit was its own like dinky department. Basically, they were seen as like glorified mall cops. But Jack acted like being a transit cop was the most glamorous job in the world. After work, he would go to all these extremely high-end fancy bars. Plays where celebrities went, like the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel. You know, here's Jack with his Hamburg and his spats going out after work amongst these rich people that Jack used to call foffington's, you know. And everybody would always ask who is that guy. He'd go to the bathroom and say, "Hey, who is that guy?" They thought he was an actor, a producer, whatever. And then people come up to him and say, "Who are you?" He always, his response, quite often was, "My name is Waldo Wiedemeyer." And I get shy out of the can and I wringling from the circus. How we gravitated towards police work, I really don't know. But he really wanted to be famous. He really wanted to make his mark on the world. Meanwhile at work, Jack was always on the verge of getting fired. The thing was he kept ignoring the fundamental rule of being a transit cop, which was just stay in the subways. In his mind, he was like, "I'm a crime fighter. Wherever there is crime, I must go." And so he was constantly leaving the subway. In the tapes I have of Jack, he tells Chris his favorite place to go when he was leave. Times Square. You know, it was full of pimples with those "Ogorado, Cadillac" like what the hot boy does. Forty-three is real dark around here and he didn't get the bar over there. On 41st days before the terminal bar appropriately named. So even though Jack wasn't supposed to leave the subway, he'd found this loophole that was letting him do it, which is that there was one hour a day is the lunch break, where technically he could go wherever he wanted. Jack said that he was getting an education in Times Square. He said he was getting a master's degree in Cracology. He was starting to believe that he could read, crime, the way like a weatherman can read a weather pattern. I charted this guy Jimmy Nusuforo who worked for Jack. He told me a story about Jack doing this. He said tomorrow, Jimmy, we're working. You and me. I'm like, Jack, it's Thanksgiving. He says, yeah, he says plenty of pickpockets out there. He says, we're working. So and what we would do is on 30, and he told me this, on 34th Street in Manhattan. He said, it's the easternmost exit in Macy's on 34th Street. There's a stairway that goes down into the subway. And so during the holidays, everybody's coming out of Macy's and going down into that subway. And he said it creates a bottleneck. So all these people get stuck at the top of the stairs. So he said that is the perfect situation for pickpockets. And he was absolutely right. So we would play that 50 foot area there. And every day we would lock up pickpockets there. They were like all over these people, like bees on honey. Stuff like this was why Jimmy and Billy thought that Jack was a genius. But from their boss's perspective, it was like, it's not your job to arrest people outside of the subways. Don't arrest people in California. Don't arrest people in New Jersey. Don't arrest people in Times Square. You are a transit cop. So they transferred him to the Bronx. So he was living in Howard Beach. And to take the train all the way to the Bronx, that's like a punishment. It could take you two hours to get to work on the train. This is Brigitte O'Connor. She was a transit cop. Later on, she and Jack actually got married. She said that when the department decided to punish Jack in this way, they made a crucial mistake, which is that they forgot that to get from Howard Beach to the Bronx, you had to transfer through Times Square. So when he got off at Times Square, he always made an arrest. And then once you make the arrest, then what happens? Then you have to process it and then you're done in center booking for 12 hours. You know, it was like, that's a whole day. Once you make the arrest, you're done for the day. And he never made it to the Bronx. He never made it to ever. He was assigned to the Bronx and he made an arrest every day. Over and over again, Jack, we get transferred to some punishment post. Some desolate street corner in the middle of nowhere where they tell him, just stand there and don't do anything. And over and over again, he would ignore them and make an arrest. And eventually they'd give up. They'd just chuck him back to transit. Transit was its own punishment. The Siberia, under Siberia, Jack called it once. He spent over a decade down there, stuck in the tunnels. For the people who believed in him, the tragedy of Jack Maple was that he was somebody who could have done something. He'd been this like bright young cop. He was the youngest detective in transit. And then it was just like he couldn't help himself. He had to pick fights with the bosses. He had to spend every single night going to these fancy bars. He took out nearly 30,000 dollars in loans against this house just so he could keep going to the Oak Room. It didn't make sense. I talked to this guy Mike Daly. Mike was Jack's best friend. He's a reporter. And he told me the reason for all of this was this thing that happened to Jack this one night when he was 22. The night Jack almost died. He was at 42nd Street in Bryant Park and a canary yellow jumpsuit with Elton John sunglasses. Buying drugs and locking up drug dealers. And he ended up wrestling for his own gun with this guy. The guy got to hold the gun and shot twice at Jack's head at close range. He barely missed. They ended up wrestling for it. It went off and the guy got shot. Both of them survived and Jack made the arrest. The end of the night. He was walking across Central Park South. Covered with this guy's blood with a muzzle flash burn in each cheek and he walked past the window to the Oak Bar. And he looks inside and there's all these well-to-do wealthy people on the other side of the glass. Drinking and laughing and it looked like a world where nothing bad could ever happen. Jack knew if he died that night he would have just been a dead transocop. And for the rest of his life that left him with a lot of sympathy for other people who ended up on their backs dying unimportant deaths. And he also saw what the city can offer you and what the city should be and how great the city should be and why shouldn't it be great for other people to and why shouldn't other people live like they were on another side of a glass where nothing bad happened to him. In 1988 after a decade in purgatory Jack caught a tiny break. He got put in charge of this small squad that would investigate repeat offender robberies. The people who were committing tons of robberies in the subway. And Jack decided his first target as head of the squad would be this incredibly tricky problem that nobody had been able to solve. The thing the cops called wolfback robberies. So here's what was happening. People who rode the subways were getting attacked. They were getting attacked by big groups of people. A minimum of five but sometimes as much as like 20 or 30 who would just mob their victims on the subway. They'd run in and with either just their fists or sometimes with knives or box headers they would just pummel the person to just take everything they had. Some citizens are carrying weapons to protect themselves just in case there's trouble. It's a terrible situation. Things are so bad that the public school chancellor had asked if the police could have special armed subway cars to escort kids to school. The 4,000 members of the transit police have been unable to stop this. Jack was gonna try to fix it with 24 cops. Everybody said these attacks were random but to Jack they didn't look random because he saw these patterns in who got attacked. Like for instance Asian people were getting attacked way more than anybody else. He did a victimology study. He found they were four times more likely to get attacked. So Jack came up with the idea of starting a decoy unit and so we all dressed like, you know, know average every day, people that either get mugs or people that are on the train. The NYPD had actually done decoy units before, but Jack did not like the way they did them. They were borderline entrapment. They'd have like an undercover cop on the train with a $20 bill hanging out of their pocket. Then they'd arrest the poor guy who tried to take it. But Jack's goal was that he wanted to target the repeat violent offenders. The people who were intentionally targeting the victims who showed up in Jack's studies. So he said our decoy should just be like an Asian cop who pretends to be asleep with a nice watch on. We're going to actually have cops dress up as every kind of victim that we see show up. So one day he looks at Billy. He said, you know what, he goes, you've got this boyish look to you. He says, Billy, we're going to put you in a dress. So I was like, well, that's not going to happen. Billy was a straight macho cop. He did not want to do this, but that was Jack's point. He told him they're never going to think you're a cop. They'll figure there's no way you'd agree to do it. And we'll make my partner, one of my partners, Wayne Richardson, he'll be like a nerd with coke bottle glasses, and you'll walk together or sit together and everyone's going to just rob you like it's, you know, going out of style. So I come in Friday night and they have a wig, a bra and some other things waiting for me. So they stick Billy in the middle of the subway car and then around him, there are a bunch of undercover cops who are dressed to look like random subway passengers. Jack would wear this really ugly playboy bunny sweater. Jimmy would dress up like kind of like his idea of what like a punk rocker looked like. And then, you know, we would have to get more creative on that train to make people believe that we were in cops. So we would do things like the backups, we would roll joints right on the train out of looked in team, we would use looked in team, roll joints. We would smoke those joints in the last car of the train, we're not supposed to smoke, but just to make ourselves more believable. We would sell those joints, you know, on the train, back and forth to each other, that type of thing. I think people believe that these guys ain't no freaking cops. Was there anything else that you do just to like seem more credible? Yeah, we used to have a boom box, we would bless music in there and it wasn't Frank Sinatra. And some of the backups would start dancing in that rear car and other guys, perps would get up and they'd start dancing and it's like a party and that's what it was known as the party car. So the subway doors would open, group of perpetrators would walk on, looking for somebody to rob, and they'd see Billy just looking like an easy victim. Somebody would pull out a knife to cut the necklace off his throat, it really never took much time. We would instantly rob everywhere we went, you know, in a matter of minutes we had, I think we'd been robbed like six times in, you know, like an hour or something like that. But before they could get away, this crew of undercover cops jumped on them and arrested them all. It worked. Over and over again, it worked. Not just because they were able to lock up a bunch of criminals, but because the tactic itself was so flashy and attention grabbing that actually sort of advertised to people who would have committed these crimes that it wasn't safe. Somebody who looks like a victim could actually just be another undercover cop. Wolfpack robberies plummeted from 1200 a year down to 12. And within the department, it was like for the first time some of Jack's bosses seemed to think that maybe he might be as smart as he seemed to think he was. So credibility in hand, Jack unveils his actual big idea. The thing that will transform not only New York City, but the entire world. When he tells Billy what he wants him to do, it just sounds like an arts and crafts project. Jack told me, listen, he goes, I want you to cover this entire office with a piece of paper. I don't know what you got to do, but I want every single subway station represented in this office. The New York City subway had 430 subway stations. Jack was telling Billy, go draw them off for me. It was a huge pain in the ass. So it was like, okay, okay. So I kept blowing Jack off and I just thought it was an ominous task to actually have to get up on a chair and tape pieces of paper to a wall representing every single subway station. But he does it. And when he's done it, it actually looks crazy. It's like, they have this tiny office and the walls are covered. It's 55 feet of paper. And now Jack shows up just holding the crime stats for the subway. Like a huge printout that has every single reason robbery. Pages and pages of information on lists.matrix, ancient printer from, it seems like a thousand years ago. And when you look at it, it just looks like garbage. So Jack tells Bill, what we're going to do today is we're going to create the charts of the future. Here's what I want you to do. Take this endless spreadsheet of all these different crimes and start putting them on the map. So here's the first one, 4am, somebody got mugged with a knife at Times Square. That'll be like a pink dot, put a pink dot at Times Square. There's another mugging at 6am at Chamber Street, put a pink dot at Chamber Street. And initially we would use markers or pens and color it in and then we just started using these different color sticky dots and we put the dot on for the time of day that it happened and then we'd write the code right in the middle of the dot which made it even easier. They'd seen crime maps before and every map they'd ever seen had shown them exactly what they already knew. Once a month you stick a bunch of pins on a map of the neighborhood and you see that there's tons of crime and it's completely overwhelming. But when they all stepped back and looked at what they'd made, when they looked at the charts of the future, they saw this map was different. This map, it showed you the subways the way Jack's brain saw the subways. It was updated every single day with every single crime represented by time. So a bunch of blue dots at Times Square. Those are all pickpockets. And in the afternoon they'd be orange. Orange dots that were now down at West Forest Street because they'd moved downtown. Color coding was huge because that really just spelled it out for you. It's just staring at you, they're telling you, "Look, there's a problem over here. It could either be one specific location or it could be one train line, you know, the whole line and you see it going down and they're hitting here one night, they're hitting here, they're hitting here." And one of the things they'd been wondering about was this huge uptick in purse snatchings. A hundred more purse snatchings than they'd had that month the year before. And these purse snatchings were happening in a way more dangerous way. People were hiding between the trains and grabbing women's purses as the trains sped through the platform. They were worried somebody was going to get killed. And when they looked at the charts, they realized, "Oh, wait a minute. All these new purse snatchings are actually happening on one train line. Not only that, they just happen across a few train stations and always in the afternoon. So Jack puts all his cops on that one train and they're able to identify a suspect. "I go to his apartment, it's way not down the door and this motherfucker, I mean, I got a hint at you. He jumps from the fire escape. He's not going to hit floor. Not the next floor down, he jumps the next apartment over and down one floor. "You understand the jump I'm talking about now?" So now it's embarrassing this motherfucker gets away, right? So the guy gets away. But not long after that, Jack's able to catch him. And in the weeks after that, they see that this whole enormous purse snatching crime wave, it goes away. It was all just the one guy, which, for Jack, confirmed the theory that he'd had. Which is that crime was like any other industry. A small percentage of people did most of the work. And with the charts, he felt like he could identify the criminal overachievers, arrest them, and make the city much safer. An unprecedented drop in subway crime, thousands of crimes prevented. Robbery's cut three times faster than the city-wide robbery rate. Fawning crime in the subway dropped 30% in two years. Go down into the subway. Subway riders in New York actually letting passengers off, being obedient. New York City was as dangerous as it had ever been. But the subways wore this like oasis of relative calm. So in 1993, this new police commissioner takes over the department, Bill Breton. And he says two things that are extremely shocking. One, he's going to cut crime in the city in half. And two, his second command, the guy who's going to pull this off, is Jack Maple. He says Jack is going to do what he did for the subways, but for the whole city. After the break, Jack Maple for the New York City police department. That's new. Now that Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense? Check responses set up require compatibility and availability, very 16 plus. Tammy, regularly hauled stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's wholesale club, saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. Have you met my kid? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. They call me the road warrior. This is your home, road warrior mom, home of the save. Join for just $20 at bj's.com/maskeet and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon, limited time offer, new members only. BJ's home of the save. "From the studio that brought you one to Vijay, I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore." "The vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy. That family wasn't real." "Are you sure about that?" "I had a father called Vijay." "Oh, is this possible?" "Oh, I miss you." "Don't miss the two episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest." "Nothing bonds a family together." that are quite like mortal jeopardy. Now streaming, only on Disney's Plus. (humming) When it comes to my policy, farmers gives it to me straight, so there's no surprises. It's your coverage, you should never be confused. You hear that? An insurance provider with a conscience. We're a choir, but yes, we have that too. Straight forward coverage, you can literally understand. That's what you get when. You have farmers, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump. Learn more at farmers.com, underwritten by farmers, truck, or fire insurance, exchanges, or affiliate. Products not available in every state. Welcome back to the show. So in late 1993, the announcement goes out, that Jack Maple is gonna be second in command of the New York City Police Department, and everyone agrees that this idea is terrible. The city police, they go, this transit cop comes in, and he's more or less running and transforming the NYPD. What are you kidding me? Is this fat, rigged, and transit cop in a bow tie? This is Mike Daley again. People didn't just hate Jack because he was a transit cop in a bow tie. They also hated him because he was marching around the police department, telling everybody they didn't know how to do their jobs. I walk around and I see those signings up. Welcome to the NYPD, the greatest detectives in the world. I said, you guys have been running the perfect wreckage now. We're better than 49 years. And I know you don't want to break that wreckage, but I think it's not. I should think we want to start to address crime in this fucking organization. In his 10 years as a nobody transit cop, the thing Jack had learned more than anything was that the police department only really tried to solve one kind of crime, press cases. Basically stuff that happened to rich people, white people, or rich white people. And you could even see this in some of the department's actual policies. Like in Manhattan, they would not investigate a burglary that was under $10,000. So that means that you're going to have your life saving stolen from you, nobody was going to investigate it. But if you were Donald Trump, you had a painting taken. We would have 30 fucking cops there, and I'm not rageous. We're saying if you're poor, we're not going to investigate anything. Crime victims who were poor, crime victims who were people of color, the crime that happened to them in a million different ways, it was just invisible to the police department. Mike says right in the beginning, he remembers Jack actually trying to show him how bad it was. And I was with him his first night, he was driving around, and he called operations, and says, you know, anything going on, he said, no, I was quiet commissioner. He goes, how many homicides? You got any homicides? Well, we got two in Brooklyn. Oh yeah, yeah, how about the Bronx? Yeah, we got two there too. Oh yeah, what about Queens? One, what about Manhattan? Well, we got one there too, but it's above 125 street. He goes, I was quiet though. Yeah, I was quiet commissioner. Jack's like, this is how it happens. The police department just doesn't tell you about the crime that they don't think is important, which is a lot of the crime. And he starts to panic as he realizes that his boss, Bill Bratton, does not understand that that's what's going on. So we're in there about a week, and Bratton says to me, you know, things are pretty quiet around here. I say, quiet. You said, fucking, you know, 30 murders so far. Quiet. I said, they don't tell you stuff. Police departments do that with commissioning. Because police departments hate to change, and most police commissioners only last for two years on the job. And so all they're going to do is keep the bad news away from him. And what Jack wants is to force these people to take every single crime seriously. And so he calls operations back. And he says, for now on, I want a lot more information from you. I want to know every murder, I said, and I want to know every time we fly, we're going to and we hit somebody. They said, you know, how many times that is? I said, yeah. He says there were 9,846 murders last year. We were in 442 street outs. We shot 87 people and 25 of them died. Every time this happens, I want you to page me. So there were Q for murder happened at 10 at night. They would wake me up here at 3 o'clock in the morning and tell me we had a murder. I liked that. You got it with my event. When he first became the deputy police commission, he became very involved. They never, like, usually these people went home at 9 to 5. They went home. Jack was always on call. He would just show up on the scene of things. Like, you guys have, like, had dinner. You're going to bed and he's like, oh, I'm going to go out. Oh, he used to do it all the time. He'd get up and he'd be like, oh, there's a homicide. It's only downtown. I'll be back. And he would just get up and go. So late one night, Jack slept at the house. And instead of going to a crime scene, he's gone to his favorite bar, Elaine's. I don't think it about what it will accomplish. And you don't even have just enough to drink. Concentrate on one thing, all right? And he sees this thing happen. The thing he's actually seen a million times before. Elaine always has a eye on the cash register. She always knows that any given minute are they making as much money as they should be that night. And if not, she's always answering the question, why not? Are the waiters moving too slowly? Do they need help? Do they need to get yelled at? Like, is there some table that's taking forever in the back? Like, is there a hold up in the kitchen? She's floating around the restaurant, pushing everybody to get done what needs to get done. And he realizes that is what I want to have. The police department. I want all the data in my head. And I want to be able to hold people accountable like we're just a tiny family restaurant. And he grabs a bar napkin and he scratches out a plan for exactly how he's going to do this. Next day, he comes into work holding the napkin, telling everybody, I've got it. This new system, his big plan to change the police department, a system that will come to be called ComStap. Step one, every single precinct is going to track every crime that happens on a daily basis. Murders, robberies, rapes, they have to count everything. And they're going to keep this data on their own personal charts of the future, which they will share with Jack. - And of course they said it couldn't be done, and you know how much man power they use in. It wasn't easy going the first couple of months. - The old guard hated all this. One guy actually went over Jack's head complained to Bill Bratton. - And I'd recommend on the side that said he's fuck off. I said, if you have a problem with me, you tell me. You understand, don't get in my way. I said, Bob, when you and what he had, this was the murder capital of the fucking world. You understand? I'm not going to let that happen here now. So I went on collecting a data and we started to get it. - The thing was, the data was actually the easy part. The scary part of this whole plan was the meetings. Jack told all these big shot chiefs, every single week you are going to come to me. You're going to come downtown to one police plaza in the morning. They told him they couldn't make it for nine. He said that was fine. They could show up at seven. These meetings would take place in this enormous room, where one by one the chiefs would have to walk in front of a giant screen that had all of their crime data displayed on it. In front of the podium, they'd have to stand at. Was this large U-shaped table where every important person they were scared of would sit. And the center of it was Jack. Jack was the inquisitor. His job was to ask them questions about crime in their neighborhood and ask them what they were doing about it. These conversations went very badly. For instance, early on, Jack noticed that robberies were up in the fifth precinct. So he brought the burrow commander in. - There should what's going on in this precinct? The burrow commander looked at me and said, "Lots more heroin out there." - There should no kids really? Where is it? Where is it coming at? Who's dealing it? How do you know that the heroin addicts didn't do any robberies? Have they been debris? And he was like that. - One guy used to go to these meetings. He said it wasn't like watching how much the kings get turned into peons. These guys had never been asked a follow-up question before. - Of course, the detectives would say, we're an active investigation. What does that mean? Tell me exactly what it means. You've got up in the morning, you're what to work. What did we do to catch this guy? - They would have asked that before, why the high level? First, and you found out that how much a number of those squad commanders didn't know. - Police chiefs, like 50-year-old men, would vomit in the bathroom before Comset meetings. They would try to find friends in the department who could tip them off to see if they were up next. These were guys who lived in neighborhoods where they ran little armies of 300 men who had to obey every single one of their orders who could never question them about anything. And now, they had to go to this other room where they stood in front of a guy in a bow tie, surrounded by everybody they'd ever wanted to impress, 200 of their scariest peers. And they just got their lives nitpicked apart. They got asked the kind of follow-up questions you asked somebody on their first day of the job, when you're convinced they know nothing. And if they couldn't answer those questions, right? They were humiliated, and then they were fired. One chief told a reporter, if they're gonna keep having these meetings, they should really have us check our guns at the door. People were terrified of Jack. He told this story about berating this cop from Narconics because he found out that guy had been ignoring complaints he was getting from people who were upset about crack deals that were happening outside of their houses. - You know, these fucking people are afraid here. We gotta do something about this. And he said to me, you know, what do you wanna make these little level cases for? We wanna make the big cases. I said, where do you live? Did he live in the Crocs town or one of these places? I said, what do you feel? What would you have? 300,000, 350? Can I still please department there? - Clarkson was a rich white suburb. Jack was saying, what if tomorrow morning, somebody was selling drugs outside your house in Clarkson? - You think you'd be on the phone to the Crocs town fucking cops? And would you want them arrested? And if they said to you, gee, don't you understand? They're just low-level guys. We're waiting for the big case and we're going to be done with the big case in a year You think that would be all right as your children were stepping over crack miles on their way to school And he said to me. I mean it was great. He said to me now you're right As much as it made everybody hate Jack comms that worked the crime rate in New York City Plunged the city is leading the country in reducing crime By the end of 1994 murders were down on was 20 percent It really is like the siege has lifted and they kept learning from the patterns they found in commsat The shooting rates highest at eight o'clock right when the cops are switching shifts fix that 60% of grand larcenes are in just three precincts. Find out why Heading out on their first patrol of the new year the officers of Manhattan's Midtown South precinct hit the streets with a new sense of pride and A new reputation to uphold as keepers of the safest big city in the nation by the end of 95 Felony crime was down 39 percent the murder rate had plunged down back to where it was in the early 70s The biggest drops of homicides came in the neighborhoods to the cops were used to ignoring One reporter wrote you could feel Madison Square Garden with all the would have been dead people who are alive simply because maple figured it out Computers now track every crime committed in the city every day allowing cops crime is really down Yes, this is not some kind of fudging of numbers. No, this is not a seasonal thing It's not only statistically recognizable. We can feel it in the sense of the city the sense of menace is there When commissioner Bratton left New York City in 96 Jack followed him out the door People thought they were geniuses. There was some academics who argued that it wasn't commsat the safe New York They're crime rate went down for other reasons Jack would tell him come to my office with a big stack of cash all your grant money I'd love to take a bet on that For the next few years Bill and Jack went everywhere across America across the world spreading commsat to police departments People thought of them as revolutionaries Jack died in 2001 Already by then some of the problems with the system it started to crop up, but most people hadn't noticed a Few years later it would be clear the flaw in the great crime fighting machine Next time on reply all what went wrong The show is produced by Shruthi Pinimanini, Fia Benin, Damianna Marquetti, Anna Foley, Simone Polonin, Jessica Young and Caitlin Roberts Our editors Tim Howard our intern is Heather Shoreing more editing helped us week from Alex Bloomberg We were mixed by Rick Kwan and K. Polinsky fact checking by Michelle Harris Special thanks to Sweet to Chris Mitchell, Saki Konafo, and Krista Ripple Our theme song is by the mysterious break master cylinder original music in the sweet episode by Tim Howard and break master cylinder And thanks to additional musicians Anya Krieger, I'm Flute and Michael Brownell on upright bass Recording help from Mark Lewis Matt Lieber is ten hours of sleep You can find more episodes to show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts Thanks for listening. You can hear our next episode right now Hank joined BJ's wholesale club the day he became a father of 30 I coach football now Coach Hank saves up to 25% off gross restore prices 30 pounds of pasta three cases of protein bars 75 sports drinks and that's just pregame He knows teamwork and BJ's knows savings. This is your home coach home of the save Join for just 20 dollars at bj's dot com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months open soon limited time offer new members only BJ's home of the save From the studio that brought you one to Vijay. I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore The vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy that family wasn't real You sure about that? I had a father called vision. Oh, is this possible? Don't miss the two episode premiere of Marvel television's vision quest Nothing bonds a family together quite like mortal jeopardy now streaming home on decent plus