What Kind of NYPD Commissioner Do We Need?

On Tuesday, Mayor Adams tapped Chauncey Parker as his new deputy mayor for public safety. It’s a big upgrade. Parker is an accomplished professional, a former federal prosecutor with extensive leadership experience in city, state and federal agencies. He brings creativity and most importantly the highest integrity to this important office. He replaces Adams’ old friend and associate Philip Banks, who started out tarnished by scandal and resigned the same way, almost literally in the night, with nary a resignation letter to the mayor.

The appointment of a competent, experienced and principled law enforcement veteran in the job raises the question: Who should be the next person to lead the New York Police Department? Adams has an important choice before him, and he needs to find the right partner for Parker.

Usually in city politics, rumors are rumors. But these days in New York, rumors have a way of coming true. The latest is that the current police commissioner, Thomas Donlon, will resign after about a month on the job.  If Donlon does step down, he will be the second of three police commissioners Adams has appointed in his scant 33 months in office to depart in a blaze of scandal. The departure starts the 10-day clock set by the City Charter within which the mayor must appoint a replacement. 

With news reports circulating the names of several able public servants as potential police commissioners, it is fair to ask whether organizational acumen and integrity alone are sufficient to address the two most prominent problems — crises even — that the police department faces: corruption and crime-fighting.  And if more is needed, how a rehabilitated office of the deputy mayor for public safety might be an essential partner to a new commissioner.

Commissioners Edward Caban and Tom Donlon both left in the wake of search warrants — not simply of their personal effects and homes (though that too), but the seizing of hard drives at police headquarters. And, while we do not know for certain, the reported evidence points to an old-timey protection racket reaching into many boroughs, up and down the ranks of the force, and run by ex-police commissioner Caban and his brother. (So many brothers in these scandals! Somewhere, Billy Carter is smiling.) Donlon’s departure has the odor of an All the King’s Men kind of hit. 

Short summary: It is not good, in fact it is very, very, very bad for the city’s primary law enforcement agency to, itself, be the target of investigations. Imagine being the United States Attorney, the head of the New York Office of the FBI, or the commissioner of the Department of Investigation, the city’s corruption-fighting agency, seeking to approach the police department with a sensitive matter. Who do you brief? Who can you trust?  

The second problem, connected to the first, is crime-fighting. You can’t fight crime without skilled and committed people, and the friends-and-associates method of staffing the department has meant the department has lost its edge, leading to the departure of many talented public servants whose skills will be sorely missed. (To be clear, the department still has many committed and able officers, some of whom we have featured in Vital City, including the former chief of detectives and the current chief of crime control strategies.)

Keechant Sewell, Adams’ first pick for police commissioner, made it only a year before resigning in the face of reported interference with key components of her job, namely her ability to pick competent people for key positions and develop effective crime-fighting strategies. Her dignified and principled exit contrasts markedly with the record of Phil Banks, whose activities reportedly prompted her exit. It was trouble from the start when Banks inauspiciously and unusually announced his own appointment in an op-ed in the Daily News that tracked closely the Nixon’s infamous “I-am-not-a-crook” declamation to the nation in the wake of Watergate.

Just as inauspiciously, one of Banks’ first acts was to fire the well-regarded chief of internal affairs who had worked closely with the FBI on the case in which Banks had been named as an unindicted co-conspirator. After that, Banks retired to the Verizon Building (the same building in which his brother appears to be running a shady scheme that merited a federal raid) pretty much for the rest of his shadow term as deputy mayor which, as far as we can tell, seemed to consist largely of trying to (and succeeding) in stocking the police department with his friends. 

While once it was New York City that led the nation in the steepness and durability of its crime decline, more recently, the recovery from pandemic-related crime spikes puts New York firmly in the middle, not the top, of the rest of the nation’s cities — and at the bottom of the pack of cities in New York State.  Major crimes are about flat with where they were last year, and 32% above 2019 levels. And “all crimes,” meaning the kinds of behavior that make people both more unsafe but more uneasy on the street (harassment, assault, criminal mischief, for example) are higher than they have been in a decade.

No department wants to be compared to the City’s chaotic Department of Correction, where the hollowing out of management and the spinning door of commissioners (six in the last 10 years) has been one factor in the stunning rise in violence and mismanagement within the city’s jails. To be sure, the police department has a sturdy structure and, over the years, has been a very well-run organization. But the rapid turnover of police commissioners in the last few years and the thinning of the ranks of those well-trained in police work must be attended to now, as they are warning signs of trouble. 

So what kind of person, with what kind of skills, can meet this moment in the department’s history? And what could an able deputy mayor of public safety like Parker, committed to the well-being of New Yorkers, do to work with the commissioner to fix these two crucial problems?

In some chief executive jobs, being a superlative manager can be the single most important qualification, and the substantive content is secondary. Think about the examples of “turnaround kings,” whether the company is selling juice and snacks, or dishwashers and dryers. In these cases, management is the thing. You don’t need to have started in the mailroom and worked your way up to the executive suite to be a great leader.   

In policing and in law, something different is going on. In the law, even senior partners at law firms, while they may no longer write the briefs, read the cases and closely scrutinize and shape the arguments based on their long experience of the law and its operations. This is true of the best district attorneys and United States Attorneys and commissioners of the city’s public corruption investigative agency: Ideally, they have had the experience of sifting through evidence themselves, composing  a case for presentation to a grand jury and withstanding the slings and arrows of trial. 

So it goes with the police commissioner as well. Experience of a particular kind matters. To know who the best chief of detectives will be, the most perceptive head of internal affairs, the most strategic chief of patrol, you do need, almost literally, to have walked the streets in their shoes. Otherwise, how would you know how good they are at their jobs? And how do you, as Bill Bratton, one of the nation’s most celebrated and effective police managers says, put the right people in the right seat on the bus? These challenges will be amplified in this moment, where it will not be immediately clear how far and wide the corruption has seeped in the department — who led it, who was willing to follow and who resisted to focus on the job at hand. 

It is ultimately the commissioner who puts together the police department’s crime-fighting strategy, of course with the crucial assistance of the many able people remaining in the department. But he or she will need to be able to distinguish when the strategy is a hit and run press opportunity and when it gets to the heart of the problem.  What is the best, most strategic deployment of the force? 

In any particular case, prosecutors will want to sit down with the commissioner to discuss the evidence where indictment is a question. These are emphatically not political decisions but questions of evidence, law and justice. Able staff can help and discuss, but it is ultimately the job of the police commissioner to make the decision. 

A commissioner without deep experience in making, directing, investigating, indicting or trying a case — the core of what police work is intended to do and support — also raises some key questions about how authority will be distributed. Here, if a commissioner lacked some of these attributes, a deputy mayor for public safety — an extraordinarily important and necessary role, notwithstanding the taint of the last office holder — might well grow in power.

I have argued previously that our safety is secured not just by police, important as they are, but also by the wise deployment of civic assets (public lighting and summer jobs, for example). An executive who can blend a deep knowledge of the power and efficacy of law enforcement with an understanding of the many other strands of civic services would go a long way toward helping New York increase both safety and well-being overall.  

This isn’t the job of the police commissioner.  It is the job of a deputy mayor who can speak to his or her fellow deputy mayors who oversee health and human services, housing and other civic services which are the foundation stone of a durably vibrant city. Knitting together a strategy that mobilizes all civic services, of which police are one, aimed at those very few neighborhoods that are suffering, and the very few people who disrupt the common peace, would focus all agencies on a single goal: making the city thrive.  

In the event that a superlative public servant is appointed as the commissioner who does not have deep grounding in the nuts and bolts of crime fighting, a deputy mayor who has this background could be a powerful ally, forging a complementary working relationship that would make the best of the enormous powers each office holds for the benefit of New Yorkers.

In this particular moment, bringing the deputy mayor out of the shadows and ensuring that he or she works in partnership with an able police commissioner is crucial. You might think this would be obvious, but it would be a first for this administration.