CITIES: Strong Arm of the Law

May had been unseasonably moist and June unreasonably cool, but this week New York City’s 7,795,471 residents finally read unmistakable signposts of an impending weather change — and with it a threat of sociological change. Shortened were Manhattan’s winter skyscraper shadows; the tall towers of stone, glass and burnished metal reached upward nearly shadowless under the hazy midday sun.

Tenements, still the city’s drab cincture to its towers, menaced a thousand rubbish-strewn, treeless streets. Subway passengers broiled; Broadway theaters and side-street restaurants hung “Delightfully Air Conditioned” banners or closed for the season. The greenery-edged hem of the metropolis echoed to domestic sounds —the whir of lawnmowers, the jingling ice-cream-truck bells, the clink of beer glasses, shrieks of splashing children in backyard wading pools.

In its summer quest for the tourist dollar, the world’s largest city paraded an exuberant proclamation for the tourist to read: “New York Is a Summer Festival.” But grimly unfestive was a shadowy battle that had swirled through the city streets during winter and spring, indeed during all the seasons since World War II.

On one side of the battle: a segment of New York’s 1,500,000 seven-to 20-year-olds whose values have so warped to the point that their crime rate has risen 60% in five years. On the other side of the battle: New York City’s police department, facing a problem that has no real precedent in the department’s 329 years of dealing with every crime known to man.

Last week, as schoolchildren slammed textbooks shut and hit the beckoning streets with shouts and shenanigans, New York’s finest, 23,657 strong, hit the streets to do battle.

Against the Jungle. New York’s police, a force almost as large as two army divisions, had made plans as thorough as an army’s offensive. The department was at near peak strength; by special order no more than 12% of personnel would be on vacation at any one time. The remaining 88% turned eyes away from the schools and wintertime haunts, kept watch on the tenement streets and summer hangouts.

Pinpointed especially were the most threatened of New York’s 34,000 acres of park, 725 playgrounds, 17 swimming pools and 18 miles of sandy, sunny beach as well as 14 “high hazard” slum areas, where more than 100 organized gangs prowl the streets. To these potential trouble points went 700 extra police in uniform or plainclothes, on foot or in radio cruisers, trained and ready to study the faces of an uncertain generation and to move in hard and fast on its rebels.

The deploying army in blue had an order of the day: “Our prime function is the protection of life and property and the maintenance of law and order, and this function will be carried out against any persons, regardless of age, who willfully and maliciously thumb their noses at law and order and who persist in thinking that the laws of the jungle can be transplanted to the streets of New York.” The order’s author: 51-year-old Stephen Patrick Kennedy, the hard-boiled career cop who is the 25th police commissioner of the City of New York.

Hard-eyed, hefty (5 ft. 10 in., 200 Ibs.) Steve Kennedy, appointed commissioner three years ago after a 26-year police career, still considers himself a cop. Says he: “J. Edgar Hoover doesn’t like the term. I think it fits.” Before he became commissioner, Kennedy went up through the uniformed ranks from patrolman to chief inspector, earned a reputation as a cold-shouldering loner who avoided department cliques and seldom mixed with other policemen. He has been a disciplinarian since he made sergeant, a trouble-shooter since he made captain, an enemy of time-honored police petty graft (e.g., Christmas gifts) since he entered the department.

Whistles & White Gloves. As police commissioner, Kennedy commands a force whose area covers 320 sq. mi., all of it except The Bronx on islands (see map), where one-twentieth of the U.S. population clings to one ten-thousandth of the U.S. area, where existence can verge on pandemonium if subways stop, elevator operators strike, or the bridge and tunnels to New Jersey and the world fail to function.

Covering this complex is a police department more than double the size of the U.S.’s next largest, i.e., Chicago’s 10,700. It guards 6,033 miles of street and another 578 miles of waterfront. It staffs 81 precincts, most of them responsible for a population the size of a fair-sized city. It rides 762 radio cars around the clock, a fleet so vast that seven separate networks are necessary to move police radio traffic. There are as many New York sergeants (1,609) as there are policemen in many a good-sized U.S. city. No fewer than 2,400 white-gloved traffic cops are needed to whistle and wave on 1,540,000 New York vehicles and 600,000 visiting trucks and cars a day.

As top officer of this force, Kennedy holds a general’s power over the men and women in his command. He approves every appointment, promotion or transfer, puts a black mark against cops who use outside influence to finagle favor. Kennedy has ordered mass transfers to break up station-house cliques, to shake up cops who allowed numbers-game rackets and bookie parlors to go unreported in their precincts, or to wake up policemen sinking into familiar and comfortable ruts. Says he: “You don’t solve things by fiat, but by knocking heads together.” New York cops give Top Cop Kennedy a top accolade. Most common estimate: “He’s a real bastard.”

Boys Won’t Be Boys. To the chagrin of a generation of social reformers, Kennedy has turned the same toughness on juvenile delinquency. He has good reason. Last year arrests of juveniles, i.e., the seven-to 15-year bracket, were up 20% for felonious assault, 36% for robbery, 15% for grand larceny. Over the last five years, under-16 crime has climbed 105% last year involved nearly 10,000 youngsters.

Arrests of youthful offenders, i.e., the 16-to 20-year-olds, increased 42% in the same period; one of every ten New Yorkers arrested in 1957 belonged to that age group. But Kennedy, like many another thoughtful New Yorker, is alarmed not only by statistics but also by the moods behind them. Hard-pressed minorities account for much of the violence; e.g., Negroes constitute about 10% of the population, are responsible for roughly 30% of its juvenile and youth crime record, while Puerto Ricans represent approximately 6% of population and 10% of such crime.

Gangs with gaudy names—Demons, Imperials, Jokers, Viceroys and Dragons—erupt with savage violence. Some rob because they need money for dope, assault because of fancied insults that demand vengeance. Typical tools of retribution: machetes, bayonets, zip guns fashioned in school shop classes, radio antennas snapped off parked automobiles that can be used to whip an enemy’s face.

Commissioner Kennedy has issued orders to stop such outrages, by force whenever necessary. Says he: “We’ll just lock them up. Then it’s up to the courts. But we aren’t going to shake fingers and say ‘Boys will be boys.’ ” In issuing such commands, Kennedy is not trying to turn back the clock on sociology but to convince his fellow townsmen that the hour is late and that it is time for the police to stand up for law and order. Says he to his cops: “The law prescribes certain conduct. Apply the law and apply it vigorously. It’s not your job to become bemused with the vagaries of the why-oh-why school. The policeman has a job to do, and if he does it honestly and intelligently, he gains respect. That’s a damned sight more important than being liked.”

Bibles & Beltings. Commissioner Kennedy gets listened to—even by the why-oh-why school—because he talks with the authority born of an up-from-the-side-walks understanding of his town. He was born in Williamsburg, on the northern edge of Brooklyn, and when he was six years old, his family moved to a cold-water flat in nearby Greenpoint (then, as now, locally pronounced Greenpernt). “There were three cops on our post—Casey, Egan and Maloney—who straightened us kids out,” says Kennedy. “They’d do more than that. They’d tell our parents, and then I’d get belted again at home. Nobody asked me ‘What are your needs?’ Nobody asked me ‘Are you happy?’ It was ‘Look, Bud, do this.’ And if you didn’t do it, you got belted.”

Kennedy, eldest of four children, got his belts from his father, an immigrant Irish marble worker who read the Bible and Charles Dickens, who had strong ideas about simple matters of right conduct; e.g., whenever inferior marble was used on a construction job, he put down tools and refused to set it. He impressed similar standards on his children. From an 18-month high school commercial course, young Steve bounced to a job as a clerk stenographer for U.S. Steel, to a grueling 57 days as a seaman on a British freighter, to work as a longshoreman unloading bananas on the East and North rivers, to peddling billboard advertising space and selling business machines. He had also developed into a better-than-average 170-Ib. middleweight amateur boxer, got to know and like the cops who worked out with him at Greenpoint’s Y.M.C.A.

Lured partly by the prospects of job security, Kennedy decided to join the force. Two people had to be sold, Kennedy’s father still remembered the British-bossed constabulary back in Ireland, took a dim view of having a policeman in his own family. And a vivacious Jewish neighbor named Hortense Goldberger, who shared Kennedy’s fondness for long walks and Caruso records, was not certain she cared to be a policeman’s wife. Kennedy sold them both. On March 22, 1929 he was sworn in as a probationary patrolman and assigned to the police academy. Seven months later he and Hortense Goldberger were married in the rectory of Brooklyn’s St. Alphonsus Church.

The Little NeedLer. Kennedy’s progress upward from his post (police word for beat) near Times Square was methodical and sure: from Manhattan’s homicide detective squad to sergeant and, after eleven years on the force, to lieutenant. At 36 Kennedy went back to school during off hours, finished high school in 18 months, a pre-law college course at St. John’s University in 24. After St. John’s, he enrolled in New York University’s law school, graduated in five years. In 1951 Kennedy was promoted to inspector, one year later he was admitted to the New York bar.

In 1954 Robert Ferdinand Wagner became mayor, and polished, energetic Lawyer Francis W.H. Adams became police commissioner. Adams looked for a chief inspector (the top uniformed cop on the force) who could help him rebuild a department shaken by recurrent graft scandals. Says Adams: “I had heard from a judge on the court of appeals and from some others that this man Kennedy, an inspector, was an outstanding individual.” Adams summoned Inspector Kennedy to a meeting, questioned him, decided the judge was right. Adams jumped Kennedy over 18 senior officers to chief inspector.

Kennedy made good. When Commissioner Adams after 18 months went back to his law practice, he picked his own successor—”When the time came, Kennedy was the obvious choice.” Few cops were pleased; neither were New York’s politicians. Mayor Wagner, who had and still has reservations about Kennedy’s toughness, went along with Adams, and Tammany Boss Carmine De Sapio got his orders to keep his hands off the department.

“I Am the Commissioner.” Sliding behind the mahogany desk that Theodore Roosevelt used 60 years earlier as one of New York’s most spectacular police commissioners, Kennedy took command of an organization with a frequently clouded history. New York’s finest started as Dutch “schout-fiscals,” who were both sheriffs and prosecuting attorneys, became in 1844 the Western Hemisphere’s first fulltime force, patterned after Sir Robert Peel’s London bobbies. But by Civil War’s outbreak, the new-model police had become crazy over graft and hazy about their responsibilities. Rookies shelled out $40 to captains to serve under them, $200 more to the politicians who paved the way. The energetic recouped these outlays by obvious means. In return for such opportunities, police kept a tolerant hands-off attitude toward the hoodlum gangs—the Dead Rabbits, Empire Club and O’Connell Guards—whose services Tammany Hall used to steal ballot boxes and bar anti-Tammanyites from the polls at election time.

Graft and influence fell on evil days in 1895, when 36-year-old Teddy Roosevelt bounded up the steps of the old Mulberry Street headquarters, was sworn in as police commissioner, and promised to make the department “clean as a hound’s tooth.” Roosevelt personally undertook to shield his men from graft. In the evenings Teddy tugged a hat low over his face, put on a cape, went out into the city to ferret out lax police officers. On one occasion the commissioner, dubbed Haroun-al-Roosevelt for his nightly forays, wandered to Third Avenue, four times sought a cop on post there. Eventually, Roosevelt found him in a saloon, chin-high in fresh oysters, told him sternly: “Get back to your post. I am the police commissioner.” Jeered the cop: “Yes, and you’re Grover Cleveland and Mayor Strong all in a bunch, you are. Move on now, or else.” The barkeep settled the discussion. Said he: “Shut up. Bill. It’s his nibs for sure. Don’t you see the teeth and glasses?”

Teddy Roosevelt did more during his two-year stint than search out errant cops.

He introduced New York’s first traffic policemen, four men on bicycles who stopped runaway teams, harassed “scorchers,” i.e., fast-pedaling bicyclists who were the turn-of -the -century’s hot-rodders. Most important accomplishment: when he stepped out in 1897 to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt had restored public faith in the police department.

Ice & Cloudy Beer. In the post-Roosevelt period, the public’s faith went up and down. After World War I came Prohibition’s bootleg and ballyhoo; New York cops collected royalties for looking elsewhere while cloudy beer and bad booze (just off the boat) poured into 30,000 speakeasies. And as recently as 1950, Bookmaker Harry Gross rocked the city with a running police scandal. To lighten his own sentence, Brooklyn Bookie Gross ticked off names of policemen who were getting his “ice money.” Eventually, 18 cops were convicted of perjury or contempt of court, 41 more were fired from the force, and William P. O’Brien, the police commissioner appointed by ex-Cop (1917-25) William O’Dwyer, lost his job. But today crookedness on the grand scale, if it is there at all, eludes investigators. The privately financed Institute of ‘Public Administration, which surveys U.S. police departments, ranks New York’s with the best, alongside the police forces of Cincinnati, Milwaukee and Berkeley, Calif.

Scissors & Sign Language. Because of their work’s scope, New York’s cops have become Jacks-of-all-trades and masters of many arts. Among their units:

¶ Two mounted troops totaling 266 men; even in the mechanized age, horse-borne cops are still the best unravelers of theater and garment-district traffic, best at handling riots and forcing back crowds.

¶ Twelve radio-equipped police boats, four helicopters, 36 emergency trucks; the trucks are equipped with every tool from scissors to pneumatic drills to help extricate subway victims, deliver babies, coax down jumpers from skyscraper pinnacles or bridge peaks.

¶ A nine-man bomb-disposal squad that packs off hot bombs in trucks made of blast-dampening woven-steel cable.

¶ A crime laboratory that is second largest in the world (after the FBI’s); a 3,700,000-card fingerprint file that also ranks second.

¶ A 185-man narcotics squad, second to the Federal Government’s, to keep track of 23,000 known drug addicts and to head off the traffic to 15,000 additional users.

¶ Personnel Records Unit that catalogues each cop’s skills, hobbies and qualifications on an IBM card, can in minutes mechanically thumb 24,000 cards and flick out names of policemen who understand Tagalog or Tonkinese or deaf-mute sign language, who are tall enough (6 ft. 3 in.) to form an honor guard for England’s visiting Queen Elizabeth II, who know bees well enough (twelve do) to handle the swarm that appeared suddenly last month in Brooklyn.

¶ 42-man confidential squad that reports directly to Kennedy, spies on the rest of the department with Minifones, movie cameras and tape recorders to catch crooked cops in acts of dishonesty and keep the rest of the department as close as possible at the side of the angels.*

“Check the Wool.” During this summer’s siege against juvenile delinquency, a key police department unit is the youth squad, 144 detectives who cruise New York City’s five boroughs in unmarked sedans and concentrate on teen-age activities and spots of action. Routinely the youth squad checks bars for underage patrons, community centers, parks, dances and picnics for teen-age trouble. Swiftly they check out tips on approaching “rumbles,” i.e., fights between New York’s organized gangs. After one such tour with Deputy Inspector Peter Costello, youth squad commander, and Detectives William Kelly and Frank Rochman, a TIME correspondent reported:

We headed east across town, past the filthy, begrimed tenement brownstones where families loiter on the front stoops in the evening warmth, through the smelly, crowded section east of Park Avenue and over to East End Avenue. East River Drive was deserted. But near by, lolling against a slum tenement, were 25 boys and about ten girls, mostly Italian.

“O.K., you guys,” said Costello, “what’s going on here? Line up against the wall, and we’ll see.”

The kids faced the wall, and Costello, Kelly and Rochman frisked them skillfully. There were no weapons. The kids snickered.

“They never carry them,” explained Costello. “They stash them near by so they’ll be ready. If we caught weapons on them, they’d be liable for unlawful assembly, but they’re clean. They knew we can’t frisk the girls. If we thought they were carrying something, we’d call for a policewoman quick.”

Turning to Detective Rochman, Costello ordered: “Check the wool on ’em, Frank.” Rochman ran his hands through the hair of both the boys and girls, looking for concealed razor blades, found none. The cops rolled on.

The Task Force. Such summary police treatment, on the orders of Commissioner Kennedy, disturbs nonpolice agencies concerned with juvenile delinquency, has touched off in New York a battle of philosophies whose outcome may have as lasting effects on the city as the war of the streets. Kennedy’s use-force orders draw cries of protest from social scientists. They point to increasing arrest rates in the 14 heavily policed high-hazard slum areas, where social agencies thought they had made headway with a gentler approach toward juveniles. And they vehemently disapprove of Kennedy’s decision on the proper function of the police department’s Juvenile Aid Bureau.

The J.A.B. correlated records on some 31,000 troublemaking juveniles last year, marked out unruly youngsters to be taken to court as serious offenders or chronic mischief-makers (3,316), listed others who are to be let go with a police warning (24,766). J.A.B. officers followed up with visits to homes of errant youngsters to lecture their parents, determine whether the city’s social agencies should be called in to help the family. Kennedy decided that the J.A.B. was dipping too deeply into social work that was not police duty. He put 100 of the J.A.B. men on the streets as a “Task Force” with the more immediate crime-preventive role of keeping an eye on troublesome gangs.

You Shall Not Appease. Kennedy’s decisions have aroused protest, particularly from New York City’s Youth Board, the municipal agency that allots some $4,500,000 a year of city and state funds for juvenile recreation and rehabilitation projects, also maintains a staff of 100 conscientious street workers who work in crime-ridden neighborhoods to counsel gangs and to reduce their violent activities. The Youth Board believes in allowing gangs to remain intact because they provide a juvenile sense of security and comradeship. The board distinguishes between “bopping” (attacking) gangs and defensive gangs that fight back only when attacked. Youth Board workers “mediate cools” (arrange truces) between gangs, get them to agree to avoid one another’s proscribed “turf” (territory).

Policeman Kennedy, on the other hand, is against gangs, period. He makes no distinction between boppers and defensives. Two summers ago, after the Youth Board arranged a cool and helped allot turf to Lower East Side Puerto Ricans and Negroes who had shot up two youngsters in a rumble, the commissioner passed on a pointed order to his department: “You shall not enter into treaties, concordats, compacts or agreements of appeasement. You shall meet violence with sufficient force, legally applied, to bring violators to justice. Every man, woman and child has the right to use the streets of this city without fear and without consent of any illegally organized group.”

Since that incident there has been no cool between Police Commissioner Kennedy and the New York City Youth Board. Says one board official bitterly: “All Kennedy wants is to swing the big stick, arrest more kids, get more cops, bust up gangs. Where’s his respect for the human being?” Contends another critic, Columbia University’s New York School of Social Work Professor Alfred J. Kahn: “The conduct he encourages in his officers in effect challenges the objectives of our statutes and substitutes his personal philosophy for that of the law.”

Individual Responsibility. Kennedy argues that such critics misunderstand the policeman’s role. And he is angrily suspicious that sometimes they do not even understand their own. Says he: “They say some young punk is ‘the product of his environment.’ Well, who isn’t? They say ‘He suffered a traumatic experience in his youth.’ Well, most of us have. They say ‘He’s the victim of a broken home.’ Well, there are lots of kids from broken homes who didn’t become vengeful and take it out on someone else. We’ve got away from the sense of individual responsibility and free will.”

Street-roaming delinquents might not have been listening this week, but the kids saw and heard the physical translation. The gentle police approach was gone; “headbeaters” (cops) were on watch everywhere. And behind the men and women in the deep blue uniforms stood the toughest cop of all, keenly aware that the responsibility for keeping the peace was his, positive that his approach to juvenile delinquency was the proper one for a policeman—especially since the other approaches had not solved the problem. For New York’s fisty finest, Commissioner Stephen Patrick Kennedy had a last basic police order: “To the extent that we perform our proper function, to that extent will the city be a better place to live in.”

* Last week Kennedy’s confidential police solved the department’s most embarrassing burglary in recent years , the theft of $26,000 from police department sales. They grabbbed a 35-year-old patrolman previously cited for good police work, who confessed that he had already spent half of it, shamefacedly coughed up an unspent $13,433.