COVER STORY: NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea

COVER STORY

BY THE NUMBERS: REDUCING CRIME & ARRESTS

BY SHANE MILLER

Dermot Shea graduated from SUNY Oneonta on a Saturday in May of 1990 with a Bachelor of Science in Business Economics in hand, but by Monday morning he was working for 32BJ. His boss allowed to leave his post from time to time to interview for positions in the world of finance, but things weren’t going as planned.

“It wasn’t the best time to be looking for a job,” Shea recalled. “I had taken the police test my junior year, but didn’t take it with the intention of coming on the job. I figured I would finish school and find a different job, but I think fate pushed me down a different path.”

So Shea entered the Police Academy, and in 1991 he was sent to his first assignment in the Bronx. It’s a decision he has never once regretted.

“More and more I found myself saying ‘I don’t see myself sitting behind a desk,’” he told This Is Queensborough during a recent interview in his office at One Police Plaza. “From the moment I got into the academy, there was never a doubt I was going to continue with policing. I didn’t know that much about it going in, but once I was in, I knew I was never leaving.”

Shea quickly rose through the ranks. Within three years he was a sergeant, which due to a change in department policy is a jump so swift it’s not even allowed today. He began to work in the investigative world, holding posts in the Narcotics Division in the Bronx and Queens. By 2002, he was a captain. Today, he is commissioner of one of the oldest – and the largest - police departments in the United States.

“I never even saw myself as a precinct commander, but you build a reputation on this job and you keep working,” Shea said, reflecting on his nearly 30-year career in the NYPD. “Sometimes the jobs find you.”

Shea grew up one of five kids, the son of two Irish immigrants – his father came from County Laois while his mother grew up near the MayoSligo border - who met in New York City. They settled in Sunnyside, first in a one-bedroom apartment on 44th Street near Skillman Avenue. When the family grew to five kids and a dog, they upgraded to a two-bedroom apartment on the other side of Queens Boulevard.

His father joined the Army, partly as a path to citizenship, eventually reaching the rank of sergeant. He later worked as a bartender and handyman, while his mother was a devoted homemaker. All five kids attended Queen of Angels, and Shea would eventually graduate from Xavier High School in Manhattan.

“Growing up was great, it was solid working-class neighborhood,” Shea said of his childhood.

Perhaps it was this solid upbringing that inspired Shea’s devotion to keeping kids out of the criminal justice system, a priority for him in his new role. That encompasses a number of different initiatives, from providing safe places for kids to go, o rg a n i z i n g movie nights in local parks during the summer, or e n g a g i n g the 5,500 school safety agents who are interacting with kids on a neardaily basis. It also involves using data to make sure that existing services and programs align with areas of high crime.

“Think back when you were that critical age, were you on the edge of potentially getting into trouble?” Shea asked. “And did you have a safe place to go, whether it was a gym or Boys and Girls Club or PAL? All of these things we do already, can we do more of that?”

Shea said the department plans to have a youth coordinator in every precinct. “That is one of the absolute priorities in the next two years,” he said. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s probably the most worthwhile investment that we can make.”

The commissioner also sees an opportunity to provide more services when a minor has their first run-in with law enforcement.

“We have kids being brought into precincts when they get into trouble, and then we release them to their parents,” he said. “I would like to slow that process down a minute or two. I think there’s an opportunity there.”

Shea said the ultimate goal is to keep kids from entering the criminal justice system in the first place, and if they do end up there, making sure they have the necessary support to ensure they never return.

“I don’t think kids that are running around shooting people should receive a slap on the wrist, but the whole point of this youth strategy is to make sure they never enter that funnel,” he said. “Once they get on that trajectory and once they start getting arrested, I’m not saying they can’t be saved, but it makes it that much harder.

“But with 29 years of experience and intimate knowledge of the criminal justice system, putting a kid in jail and expecting them to be any better 18 months or two years later, I think we are setting ourselves up for disaster,” Shea adds.

In December of 2011, Shea was working in the Detectives

Bureau when he first got the call to work at One Police Plaza. “In fact, I was very successful about avoiding this building,” he joked. “When you are working out in the street, you really don’t want to have to come down here.”

Shea spent the next two years working at CompStat, where he began to see the big picture of crime in

New York City from a perspective he didn’t have when he was working on the street.

“I learned a hell of a lot about data,” he said. “For the next two years I saw the interdependency of the policy side and the laws. I knew for years what was broken on the street because I was in the fight, now I was working behind The commissioner with his family after one of his promotions. “We realized you had to convince 30,000 cops that there was a different way to police” “

COVER STORY

the scenes with an opportunity to change what was broken.”

Shea was promoted to deputy commissioner, and in January of 2014 he was tapped by former commissioner Bill Bratton to head CompStat. He quickly set about using the data to change the way the department fights crime.

“You can cut a lot of arrests, you can cut stops, but you have to concentrate on the people that are doing the most crime, and not just arrest them but make sure we get convictions,” he said. “Not just make a gun arrest and be happy with a gun off the street, but the person carrying the gun has to go to prison.

“We realized you had to convince 30,000 cops that there was a different way to police,” Shea added.

Between 2014 and 2016, the number of arrests fell from about 400,000 per year to approximately half that. At the same time, crime plummeted. Soon, the number of homicides fell under 1,000 annually, and then 800. Today, that number consistently hovers around 300.

“Every year we do a press conference, and every year we would start to see crime going down,” Shea said. “People would say ‘amazing year you had, you must be at the bottom.’ We aren’t anywhere near close to bottom, we are going to keep pushing.

“As all this is going on, we interject the neighborhood policing piece,” Shea explained. “If we don’t’ have cops flooding zones to suppress crime by throwing a wide net, if we can do it smarter, more efficiently and get better results, we are freeing up tons of cops that can now start building relationships with the community.”

But Shea says the police force can’t fight crime on its own. He said as the number of crimes committed gets lower and lower, it becomes harder and harder to bring them down even further. Shea said that’s why the entire criminal justice system, from the cops on the beat to the district attorneys to the judges, need to work in tandem.

“The mistake that people make when talking about crime is filling the room with the police,” he said. “If you want to know about crime and the big picture, you need to look at the entire system. That is the next quantum leap in crime reduction.”

Which is what makes the bail reform laws recently enacted by lawmakers in Albany so frustrating to Shea. The commissioner believes there is a correlation between the recent uptick in crimes like burglary and auto theft and the new laws that make it harder for judges to keep criminals behind bars.

“I’ve been critical of some aspects of the bail reform, but every time I’ve spoken I’ve also said there are good aspects to the bail reform,” he said. “I understand the history, I understand what was done to try and level the playing field, making the law equal for everyone whether you have money in your bank account or not. So I agree with the spirit of the bail reform changes.

“What I’m critical of is passing sweeping law changes with little input from the people that know the most about how the criminal justice system works, who have no ideological goals other than keeping people safe,” Shea added.

The commissioner says what is often left out of the bail reform debate is that the department is already achieving many of the goals the new laws are meant to bring about. The NYPD has cut arrests, summons are down, the city is moving forward with closing Rikers Island, and the prison population in the state is at its lowest level in years.

“All of this was true, its undeniable, before the bail reform law was enacted,” he said. “We support reform, the numbers can’t be debated. But when you are doing all of this and neighborhood policing to build up trust with communities, you now have a bail law that is resulting in crime going up significantly.”

And this all comes at a time when there have been several disturbing anti-police incidents across the city, from last summer’s water dousing of officers in Brooklyn to the rallies protesting additional cops in the subways to the shooting at a Bronx precinct. But Shea is confident the rankand-file members of his force are up to the challenges and will conduct themselves in a professional manner.

“Am I concerned anytime there is anti-police rhetoric?” Shea said. “Absolutely I am.

“But I think the day you go into the academy, you are reminded that you better have thick skin for a lot of different reasons,” he added. “You can expect to have some verbal comments said to you literally at any point in time, and you have to be able to take it and set an example.” Dermot Shea being sworn in as 44th commissioner of the NYPD. Dermot Shea (center) on the day he graduated from the Police Academy.