Colón’s Corner: The Great NYC Police Merger of 1995 — Was It Necessary in Hindsight?
A merger & memories of an era in policing gone by.
If you ask any former New York City Housing or Transit police officer who was on the job then, they can tell you the date, time, and maybe even the second that one era in New York City policing ended and another began.
For the Transit Police, that date is April 2, 1995. For the Housing Police, it is May 1, 1995. Those being the dates both departments, after decades of debate and speculation, formally merged with the New York City Police Department to become one single force. The feelings range depending on whom you ask about those respective dates from excitement about a new career chapter and the newfound ability to explore previously unavailable horizons, to a deep seeded disdain of what many still refer to as a “hostile takeover”.
So now, well over two, almost three, decades later, the question is: was the merger necessary? To find our answer, let's go back to some of the reasoning behind the merger of the three forces in the first place.
According to then mayor-Rudolph W. Guiliani, who unlike predecessors Edward Koch & David Dinkins, succeeded in his mission of achieving consolidation, the main reason was in his eyes, the combination of an inability to communicate and a redundancy in the units of each of the three departments.
Per Wikipedia: “Discussions between the city and the New York City Transit Authority which included a threat of laying off the entire Transit Police Department, produced a memorandum of understanding, and at 12:01 A.M. on April 2, 1995, the NYC Transit Police was consolidated with the New York City Police Department to become a new bureau within the NYPD called NYPD Transit Bureau. The true reasoning behind the consolidation was Giuliani’s desire to create one police payroll instead of three separate ones, and to bring all three police departments under his direct control. Prior to April 2, 1995, neither the Transit Police nor the Housing Police was under the purview of the police commissioner, who was in turn the direct subordinate of the mayor. While Members of the Transit Police were paid by the Transit Authority, and those of the Housing Police was paid by the Housing Authority, the funds for the payrolls did not actually come from those agencies but were provided monthly by The City of New York. Giuliani won his quest for the consolidation by withholding the payroll funds for both police departments.”
Further bolstering that claim is an April 2004 report issued by the New York City Independent Budget Office, which stated the merger “allowed for more efficient decision-making processes, better tracking of criminal activity, coordinated prevention programs, and reduced duplicative police responses and paperwork”.
While that objective may have been achieved, and crime in the Big Apple continued to decline through the end of the ’90s and well into the new millennium, how did some of the officers directly affected view the merge then & now?
Says retired homicide detective and hostage negotiator Scott Wagner, who spent the first 14 of his 20 years as a police officer and later detective with the Housing Police (1981–1995): “As a proud member of the NYCHA Police Department, I, along with most of my colleagues in the Housing Police, were deeply saddened and hurt by the merge, or “the hostile takeover”, as we called it.
At the time, I was assigned to the most elite unit within the Housing Police. The Manhattan/Bronx Homicide Major Case Squad. We were assigned to assist in the investigation of all murders, as well as any and all sensitive criminal investigations that occurred within the NYCHA developments, to its population, their guests, or the employees of the Housing Authority. (This included property crimes, among the most notable one that resulted in numerous federal indictments of members of organized crime individuals for theft and embezzlement).
When the merge occurred, we were approximately the tenth largest police department in the US, with over 2700 sworn members. A federally accredited department that served a population of more than a half million, who resided within over 335 separate developments located in the five boroughs of NYC. (All of which were located in an urban environment). This was greater than the population of major US cities such as Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Atlanta, New Orleans, Cleveland, Miami, Cincinnati or Tulsa.
As far as the duplication of work that is often cited as one of the main reasons for the merge, other than being on the same radio frequencies and 911 systems as the NYPD, there were complaint reports that were to be filled out for the NYPD as well as the NYCHA. All murder investigations were conducted out of the local NYPD precinct of occurrence-mostly due to convenance of space.
Being that the murder took place within the confines of the City of New York, the NYPD had to be involved. The Housing Police often led the investigations committed on their NYCHA Properties. Both departments investigated these crimes jointly. This often resulted in a positive outcome, in a much shorter amount of time than normal NYPD Homicide investigations. We came with manpower and resources that were not available to our NYPD counterparts.
This whole department, basically the patrol force only, was made a bureau within the NYPD. All of the detectives were scattered throughout the NYPD, wherever the manpower needs required. One example was federal monies that we were privy too, that the NYPD were not, due to our federal accreditation status.
The Housing Police were also privy to the records of the NYCHA which aided us in our investigation of crimes. Copies of all housing police prepared complaint reports were placed within the respective tenant folders that were kept in the management office of each development. Also, our uniformed officers assigned to each development, were an unbelievable source of information, having attended community meetings, and interacting with the tenants on a daily basis. The trust factor between these officers and the community they served, was a “partnership”, not seen since the department was taken over by the NYPD.
I, and my partner were able to work our way to a precinct that was primarily filled with public housing. We felt we could do our best work in an area that we were known, as well as knowing what the needs of the community were. We both ended our very successful careers a few months apart. We both did over 20 years, (Having met on our first day of the police academy-the last sole Housing Police Academy ever conducted).
Had the merge not occurred, we would always lament, both of us probably would have stayed on for many, many more years than we did. You see we were doing a job that we both loved, as were most of the other cops from our era. It didn’t really seem like work until that fateful day in May 1995.”
Meanwhile retired Emergency Service Unit Detective John Busching, who spent the first nine years of his career with the Transit Police (1986–1995), including the last four in their version of ESU, the elite Emergency Medical Rescue Unit, said in a podcast interview with yours truly: “The opportunities that the city and Emergency Service presented to us, would’ve never come anywhere close if we had stayed just the Transit Police. Being in Emergency Service, you were it”.
Though the resources of a large department can offer more in terms of equipment as well as manpower to adequately protect a given area (with a budget in the billion-dollar range and over 36,000 officers within its ranks, that certainly isn’t a problem for the NYPD), there is something to be said for a smaller department’s ability to not only protect and patrol a given area, but develop a familiarity and style of protecting it that simply cannot be duplicated.
After all, at their respective peaks, Housing boasted 2,700 officers within their ranks, and Transit close to 4,000. With thinner ranks and a hyper focus on specific areas were born game changing methodologies that propelled crimefighting to new heights and communities, or in transit’s case public spaces, all the closer to safety and prosperity.
For the Transit Police that methodology was the computer-based model CompStat. Developed originally by Far Rockaway, Queens based NYPD Captain and later Chief Mario Selvagi but modified and fully implemented by both Transit Chief and later NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton and late Transit Lieutenant and later First Deputy Commissioner Jack Maple, the model at first consisted of mere crayons and maps, the crayons used to mark in Maple’s words “every violent crime, robbery and grand larceny that occurred.” Soon, it’d develop into a computerized database to track and subsequently curb crime. A database still in use to this day not just by the NYPD, but police departments nation and worldwide.
The result? A 27 percent drop in subway crime during the dynamic duo’s time together in Transit from 1990 to 1992. That number would rise to 60 percent upon the ascension of both men and citywide implementation of the strategy for the NYPD in 1994.
As for Housing, as noted earlier by Detective Wagner, their method was community policing. Born out of the unique environment in which they patrolled, the city within a city that are New York City housing projects, officers who patrolled on foot pioneered the method through two means. First, the constant maintenance of an omnipresence, an omnipresence that would be especially vital to maintain as crime skyrocketed during the violent 1970s and ’80s. Secondly, through regular, simple, courteous interactions with the residents of the area, ensuring they knew that not only were their police always present, the last breed of the neighborhood police if you will, but that they were human too.
Just like you, the average Joe or Jane with the same hobbies, perspectives, hopes, dreams, and every other personality trait that makes us humans the unique species we are. No different were these cops, the neighborhood cops, than you just because their manner of making a living just so happened to involve carrying a badge and gun.
The New York City Police Department of course would copy this method too. Now known as “neighborhood policing”, the department describes the current iteration of the initiative as “a comprehensive crime-fighting strategy built on improved communication and collaboration between local police officers and community residents. Neighborhood Policing greatly increases connectivity and engagement with the community without diminishing, and, in fact, improving the NYPD’s crime-fighting capabilities.”
Utilizing Neighborhood Coordination Officers (NCOs), these cops embed, and if they’re successful enough, endear themselves to the communities they’re assigned to serve with what the department further describes as familiarizing themselves with “residents and their problems by attending community meetings with neighborhood leaders, visiting schools, following up on previous incidents, and using creative techniques and adaptive skills.” Meet the new neighborhood police, same as the old neighborhood police.
All of this to return to our main question: was the merger necessary? Furthermore, had it not happened, what would the New York City of today be like with three separate police departments serving it? To analyze the flip side of the argument in the present, we once again turn our attention to the past. Having both received federal accreditation, Housing and Transit possessed with that accreditation the one luxury their big brother in the NYPD did not: extra money, more specifically, government money.
With that extra money? Access to extra equipment through the purchase's accreditation allows. Equipment that further aided both agencies in the massive success they enjoyed in lowering crime in subways and projects across the five boroughs. If they were enjoying success then, one can only imagine the success they’d enjoy now with the technology boom of the 21st century and the positive impact tools like drones not to mention robots have made on the first responder community as a whole.
Was the merger necessary? For the time in which it occurred during that pivotal spring of 1995 perhaps it was. But as the one singular police department Mayor Guiliani envisioned and ultimately succeeded in having struggles to protect a city grappling with a crime crisis, one cannot help but wonder if the battle would be less strenuous for the NYPD of today if they still had their little brothers of yesteryear in the Housing Police and Transit Police fighting the battle alongside them.
