Subject: [NEXTEL-1] NYPD Commish Uses A Nextel Phone-

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 01 Jan 2003 23:09:57 -0500

December 29, 2002
The Rise and Fall of Murder in New York
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

here was no 911 emergency number. The Police Department had 25,500 officers, most of them
men and almost all of them white. Most patrolmen walked a beat, without a radio,
communicating through a network of street-corner call boxes. There was no DNA analysis or
computerized ballistic fingerprinting. And the Supreme Court had yet to issue its ruling
in a case called Miranda, so officers were not required to read suspects their rights.

That was the New York City Police Department in 1963. Today, the force of about 38,000
responds to roughly 1,000 calls to 911 every day. Officers patrol the city mostly in cars,
aided by a range of technology that seemed unimaginable in 1963. Computers in some patrol
cars today can check motor vehicle data and criminal records. A pilot program lets some
officers check records with pager-size devices worn on their belts. A hair or a droplet of
blood can help solve a crime, lasers trace the paths of bullets and equipment can pinpoint
a cellphone's location to track criminals on the run.

These changes over 39 years in law enforcement in the city provide the backdrop for a
striking increase in the rate at which New Yorkers kill one another — and then a decline
perhaps even more striking in that rate. More than a decade after its homicide rate peaked
at 2,245, in 1990, the city, with 573 killings as of yesterday afternoon, is set to end
2002 with fewer than 600 homicides for the first time since 1963.

The low murder rates of the early 60's conjure a perception of a more tranquil era, when
crime was of little concern, when children walked to school without fear, when their
parents were free from worry. It seems long ago: a subway ride was 15 cents, the
Verrazano-Narrows Bridge had yet to link Brooklyn and Staten Island, and the Mets were a
comically inept expansion team in their second season, getting ready to move into their
new home, a place called Shea Stadium.

But 1963 in New York City was not so tranquil. The 548 killings that year represented a
significant increase over 508 the year before, and some of the men who investigated
homicides recall concern about the rising rate, and about a city widely viewed as
sometimes violent and dangerous.

"Of course it was busy, because we don't solve them like they do on television; it takes
weeks" and sometimes longer, said Samuel K. Drexler, 80, who supervised a team of
detectives in 1963 as a sergeant in the Manhattan North Homicide Squad. "There was always
pressure."

Homicide detectives today work much the same way their predecessors did 40 years ago. New
technology notwithstanding, some changes in the city's culture have made their jobs
harder. Several investigators who worked in the 1960's said that the simplicity of that
earlier age often made solving crimes easier, and that the more transient nature of
today's society can complicate the task of catching killers.

"A Harlem homicide was easier to solve because people lived up there, they worked up there
and they died up there," Mr. Drexler said. "Now everyone is on the move, everything is
fluid, people are strangers where they live. It's got to be a little more difficult to
come up with a suspect."

One of the most infamous crimes in 1963 was a double homicide in which Janice Wylie, 21, a
copy clerk at Newsweek, and Emily Hoffert, 23, a teacher, were killed in the apartment
they shared on East 88th Street near Fifth Avenue. They were bound ankles to wrists with
strips of bedsheets and repeatedly stabbed and beaten with soda bottles. The attack came
to be known as the Career Girl Murders. Although the term is itself an anachronism today,
the killings symbolized the kind of seemingly random violence that then, as now, could
make New Yorkers feel vulnerable.

Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly joined the department as a cadet in 1961, when Mr. Drexler
was supervising homicide investigations in Harlem. Mr. Kelly first worked as a switchboard
operator at the old police headquarters on Centre Street, where he patched together calls
by plugging heavy wires into a wall-size switch panel. Violence began to rise in the late
1960's, driven largely by the drug trade — which pushed up the number of homicides,
especially when crack became prevalent in the 1980's — and by the increasing availability
of powerful handguns.

"The world seemed to change dramatically as far as crime is concerned in the late 60's,"
said Mr. Kelly, who these days uses a Nextel cellphone. He cited not only the rise in
drug-related violence, but also a broader atmosphere of crime and unrest fostered by the
killing of police officers by black militants and the protest movement that was growing
against the war in Vietnam.

Most experts and investigators agree that despite the precipitous drop in the number of
homicides, the reasons people kill have not changed much. Homicide is still most often
about love, hate and greed. And narcotics, in one way or another, have long played a role
in murder, although killings over drug turf became more common in the 1980's and 1990's,
perhaps because the organized crime figures of an earlier era quickly crushed challenges
to their market hegemony.

The reasons for the stunning drop in killings remain something of a mystery, according to
many experts and social scientists who have followed New York's declining crime rates.

Police officials point to the department's vaunted Compstat system, which uses an
exhaustive computer analysis of where crimes occur to better deploy police resources to
hot spots, and a nearly 40 percent increase in the number of police officers. But other
analysts cite a wide range of factors, from drops in drug use to the economy and the
city's arrest over the last decade of roughly a million people on minor violations for
which they spent the night in jail.

Whatever is behind the decline, it has continued despite a downturn in the economy; a
shrinking police force, which has been whittled away by the city's budget crisis; and
rising crime rates elsewhere in the nation.

The basic work that detectives do after a killing, like cordoning off the crime scene and
photographing it, collecting evidence and canvassing for witnesses, has changed little.
But now, when investigators lift fingerprints and find ballistic evidence, like bullets
and shell casings, they can enter their findings into state and federal computer systems
that compare them with the fingerprints of millions of people who have been arrested or to
bullets and shell casings from guns used in other crimes.

Other developments in technology that are not often associated with crime-fighting are
regularly used to track criminals, trace property taken from homicide victims or other
victims of crimes and better understand the relationships between criminals and victims.
Detectives can now use phone records to make connections between a suspect and a victim,
or among suspects. They can track a person's movements through a MetroCard or E-ZPass.
They can pull A.T.M. records or surveillance camera videos at A.T.M.'s or in other
locations.

DNA can link killers to their victims, not just in sex crimes but also in cases where the
attacker may have bled at the crime scene, smoked a cigarette, drank from a glass or
struggled with a victim, leaving behind cells in any number of ways, including hair or
bits of skin caught under the victim's fingernails.

But most investigators agree that no conceivable technological development could ever
replace a seasoned investigator's ability to talk to people and a knowledge of the
environment where killings occur.

"As has always been true, the devil is in the details, and so far, only a good
investigator has been able to find him there," one veteran detective said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/29/nyregion/29CRIM.html?pagewanted=print&position=top

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