Vigilance: My Life Serving America and Protecting Its Empire City by Ray Kelly

Author:Ray Kelly [Kelly, Ray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Political, Law Enforcement, Rich & Famous, General
ISBN: 9780316383790
Google: IIwQBgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2015-09-08T20:41:52+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Building the Team

Mike Bloomberg didn’t announce my appointment for a week. But the morning after I’d accepted his offer to become police commissioner again, I was standing beside a metal easel in a brightly lit conference room at Bear Stearns headquarters on Park Avenue. A large flip pad was on the easel. I had a red Sharpie in my left hand.

It was still six weeks before the Bloomberg administration would take city hall, six weeks before I would return to my old fourteenth-floor office with Teddy Roosevelt’s desk at 1 Police Plaza and the job I’d left with mixed feelings eight years earlier. There’d been three police commissioners since then: Bill Bratton (for twenty-six months), Howard Safir (four years, four months) and Bernard Kerik (sixteen months). My own previous term as police commissioner had ended after sixteen months, when Rudy Giuliani defeated David Dinkins for mayor in 1993.

Soon the responsibility would be mine again—but it wouldn’t be the same job at all. The city was different now. The department would have to be different too. The crime drop we had set in motion with Safe Streets, Safe City had continued through the Giuliani years. September 11 changed nearly everything. There was no time to bask in my appointment. New York was still grieving. The city wasn’t anywhere close to being back on its feet. The recovery had barely begun. Plenty of slogans were floating around: “Never forget.” “Homeland security.” “Rebuild better than ever.” “Let’s roll.” But there was no overall plan for rebuilding public confidence and no comprehensive strategy—not at the police department, not anywhere—for reducing the chance that the city would be attacked by terrorists again. Devising that strategy, I knew, was our first and highest priority.

To be certain, this would entail more than small changes at the margins. It would require a fundamental rethinking of the role of the police in New York City, a thorough reordering of the department’s priorities, and some genuine cultural change. We’d still have to fight street crime. That challenge would never go away. But moving forward, a large part of our responsibility—maybe the largest—would be protecting the city against another terror attack. No local police department had ever taken on that responsibility. But no local police department had ever been in the position the NYPD was in as 2001 came to a close. We had to think creatively. We had to start—now. And I certainly couldn’t do it alone.

Four men in shirtsleeves and ties were with me that day in the Bear Stearns conference room, sitting at a long glass table, looking up at the easel and at me. I began by drawing a sketch of the police department’s organizational chart.

“Commissioner’s here,” I said, drawing a small rectangle at the top of the pad.

“Right below that, the first dep and chief of department,” I continued, putting two boxes below the one for commissioner, connected to it with short vertical red lines.

Next I drew a row of boxes for all the deputy commissioners and chiefs.

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