Twenty years ago, police officers were widely considered the heroes of New York. Yet, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, less than half of Americans had confidence in them. Here’s how the tables turned.
Bernie Whalen had the morning shift. Nearing the Casciano bridge on his way to the New York Police Department headquarters in downtown Manhattan, an announcement came over the radio: “A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.”
An hour later, he was on the ground in lower Manhattan, evacuating the area.
“We had a perfect view of the Trade Center falling,” he said. “I remember people screaming in the street. They just dropped to the ground, crying. We would tell them they had to get up and keep moving. It’d only be a minute until the cloud reached us.”
After September 11, first responders, including the police, received tremendous accolades from the public.
“Celebrities were taking pictures with us, and baseball players were wearing NYPD hats,” said Bill Ryan, who spent 20 years with the NYPD and investigated both the 1993 bombing and 9/11. “It was like a party.”
“60 Minutes was there. The Sopranos cast, and I think Muhammad Ali,” said Whalen, who worked in the office of labor relations at the time. He retired the from the force after 38 years as a lieutenant. “On the west side highway, near the new command center, people were clapping and waving flags” as police officers and other emergency personnel entered and exited the World Trade Center site.
Twenty years later, the narrative has completely flipped. Gallup polls show that the number of Americans who expressed confidence in the police bottomed out in 2020. That number, which climbed gently to 51 percent in 2021, remains significantly lower than its peak reached in the wake of 9/11.
The future of law enforcement remains uncertain. While the vast majority of Americans favor reforms, it’s anyone’s guess what those measures will look like. Some voices within the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as other critics, have called to defund or abolish the police. Experts, on the other hand, recommend a centralized, top-down system of policing or stricter government oversight. The debates surrounding the decline of the police’s standing after the post 9/11 peak illustrate the difficulty of instituting reforms and shine a light on how the nation’s polarization will continue to impact America’s 18,000 police departments.
In his chapter of New York After 9/11, Charles Jennings, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, wrote that journalists’ “cheerleading coverage” towards first responders immediately following the tragedy contributed to a lack of accountability. No one asked tough questions or critically evaluated their performance, he said, citing shortfalls in communication between the NYPD and the fire department during the attacks.
The “unquestioning acceptance” of the NYPD by the local government and press led to little pushback in the ensuing years after the tragedy, he added. “They pretty much got to do whatever they wanted and however much of it.”
To this, Ryan, the 20-year veteran of the police force, said, “Absolute horseshit.”
“People are conveniently changing the narrative,” he said. “We were so loved, we probably could do anything we wanted, but there was no power trip. If anything, we were doing more of that before 9/11.”
Whalen agreed.
“If we became more forceful, it was because the Bloomberg and Kelly administrations continued the policies from the previous administrations,” he said. Months after 9/11, Michael Bloomberg succeeded Rudy Giuliani as New York’s mayor. He appointed Raymond Kelly as police commissioner.
“And it wasn’t related to 9/11,” Whalen explained.
New York City’s crime rates increased dramatically in the early 1990s with more than 2,262 murders in 1990 alone, marking a record for the city. When Giuliani took over as mayor in 1994, he employed aggressive policing techniques to combat crime. This included ‘stop-and-frisk’ searches and ‘broken windows policing,’ which refers to the enforcement of less serious crimes to establish some level of social order, theoretically preventing more serious crimes from taking place. He also increased the number of misdemeanor arrests and grew the police force by 35 percent, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
Whether it was due to Giuliani’s changes to policing or other factors like the economic boom and demographic changes of the 1990s, NBER added, crime rates dropped significantly. Under Giuliani’s administration, crime occurrences halved in most categories, including murder, robbery, burglary, and vehicle theft. In 1998, crime records show 629 murders, a low the city hadn’t seen since the mid-1960s.
People were finally starting to feel safe again, and then 9/11 happened, followed by the subsequent anthrax scare, the new “normal” of heightened security in public spaces, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the pursuit of Al-Qaeda’s terrorist network.
In the chaos and fear that engulfed the city, “there was a natural tendency to turn to the NYPD,” said Jennings, the professor of criminology. “And I think they effectively jumped into that role.”
“When people feel threatened and insecure,” Ryan added, “they run to mommy every time.”
After 9/11, NYPD commissioner Kelly created a 1,000-person counterterrorism unit meant to help prevent future terrorist attacks in the city. This led to an increase in federal resources and a continuation of Giuliani’s aggressive tactics. Back then, people saw this as a legitimate mission for the NYPD, Jennings said.
Nevertheless, “The good will never last,” Ryan said. “It’s just like baseball. You’re only as good as your last at-bat.”
There is no clear date as to when public opinion shifted against the police. Whalen felt it was a couple of years after 9/11. Ryan thought it was more like six months. Regardless, there is no question that the public’s confidence in the police faded.
“The police have been subject to general distrust since its inception because of the tremendous power it has over its citizens,” said Maki Haberfeld, department chair of law, police science and criminal justice at John Jay College.
“The same people who took pictures with us were the ones criticizing us,” Ryan said.
Public opinion might have shifted due to the aggressive policing Kelly instituted after the attacks.
The NYPD’s venture into counterterrorism “marked the beginning of a period of unchecked autonomy and power,” Jennings wrote. Both the media and the policies of the Bloomberg administration contributed to the police’s unchecked power.
The role of journalists is to hold institutions like the police accountable. Starting in the late 1990s, the journalism landscape shifted. Wall Street investors purchased many independent newspapers, and they cut jobs to increase the profit margin, according to the report “The Media Landscape” issued by the Federal Communications Commission. Unable to navigate through the rise of online media, newspapers saw huge financial losses, thus laying off more journalists. As far back as the founding of the country, journalists have been considered essential to a functioning democracy. The cuts that struck the industry forced out beat and investigative reporters whose specialized and time-consuming work could not be sustained in the struggling market. The remaining journalists suffered pay cuts and were expected to cover many beats, giving them little time and resources to keep tabs on the local police.
According to the Associated Press, the Bloomberg administration focused largely on school reforms, public health, gun control, poverty and business. This allowed Kelly to have near complete autonomy over the police force. The police regulated themselves because Bloomberg had little interest in overseeing them, Jennings said. He equated it to Bloomberg putting the NYPD in the corner and saying, “Do whatever you need to do for 12 years.”
It is important to note that this isn’t just the police going off on their own, Jennings said. Responsibility doesn’t only fall upon Bloomberg or the fledgling media. “We were in the midst of two wars and huge societal changes,” he added. The NYPD was a product of a much larger historical episode.
In the past, the police captured criminals after they had committed crimes. They were rarely in the business of catching criminals before a crime occurred, or in this case, stopping future terrorist attacks. This new expectation involved targeted stops for anyone that looked suspicious, which included minor actions like loitering in the street or wearing too much clothing in the heat.
Stop-and-frisk is a policy allowing police officers to stop, question and search an individual when they have reasonable suspicion the subject is engaged in criminal activity. While it’s been used for half a century, it reached unprecedented heights in the early 2000s, which many experts cite as evidence of police abuse.
From 2002-2011, stop-and-frisk searches increased sevenfold as crime rates declined to lows not seen since the 1960s. Throughout the decade, only about 10 percent of stops translated into arrests. At its peak in 2011, the NYPD stopped more than 78 people each hour. It is unclear if the decreasing crime rate can be attributed to the increased stops, or as critics claim, if the increased stops were a symptom of unchecked control.
The Floyd et al. v. the City of New York case, a class action lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of stop-and-frisk, exposed many grievances between the police and the local community. In 2013, the case concluded that stop-and-frisk violated the Constitution’s protection against unlawful searches and seizures and its guarantee of equal protection under the law.
In the court’s opinion and order document, Federal District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin wrote: “I find that the ‘institutional evidence’… shows that the City has been deliberately indifferent to violations of the plaintiff class’s Fourth and Fourteenths Amendment rights.”
Sheindlin found not only an unjust increase in police stops, but also identified the pressure police faced to produce higher numbers.
Much of this pressure can be attributed to Compstat, a revolutionary data system created by the NYPD in the mid-1990s. It changed how resources were distributed, held officers accountable, and allowed the NYPD to track crime and arrest patterns in America’s largest city in real-time. Compstat’s success spread its use around the country, bringing law enforcement agencies into the 21st century through data collection and analysis.
The system also counted stop-and-frisk searches.
“Compstat became the monster you had to keep feeding,” Ryan said. Using a hypothetical, “If you had 50 stops last week and 40 this week, they’d ask why you had 10 less,” he explained. “Instead of using Compstat as a tool, they wanted to use it as a quantifiable statistic.”
Sheindlin wrote in her opinion that Compstat functioned in this manner “especially after the arrival of Major Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly.”
As the pressure increased, the number of stops compounded at an astronomical rate.
“I think people have a difficult time grasping the scope of the NYPD,” Ryan said. “The NYPD is more of an army rather than a police force. If we were an army, we’d be the eighth largest in the world. Our narcotics division is bigger than the LAPD.”
Due to its magnitude, the NYPD had an impossible job of evaluating if every search was warranted, while also being tasked with stopping the next 9/11.
“The NYPD has repeatedly turned a blind eye to clear evidence of unconstitutional stop and frisks,” Sheindlin wrote.
On the flip side, Ryan does not believe that the increase of stop-and-frisk searches related to police abuse. There’s a form officers are supposed to fill out whenever they make a stop, he said, and before Compstat, people weren’t always filling it out with shorter stops. “Once they started quantifying it, people started filling it out.”
Sheindlin also pointed to the disproportionate searches targeting Black and Hispanic Americans, which violated the Fourteenth Amendment.
“I had a disdain for police because I was a product of the stop-and-frisk era,” said Hawk Newsome, who leads New York City’s Black Lives Matter chapter. “It was a common occurrence to be walking down the street at 14 or 15 years old. They’d slam us against walls and throw us in cars. We’d be playing basketball and out of nowhere, five cops would show up.”
“They were bullies,” he said. “It’s not like you could fight back.”
Ryan credits the disproportionate stops for People of Color to the increased crime in minority neighborhoods. “If you’re fishing for sharks, you can’t look in a lake.”
Researchers from Columbia’s Center for Violence Research and Prevention tested this theory. They found that Black and Hispanic Americans were still stopped more frequently than white people, even after accounting for “race-specific crime rates and precinct population composition by race.”
In the Floyd case, specific instances of police abuse came to light. In one piece of evidence submitted in the case, Sergeant Raymond Stukes can he heard on tape in 2009 talking about dealing with groups of people on the street. He said, “If they won’t move, call me over and lock them up [for disorderly conduct]. No big deal. We could leave them there all night. If you stop them, 250, how hard is a 250,” referring to the stop-and-frisk provision. “I’m not saying make it up, but you can always articulate a robbery, burglary, whatever the case may be.”
In a tape from 2008, Lieutenant Jean Delafuente can be heard saying: “They might live here but we own the block. You tell them what to do.”.
Despite the findings of the court, Ryan claims that “power-trip cops are the exception, not the rule.”
After the attacks, members of the NYPD endured increased job responsibilities, department restructuring and the emotional impact of living through 9/11.
Despite terrorism being a federal issue, the NYPD carried out about 80 investigations appointed to them by the Federal Bureau of Investigations, according to the report “Antiterrorist Policing in New York City after 9/11.” A new national standard encouraged police units to adopt an “all-hazards” approach, said a study by RAND corporation, a nonprofit global policy think tank. This put additional pressure on the NYPD to prevent anything that could go wrong in one of the world’s largest cities.
“There was a lot of confusion,” said Whalen, who worked in labor relations. “We were pulling people from all over the city at all hours of the day. They’d finish a shift, and we’d say, ‘OK, come back in three hours.’”
Kelly’s counterterrorism unit also demanded intense specialized training, taking at least two years for a mid-career officer, the same study noted. The new unit shifted personnel throughout the department, moving middle-and-upper-tier officers into new roles, which required additional hiring for junior levels.
Officers’ jobs also became harder because many suffered lasting traumas that stayed with them for years. The “Antiterrorist Policing in New York City after 9/11” report references a “recurring feeling of guilt” that they had lived while some of their fellow officers perished, as well as “a strong identification with and compassion for the victims and their families.” The World Trade Center cleanup lasted eight months, where officers relived the horror of the attacks on a daily basis. The report notes that one officer said, “she and her colleagues had ‘gone numb in order to get on with everyday stuff.’ She thought it was good that she was exhausted from work, because otherwise she probably would not sleep.”
“After 9/11, I went to about 30 funerals of our people, FDNY, friends of friends,” Whalen said. “They seemed to go on for weeks.”
The difficulty in detecting police abuse lies in the disparate viewpoints of people inside and outside the force. In his work, Jennings found a connection between the unquestioning acceptance awarded to police for their heroic actions on 9/11, which led to a subsequent abuse of power. Ryan and Whalen, who were both officers during 9/11, reject these characterizations and don’t recall holding such sentiments. But no matter the differences in opinion, both sides of the issue cited dramatic societal changes that contributed to today’s reality.
“There were reactions to the war on terror, the rise of an abrasive relationship with the community, the George Floyd murder, the NYPD’s widely perceived insensitive policing of protests,” Jennings explained.
“At the same time is the tearing apart of our political discourse, including the Donald Trump phenomenon and Blue Lives Matter,” he added. “The NYPD versus the city and its residents.”
Nearly everyone who spoke on the subject for this article used the same phrase to describe this experience: “A war on factions.”
“It’s a difficult period, compacted by the pandemic, compacted by the polarization of factions and the politicization of issues,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit law enforcement think tank. “Police have been pulled in many different ways. It’s taken both a positive and a negative toll.”
Many experts worry that one of these negative tolls is hiring.
“The police can’t function without new hires,” said Haberfeld, the professor at John Jay College. “And that’s what I’m afraid of.”
Department data shows that the force has lost 1,400 full-time, uniformed members since fiscal year 2019, which is about a 4 percent decrease. Since 9/11, it has decreased by 5,700 people, or 14 percent.
“After 9/11, you saw people leaving the private sector to become police officers.” Wexler said. “Now, we are facing a very different challenge of getting the best and the brightest to recognize the importance of policing.”
The public’s perception of the police has also taken a turn for the worse. Gallup polls reveal the lowest approval rating of police officers in the nearly 30 years it has conducted polls on the subject. Immediately after the attacks, 59 percent of the population reported having “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the police. That number continued to rise for three years, to hit an all-time high of 64 percent. During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, that number fell to its all-time low, with only 48 percent of Americans holding confidence in the police. While this difference might seem modest, the “Public Opinions of the Police” report, sponsored by the Department of Justice, notes that polling has been stable over time and remained in a narrow range, so the 16 percent drop represents an unprecedented shift in public opinion.
This is partly because of social media, Jennings said. “The sins of any law enforcement officer anywhere in the country are visited on all police collectively.”
Social media allows for local events to be broadcast around the country. Something that happened a thousand miles away can feel like it’s happening in someone’s backyard. Had George Floyd been killed in an era without social media, his story might have been confined to local news outlets.
At the same time, Robert Shapiro, an expert in public opinion and former chair of Columbia’s department of political science, points out that public opinion varies by locality. “People can have very different opinions of the police as an institution versus the police in their community.”
“People, even my students, have trouble differentiating between police misconduct institutionally and individually,” agrees Haberfeld. “One person engages in misconduct, and it is attributed to something much larger.”
To this, Newsome, the Black Lives Matter leader, argued that the police are trained under a racist system.
The main argument for reforming the police is this questionable system – the institution of police and the role it should have in communities. A Gallup poll found that 58 percent of Americans believe the system requires major changes, while 36 percent believe minor changes would suffice. Only 6 percent feel no change is necessary.
“The future of public opinion depends greatly on the short term,” said Shapiro.
Haberfeld sees a solution in centralized law enforcement with proper oversight and standards. She notes that most democratic countries have this already.
Similarly, Jennings said, “You need real, meaningful political oversight of law enforcement,” but today, local governments aren’t asking meaningful questions. “They don’t get down to details, and there’s a lot of public safety issues that are left half done, undone or unexplored because of that failure of political oversight.”
Taking a different approach, Newsome said, “The police need to be abolished and we need to find a new way to make people obey the law.” He recommended those with social work degrees taking over the job of police, because many 911 calls are responses to people with mental health issues.
“We’ll stop crime by ending poverty,” Newsome added. “Poverty is the mother of all crime, but politicians don’t want to admit that because the criminal justice system is a billion-dollar industry.”
Ryan, on the other hand, attributes the current distrust specifically to a new group of people inhabiting the city.
“People who didn’t live through the bad times are here now,” he said, referring to the 1980s and ‘90s. “Back then, it was a different time in the city and a different time for policing. I remember when Times Square was dangerous. Now, it’s Disneyfied.”
These new residents are the same ones pushing back, questioning if the aggression is necessary, he added: How do they think the city got this way?
“If you walked into a room of police officers today and asked them, ‘How many of you want your kids to become officers,’ you’d have very few raise their hands,” said Wexler, the think tank director. “It was different 20 years ago. People were proud of what the police did.”
