NATIONAL COPS EVALUATION
ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE CASE STUDY:
Albany, New York

David Thacher
Research Associate
Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University

Case Study Prepared for the Urban Institute

Introduction

Albany, New York is a city of just over 100,000 residents and a rich political history. Though it has been the state capital since 1797, it is Albany’s local politics that have truly distinguished the city: Albany hosted the most enduring political machine in modern American history, one that kept a strong hold over most city affairs well into the 1970s and even the early 1980s. But towards the end of this period the party’s hold on civic affairs began to weaken: Although Democratic voters still outnumber Republicans better than 10-to-1 in Albany, the Democratic organization no longer holds the iron grip on power that it once held, and today party leaders share power with employee unions, neighborhood groups, civil service boards, and independent administrators.

The Albany Police Department has evolved over the past two decades in response to these changes, and recent reforms labeled “community policing” have played a part in that evolution. In some ways, community policing has meant a return to the past in Albany: Well into the 1980s, local police maintained a neighborhood-oriented force that emphasized foot patrol, and it was not until reform Mayor Thomas Whalen cut department staffing radically—from a patronage-swollen 415 in the 1970s to 300 by 1993—that the APD shut down its popular neighborhood substations. In part, community policing simply reversed these recent reforms by re-instituting foot patrol and by promising to re-open neighborhood substations. But it also promised the city something different: Whereas in the past local police had taken guidance mostly from the formal political system, under community policing they pledged to listen to Albany’s newly-powerful neighborhood and business groups, and also to unorganized residents.

This case study chronicles the history of the APD community policing efforts in three stages. Section I sets the context for change by reviewing the recent history of Albany’s police and its government more generally. Section two, the heart of the study, then chronicles the reforms of the past four years in some detail, focusing on the strategies APD administrators and others used to put community policing in place. Section three then sums up the consequences of change by briefly reviewing how the APD operates today.

I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994

1. Relationship to the Environment
All public agencies submit to some form of public oversight, often distributed among elected officials, public-minded professionals, community groups, and administrative law. But in the decades leading up to community policing, what was distinctive about the Albany Police Department was the degree to which this oversight was informally centralized in the hands of local politicians. The near monopoly of control that elected officials held over city agencies began to weaken in the 1980s, but many observers maintain that up until the 1970s, Albany government was firmly in the hands of a unified Democratic machine.

The Albany County Democratic Committee is the stuff of legends. Presided over for some five decades by party leader Dan O’Connell, Albany Democrats held tight control over everything from elections, to taxes, to the criminal justice system, using their influence over those spheres to earn loyalty and maintain their hold on power. Though a few veteran city officials downplay the influence of the machine, most report that as late as the early 1980s, the party’s appointed ward leaders held sway over many important decisions—including where code inspections would be made, whether or not the city would collect on a parking ticket, and who the police department would hire and promote (civil service tests were widely considered toothless in Albany, one of the few large cities in New York to administer the test locally, and the state repeatedly admonished city officials for lax administration of hiring regulations). Indeed, the special role of jobs in the patronage system led to an enlarged police department of some 415 officers in the 1970s, when LEAA funds boosted APD staffing considerably.1
Ward leaders, of course, did not exercise their influence independently. O’Connell and Albany Mayor Erastus Corning—whose 42-year tenure made him the longest-serving mayor in America—exercised strong discipline over party members: Well into the 1970s, it was highly unusual for any political position to be contested within the Democratic party, and to win the Democrats’ endorsement meant certain victory in open elections. (Even in 1985, after the machine’s inexorable decline had taken root, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 16 to 1 in Albany.) Indeed, “loyalty” has long been the watchword of Albany politics,2 and observers both credit it with making the system work and blame it for making it unbearable. On the one hand, loyal party members—even those of the most modest means—could often expect immediate responses when they brought neighborhood or personal problems to the attention of their ward leaders, who gave Albany government a strong neighborhood focus that so-called “professional” city halls around the country could rarely match. On the other hand, dissent was not welcome in Albany, and those who sought to organize their own power bases met with stiff resistance. One example of this dynamic comes from repeated attempts by police to unionize, which did not succeed until the mid-1970s after a bitter fight with the Corning administration. Another example emerged during the same period as neighborhood associations began to form in the city: Many observers report that Corning fought the groups and their proposals every step of the way, seeing them as an affront to the consolidated power of the political machine.3 Finally, Corning also resisted organizing attempts in Albany’s black community, which was scantly represented in the Democratic Committee. Indeed, Albany blacks have long had a contentious relationship with city hall—particularly the police department, which faced widespread accusations of brutality towards African-Americans.

These various organizing attempts presaged the machine’s gradual unraveling, which was punctuated by the deaths of O’Connell in 1977 and Corning in 1983. Corning was succeeded by Thomas Whalen, who at the time was the president of the city’s Common Council and had been hand-picked by Corning himself as his successor. Initially viewed as a Democratic loyalist who would simply continue with the status quo,4 Whalen turned out to be something of a reformer. Even before taking charge of the city, he had felt that voters simply would not accept the “bare-knuckles” strategies of the past,5 and two structural problems apparently encouraged his reformist bent. First of all, the tight link between the mayoralty and the County Democratic Committee died along with Corning, who left the mayor’s job to Whalen but the chairmanship of the Committee to a longtime party member named Leo O’Brien—a division that broke the machine lifeline connecting voters to city services. Second, years of patronage had swollen the city’s budget, to the point that Corning had allegedly begun borrowing to finance regular operating expenses (an illegal practice supported, again allegedly, by questionable accounting). As Whalen quickly recognized, the already-decaying city simply could not afford the old strategies of patronage.

Whatever the reasons, Whalen gradually extricated city government from the Democratic Committee and its offshoots, selling the water system to an autonomous agency, ending most no-bid contracts, and embarking on a massive enterprise to rationalize the city’s finances. At the same time, Whalen cultivated a relationship with the growing movement of neighborhood associations, which gradually began to displace ward leaders as shareholders in some city decisionmaking. The new Mayor’s supporters trumpeted his efforts as a professionalization of city government that had started to undo the damage done by decades of backwards politics—which, they argued, had left the city’s downtown in disarray, undermined effective service delivery, and destroyed city hall’s legitimacy. But opponents accused the new mayor of elitism and of catering to the wealthy and business interests, and many party loyalists treated him as a traitor. Moreover, some in the police department argue that political influence over policing actually increased under Whalen, who they say took a more direct interest in staffing decisions that Corning ever had, perhaps in order to advance his reforms there.

Whatever their objective merits, Whalen’s reform efforts touched the police department directly: Believing that patronage had swollen the APD’s ranks, the mayor stopped hiring completely for eight years, closing the department’s two neighborhood substations in the process. The effort put a serious strain into relationships between city hall and the police—particularly with the increasingly-vocal Police Officer’s Union, which fought Whalen on staffing and other issues for years. The result was that the Mayor found it difficult to push more substantive reforms: For example, despite four years of efforts to implement community policing towards the end of his tenure, Whalen was only able to establish a marginal special unit, leaving the rest of the department untouched. Other Whalen-led reforms to areas like internal affairs and minority hiring also led to serious dissent and were never completely implemented (one Chief resigned over disagreements with the Mayor about discipline).

Whalen did influence policing indirectly by encouraging active neighborhood associations (NAs), which began gradually to play more of a role in the APD and other city agencies. But while police were not exactly antagonistic to these groups (special units like the anti-burglary team and community services reportedly had close relationships with some NAs), they apparently never fully accepted the idea that they should look to the community for guidance about police priorities. Community activist Harold Rubin recalls an incident that illustrates this idea:

Rubin, whose Center Square neighborhood was the only one with foot patrol in the city after the Arbor Hill and South End substations closed, had perhaps the closest thing to “community policing” that the APD was offering at the time. Nevertheless, Rubin reports that even the foot patrol officer only occasionally attended association meetings, and that while he was an effective and welcome police presence, “he was not community-oriented.”

The Task Environment
Until the 1980s, the Democratic organization also influenced the APD’s dealings with other city and county agencies. In fact, interagency cooperation in this period was apparently reasonably good, as employees of both the police department and their agency partners remember making regular referrals to one another, particularly with regards to problem properties: Since public servants worked as much for ward leaders as they did for their respective agencies, the “barriers” between different agencies were not especially salient.

On the criminal justice side, the APD apparently enjoyed a good relationship with other nearby police agencies and with the County court system, which never faced the crisis of jail space that began to pressure many other U.S. cities. Some local officials feel that the APD had too little contact with State and Federal law enforcement agencies (both of which participated in investigations against the County Democratic Committee—ranging from the one led by presidential aspirant and New York State Governor Thomas Dewey in the 1940s, to a more recent FBI probe into fundraising practices in the early 1990s).6 But within the county, at least, some allege that the APD was enmeshed only too well into the machine-controlled criminal justice system, which elected its judges, its county attorneys, and (until 1968) its DA with the blessing of the Democratic Committee.7

2. Operations
Writing thirty years ago, James Q. Wilson described the Albany Police Department as a “watchman” style department that emphasized serious crimes and the maintenance of public order, paying less attention to minor violations like traffic offenses, gambling, and other misdemeanors. Many department veterans today insist that this policing style dominated the department well into the 1980s. For example, one officer who moved to Albany relatively late in life remembers that the department frowned on him when he did make arrests for minor infractions: “A lot of the older guys would look down their nose at that,” he explains. “I can remember my Lieutenant yelling at me for bringing in a drunken driver, or different things that were [about] quality of life.” Tolerance for vice and gambling declined somewhat under the glare of negative publicity (including an early-1970s investigation by the state into allegations that Albany police took payoffs from local prostitution rings), but the underlying watchman ethos remained.

The organization of the patrol force underwent more dramatic fluctuations. Several decades ago, the APD was divided into six precincts that assigned officers to relatively small areas of the city. But this decentralized structure eventually gave way to two relatively large patrol divisions within which officers did not have permanent beat assignments.

In the early 1970s, the department moved back towards decentralization again by using federal LEAA money to open up two neighborhood substations, located in the predominantly black neighborhoods of Arbor Hill and the South End. Tensions with police were high in these areas, largely because of accusations about police brutality, but also because of concerns that police were ignoring these neighborhoods’ serious crime problems. In response, the department assigned several non-uniformed officers to patrol these neighborhoods mostly on foot, charging them with delivering essentially all police services—from patrol, to call response, to investigation—and thereby creating what amounted to a new and separate police department dedicated solely to these two areas. One substation officer remembers:

This divisiveness may have contributed to the substations’ closing in the mid 1980s, and some former unit officers argue that growing union activism also undermined them (among other demands, the new union insisted that the administration fill jobs in the neighborhood units through the seniority-based bid system that began to govern most other APD assignments). But when Mayor Whalen eliminated the two units on the advice of an outside study, he presented the action as part of his more general downsizing of the police department, arguing that Albany simply would not have enough manpower to run these special substations any longer.

In closing the Arbor Hill and South End substations, Whalen returned the APD’s patrol force to the relatively centralized model it had used in the 1960s, which consisted of two divisions plus a traffic unit, with little focus placed on neighborhoods. The basic grouping during this period was the squad, and the Lieutenants who commanded them were charged with overseeing the entire patrol force during their hours on duty. It was not that there was no incentive at all to deal with neighborhood problems in this system: One department manager recalls, “I know when I was a Sergeant, if I had groups that were constantly congregating in one area between certain times, causing an uproar in the neighborhood, I didn’t want to have to go to the Lieutenant three times and tell him I couldn’t fix it. I’d fix it.” But the difficulty was that accountability for these problems was often fragmented or ill-defined. The manager continues:

As a result, some department veterans argue, chronic neighborhood problems never received the attention they deserved.

Outside of patrol, the relatively unspecialized APD of the 1960s (when operations divided into traffic, investigations, patrol, and communications) gradually added a number of dedicated units, including a juvenile unit, a community services unit, a drug unit, and an anti-burglary unit. Like the neighborhood substations, most of these special units operated autonomously, having little coordination with the rest of the APD. The drug unit, for example, worked flexible shifts and had little managerial oversight—to the point that by the early 1990s, some city officials felt it was getting out of control, as drug officers provoked a number of civil suits for excessive force and wrongful searches. Community services, which met with neighborhood groups, provided crime prevention services, and took care of other community relations functions, obviously did not create the same types of concerns. But many department members felt that it too was overly isolated, as the rest of the patrol force rarely attended community meetings with community services officers, who were expected to take care of such duties on their own.

3. Administrative Systems
These problems with organizational structure apparently reflected more general administrative weaknesses in the APD. In part, the department’s relative lack of emphasis on things like policy, procedure, and coordination reflected the strong influence of politics on Albany policing. For example, hiring and recruitment were directed less by internal needs assessments and standardized testing than they were by the political machine. (Even today, it is not hard to find department veterans who remember a time when the surest way to gain a police job in Albany was to contact one’s ward leader.) This particular form of strong political influence subsided when Corning died in 1983, but at that point a new form of political influence began to dominate personnel decisions, namely, the massive downsizing of the Whalen administration, which saw hiring stop cold for eight years, promotions slow to a crawl, and total staffing drop by one-third. In any case, other administrative systems also seemed to suffer due to political influence, as functions like planning, internal budgeting, and policymaking had little place in an environment where political leaders had final say in most important decisions. The party’s opposition to unionization also had the effect of maintaining informal administration, as evidenced by the fact that formal rules governing things like assignments and discipline proliferated in the APD after the union did gain power in the late 1970s.

Further back in time, the internal affairs system also received little attention in Albany. In particular, complaints against police were widely viewed as unwelcome, and the entire criminal justice system seemed to mobilize against those who made them.8 “Twenty, thirty years ago, especially in this city, you didn’t make complaints,” one department veteran explains. Mayor Whalen sought to revamp internal affairs in 1985 when he replaced its commanding officer in response to a high-profile case that he felt had not been investigated properly, and some department veterans argue that the complaint process became much more sophisticated around that time. But others maintain that low-level complaints still tended to be deflected, since the small internal affairs unit simply did not have the time to investigate every minor incident.

4. Management
The lack of structure and coordination that came with the APD’s informal administrative systems were something of a double-edged sword to department managers. On the one hand, the lack of emphasis on strict rules and procedures meant that the personal authority of a manager or supervisor carried considerable weight, and it is perhaps for this reason that many department members remember their organization as a fairly hierarchical one. “Back then,” one department member remembers, referring to the 1970s, “a Sergeant was a Sergeant and you did what he said. You didn’t question him, and you didn’t make suggestions.” Indeed, supervisors tried to keep close watch over their subordinates: For example, officers were not supposed to contact outside agencies like code enforcement without first clearing it with their Sergeant. And until forces like unionization and civil service began to erode upper management’s power in the 1980s, APD managers (working closely with elected officials) had essentially unilateral authority to make assignments, decide policies, and choose promotions. In this sense, authority was fairly centralized in the APD during much of this period.

On the other hand, the department’s informal, craft-like flexibility made for something of an unruly organization that management occasionally had trouble controlling. For example, many department managers felt that as attrition thinned out upper management ranks, individual units tended to go their separate ways, independent of oversight, coordination, and any overarching departmental strategy. One department manager explains:

These problems were particularly acute during the night shift, when the highest-ranking officers on duty would typically be the various division Lieutenants, who sometimes had trouble agreeing who should take charge of crime scenes and other situations. Finally, beyond these questions of oversight, some department veterans argue there was simply too little mentoring by upper management. “What was frustrating is when as a new supervisor . . . . you were just constantly bombarded with decisions and you weren’t necessarily sure what to do,” one department member remembers, going on to explain that the lack of upper management presence exacerbated the problem by leaving supervisors to their own devices. Thus in this sense, management was fairly decentralized in this period, leaving officers, first-line supervisors, or at least division Lieutenants with important decisions—to the point that some of them felt that they were overburdened with authority.

II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY

The growing national discourse about community policing began to touch Albany in 1991, when Mayor Thomas Whalen attended a U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting on the topic and was prompted to direct then-Police Chief John Dale to implement it in the APD. Dale’s staff spent three months studying community policing efforts in other cities, and the Chief then announced plans to start up an outreach unit that would partly re-create the popular foot patrols that Whalen had abolished a few years earlier (residents in those neighborhoods had repeatedly complained that they wanted their stations back after Whalen closed them in 1986). This time, however, the effort would not involve physically opening up new police stations to which a large number of officers reported: Instead, the APD would assign eight officers total to four relatively small “quarters” in each of the Arbor Hill and South End neighborhoods, with a mandate to broaden their role beyond traditional police work. “I want the officers to be able to get on the telephone and call an individual to take action, not go through the red tape,” Dale explained to a newspaper reporter at the time. “[An officer might say] ‘I have a house that needs to be boarded up, I have a mother here who doesn’t have any food, you’ve got to help her.”9 Dale especially hoped that that the officers would build rapport with residents in these neighborhoods and thereby reduce the historic mistrust that had existed in Albany’s African-American community, telling a newspaper reporter, “My internal affairs department shouldn’t have much work if this works.”10
The foot patrols were apparently popular in the city, and some residents insisted that their community policing officers had helped clear out the most egregious drug markets in their neighborhoods.11 But many in the APD felt that the program represented a superficial commitment to community policing. One explains:

Others concur that in this incarnation, the outreach unit was even more isolated from the rest of the department than the APD’s other special units. The problem was not just that this version of “community policing” left most Albany officers untouched, but also that the unit itself sometimes did not get needed support. Then-Sergeant Arthur Phinney, who commanded the outreach officers for a year, reports that his team made some significant accomplishments but that at times he felt constrained by wider organizational issues:

The problem, perhaps, was that longstanding disagreements with Whalen made police less than enthusiastic about carrying his newest program forward: Patrol officers opposed the effort through their union, and when Dale advertised the position for a Sergeant who would head up the new outreach unit, no one applied for the job, forcing the Chief to fill it by inverse seniority. Some observers suggested that the union was politically-motivated, in that it was geared to oppose anything proposed by Whalen. But union leaders argued that they had serious substantive disagreements with this particular proposal, maintaining that too few officers were being committed, that the target areas needed to be “cleared out” with sweeps before foot officers took to the beat, and that a heavy load of traditional police work was diverting the officers from the job they were supposed to be doing.

1. A New Mayor and a New Push for Community Policing
Community policing thereby sputtered along slowly in Albany for about three years until 1994, when a new Mayor brought not only a broader vision for the effort, but also, and perhaps more important, greater credibility with the rank-and-file. That Mayor was a man named Jerry Jennings, an Albany alderman for thirteen years who had long stood up for police interests against Whalen’s budget cuts. Community policing had a direct connection to at least one of these battles, as Jennings joined one other alderman to oppose the Mayor when he shut down the Arbor Hill and South End substations. Jennings did not represent either ward at the time, but he explains that as a school administrator (a position he had held since the 1970s), he “understood the importance” of these units, which he felt did an excellent job of holding the line against growing crime problems. Moreover, when Whalen began pushing his new version of the outreach unit in 1991, Jennings felt that the efforts left much room for improvement. “The community was crying for more,” he maintains.

Public safety was not the only area in which Jennings clashed with Whalen: Long something of a dissident who had insisted on the Common Council’s independence, Jennings alienated the party mainstream and became a pariah to many Democratic stalwarts. For example, when he sought to defend his alderman’s position in 1989 elections, the party not only failed to endorse him, but it actively worked to disqualify his Democratic primary petition, forcing Jennings first to run a write-in campaign, and then, when he lost that campaign by seven votes, to run as an independent in the general election (which he won).

This history poised Jennings as a maverick candidate for mayor, and he found himself running against a well-financed candidate named Harold Joyce, who had the Democratic party’s endorsement and had only recently been the party’s chairman. The contest was a highly unusual one for Albany: No one had upset the party pick for mayor since World War I, and even lesser races were still rarely contested. But Jennings gradually assembled a diverse coalition of supporters who helped him win a close Democratic primary and then an easy victory in the general election. Part of this coalition came from those who disapproved of Whalen’s reforms, including a number of Corning loyalists who felt Whalen had betrayed their patron’s legacy, as well as a few dissident ward leaders who lamented their declining clout in city decisions.12 But Jennings also had strong support from organized labor, receiving endorsements from the Albany Permanent Professional Firefighters Association, its statewide parent organization, and the New York state police union. The local Albany Police Officers’ Union declined to endorse either candidate, citing potential conflicts of interest if someone in a campaign became the target of an investigation.13 But most Albany police officers clearly supported Jennings, who they were grateful to for his opposition to Whalen, and who was close friends with then-union president James Tuffey.
Substantively, Jennings ran on a mixture of issues, but public safety was among his most prominent themes. “Crime was a major concern as I walked the neighborhoods, talked to people, and tried to become Mayor of the city,” Jennings explains. “And it’s something that we quickly focused on.”14 Jennings saw public safety as part of the larger issue of quality of life, which he considered indispensable for further economic development in the city. At the same time, Jennings sought to build “community trust” in the police, primarily by increasing their visibility. “You only do that [build trust] by maximizing the exposure of the men and women in the department,” Jennings explains.

In contrast with his opponent, who intended to commission a professional management study to make recommendations about the APD because he felt “it’s not the mayor’s job to run the police department,” Jennings laid out a fairly specific plan, arguing that a management study would be a waste of money that could better be spent on manpower. Three proposals stood out in Jennings’s plan: First, he intended to add 25 officers as a way to increase patrols in the city. Second, he intended to restructure the department’s management team by adding two new Assistant Chief positions and dividing accountability among them, by filling the long-vacant Deputy Chief slot, and by adding two “non-union” commanders who would ensure loyal, 24-hour supervision. (At the time, the highest rank working nights was a Lieutenant, and the most important supervisors during days were Captains. Both ranks belonged to the same union, and Jennings and others felt this situation created a conflict. “That doesn’t work,” Jennings told an audience at the time. “Where’s the allegiance?”) Finally, Jennings wanted to implement community policing department-wide, expanding foot patrols and creating a special unit focused on crime hot spots in the process. Jennings estimated his plan’s cost at $1 Million, but he felt that the money could be raised by cuts in other areas (including reductions in overtime expenses within the police department) or, in a pinch, by raising taxes. “It’s a matter of priorities,” Jennings told the crowd assembled to hear his proposal.15

Robert Grebert and the Vision for Community Policing
Jennings wasted no time carrying out his proposals for the police department, filling the vacant Deputy Chief’s position in his first week on the job. The man he appointed was a 42-year-old Lieutenant named Robert Grebert, who had started as a patrolman in the APD 20 years before and had served in the old neighborhood outreach units in the 1970s. In fact, Jennings cited that experience, together with Grebert’s strong educational background, in his decision to appoint the Albany Lieutenant to the APD’s number 2 slot.16 In any event, department insiders had for some time suspected that Jennings would appoint Grebert to the position, as he had been friendly with the mayoral candidate for a while and, together with union president Tuffey, he had apparently helped Jennings develop his strategy for the police department.

Grebert received a broad mandate for reform from Jennings, including scattered administrative issues like bringing overtime under control and reining in the APD’s special investigations unit. But Grebert’s central charge was clearly to work with Chief Dale to expand the APD’s community policing program. Indeed, Grebert remembers that if anything, Jennings’s initial resolve to put community policing in place struck him as too ambitious:

Grebert also felt that the department simply was not ready to embark on the effort immediately: He himself was among those most knowledgeable about community policing in the department, but he had only been exposed to it tangentially. (His first exposure came during a session at the FBI Academy in 1989, a period when many in the law enforcement community were beginning to question the so-called “professional model” of policing and looking for alternatives. He had since followed its development in the literature and learned about it from colleagues in his role as an adjunct faculty member at two local colleges.) As a result, he received support to spend some time at Michigan State University’s Center for Community Policing, where he was joined by another APD member; and a number of high-level APD administrators attended further training locally and through the Department of Justice’s Community Policing Consortium.

Grebert took away from this experience a better sense of what community policing entailed. “I [was] at least beginning to get my own handle on some of the concepts,” he remembers. Grebert particularly became convinced about the importance of giving officers a sense of responsibility for the areas they patrolled—something he felt the current assignment system did not accomplish.

Equally important, however, was convincing officers to pay attention to the full range of problems that arose in their beats—not just serious crime. Grebert explains the importance of this idea with a reference to the New York City Police Department, which at the time was beginning to carry out its now-famous focus on quality of life issues.

Grebert’s early forays into the community, which served to announce the department’s plans, confirmed that this focus made sense:

This focus would grow even stronger over time as it dovetailed with a citywide effort led by Jennings to improve quality of life in the city.

The First Plan
Grebert sought to flesh out this vision by crafting a long-range plan, one that would lay out the specific reforms needed to make this version of community policing a reality. To be sure, the newly-minted Deputy Chief was realistic enough to recognize that Albany politics could easily overwhelm a naïve and overly ambitious plan; he explains:

Nevertheless, Grebert apparently felt that it was possible and helpful to lay out some sense of the direction that community policing would entail, even if it were not a detailed “five year plan” that programmed every element of reform.

To that end, Grebert put together a “transition team” made up of fifteen officers from different parts of the department, asking each to outline necessary changes that would orient their unit towards community policing. (At the time, some criticized the planning effort for failing to involve the community, but Grebert insists that the group met with Neighborhood Associations, and in any case he was happy with the results.) Some of the team members came with Grebert to local seminars on the subject, and all reviewed the literature collected from these events and Michigan State.

The document that emerged in the fall of 1994 laid out an ambitious plan to restructure the entire Albany Police Department. Patrol would undergo the biggest changes: The department’s two divisions would give way to six geographic sectors, and officers would have constant assignments to a particular sector until they bid into a new one. This arrangement, the planners hoped, would not only provide the sense of ownership that Grebert viewed as crucial, but it would also create teams of officers who could meet regularly to discuss troublespots in their areas.

The sector cars would be supplemented by 20 zones of foot patrol officers that were drawn, according to Grebert, according to “unofficial neighborhood boundaries” in those areas where foot patrol seemed appropriate (Grebert explained this decision to a newspaper reporter by saying, “In areas where the social life is in the family room or the backyard pool, foot patrol doesn’t work. In areas where the social life happens on the street corner and the porch, foot patrol is the ticket.”19) In his eyes, foot patrol had always been a valuable tool, and he looked forward to bringing it back to Albany. “I’ve always been a believer in foot patrol,” he explains.

Each zone was to be staffed with a single officer who would serve as “an ombudsman of positive change in the neighborhoods he patrols.” With flexible schedules and minimal 911 responsibilities, these officers would have ample opportunity to get to know their assigned communities and the conditions that most concerned them. The plan made a special effort to clarify the scope of concerns that these officers might encounter:

Finally, the plan particularly encouraged foot patrol officers to access other city agencies for help dealing with these problems, calling for the department to authorize them to make the necessary contacts. The foot patrol officers would be managed by a Lieutenant (who would in turn report directly to “a person above the rank of Captain who has the responsibility of overseeing Community Policing”), but he would act more as their support staff than their supervisor, helping the officers by following up on their requests to other agencies and departmental units, bringing serious crimes on their beats to their attention, and maintaining files on neighborhood and business groups.

Other units would undergo less dramatic transformations, but all were affected in some way. Detectives, for example, would for the most part begin assigning cases by sector rather than by incident type, allowing them to get a better overall picture of crime patterns in individual neighborhoods. (The main exceptions were illegalities like white collar crime, which was felt to have a citywide rather than a neighborhood character—for example, these criminals often committed crimes at banks far away from their own neighborhoods.) The Administrative Services Bureau, charged with jobs like evaluation of the entire effort, would be expanded by three positions, including two in the training division, which would see its duties grow exponentially: Not only would the community policing effort demand significant training for all staff at its inception, but the department would also have to revise its curriculum for recruits, and it would need to train volunteers to perform outreach duties. Finally, the plan gave all units a mandate for improved coordination, calling, for example, for SIU to include foot patrol officers in drug raids.

In the deliberations that underlay the report and the reactions to it when it was released, a few areas of controversy turned up. First of all, while the report proposed that the foot patrol officers would walk one-man beats, officers themselves insisted that many areas were too dangerous for that; as a compromise, the plan allowed some officers in adjacent zones to walk together. Second and more important were disagreements about how to fill new assignments like the foot beats: Management wanted to use the so-called review board process, which governed special assignments like detectives or the traffic unit and gave the Chief significant say in who got particular jobs. The union, however, insisted that the positions should be filled through the seniority-based bid system. Despite its misgivings, management conceded to officer demands on this issue, and in return the union agreed to the proposed flexibility in the foot patrol officers’ hours.20 (The existing union contract required fixed schedules for officers, but the union agreed to make an exception for the foot patrol officers, who would be allowed to flex their own schedules with supervisory approval, and who would sometimes be ordered to work different hours when the need arose.)

2. A New Chief for Albany
Before the new effort could make much headway, dissent broke out in the department after Chief Dale’s February, 1995 announcement that he would retire, explaining only that he was “in the 37th year in my profession, and when it’s time to go, you know it.”21 The problem was Jennings’s choice for a replacement—State Police Sergeant Kevin Tuffey, brother of the department’s recently-departed union president, and a long-time friend of the Mayor’s.
Union leaders were up in arms about the choice even before Jennings formally announced it (like Dale’s retirement, the appointment of Tuffey had been rumored for months). Albany had not made an outsider Police Chief in over a hundred years, and the Civil Service Commission—prompted by Jennings and opposed by the police union—had only made it possible to do so a few months earlier, adding language to the position’s job requirements that would allow candidates to have “equivalent experience in a municipal or State Police unit within the state of New York.” In any case, union leaders accused Jennings of cronyism for appointing his long-time friend, and they insisted that Deputy Chief Grebert was the most qualified man for the position. “I don’t think Kevin Tuffey is up to the job,” then-union president and APD Detective James Galante told a Times-Union reporter at the time. “He has no urban policing experience, [and] I don’t feel that [he] has a real feel for the goings-on in the city of Albany. I believe the people we have are more qualified and experienced and educated.”22 Regardless of Tuffey’s qualifications, union leaders and others (including two Common Council members) criticized the fact that there would be no formal search process at all for the important post.

When Jennings finally made the appointment official in a March, 1995 press release, he defended his choice of Tuffey as someone who would bring “loyal, progressive leadership” to the APD, insisting that he selected Tuffey “not because I am his friend or because I do not recognize the talent that exists within the Albany Police Department, but because he shares my vision for the future of the department and he has the experience, energy, and qualifications to implement it.”23 “As an elected official, you go with your gut, and I went with my gut,” Jennings explains of the appointment today. “I was confident that he would be forthright and up front with me, and tell me, ‘You’re wrong. You’re right.’. . . . I went with someone that I was confident in, that would be someone that would work with the present police structure and change it if appropriate.” Jennings also points to Tuffey’s experience with the State Police, which had given him experience in its own fledgling community policing program, and which had helped him to develop strong connections in regional law enforcement circles.
Local media at the time made much of the fact that Tuffey and Jennings were close friends, and some commentators suggested that Jennings appointed him for that reason—a suggestion that Jennings rejects. But while the media interpreted the friendship through the lens of “cronyism,” Tuffey argues that his close association with the Mayor meant that the two shared a view about the challenges facing law enforcement. “The Mayor and I have been friends for a long time,” Tuffey explains. “So we would always sit and talk about visions, and about where we thought the Police Department should go, and what I thought. And we would sit and talk for hours.” Tuffey remembers several recurrent themes in these discussions, including the importance of training in police work and what he saw as problems with the APD’s command structure. But at the broadest level, he simply tried to convey his underlying convictions about policing:

This idea was particularly important for his conception of community policing, which he and Jennings also discussed in their conversations. “Community policing is—again, I mean call it community policing, call it what you want: All it is just doing regular, honest, basic police work,” Tuffey explains. For example, for Tuffey, foot patrol is “getting back in touch with the community.”

Thus over the course of years of conversations like these—including discussions about Jennings’s plans to run for mayor— the two men came to share important aspects of their vision for the APD. Moreover, beyond the question of personal loyalty came from a long-time friendship, Tuffey recognized that it was his job to carry out the Mayor’s vision: “If I’m not following his philosophy, you know what? I’m not going to be here,” Tuffey explains. “Whether he and I were personal friends, or whether he just hired me, I will tell you the exact same thing.”24

Dealing with the Backlash
Nevertheless, many APD officers still resented the choice of Tuffey for police Chief, and it began to sour the once-amiable relationship between police and the Mayor. That relationship had already begun to deteriorate a few weeks before Dale’s retirement because of continued tensions around staffing issues: Union leaders argued that Jennings had been dragging his feet on filling promotions, and they were become impatient about the pace at which he was fulfilling his campaign promise to put 25 new officers on the street (Jennings attributed the delay to unanticipated budgetary problems; the new hires had been chosen in 1994, but some had not yet entered training because of concerns about funding them). The Tuffey appointment only exacerbated the situation, leading the union to pull its ads from Jennings’s weekly radio show and causing its president to threaten that he would withdraw support from the Mayor in his 1997 re-election bid.

Tuffey himself pointedly stayed out of the fray, telling a reporter he didn’t “have any problem” with the criticisms being levelled against him by the union and explaining, “they have to do what they have to do, and I’ll do what I have to do.”25 Perhaps because of this attitude, union leaders increasingly qualified their attacks in kind, saying that they were not so much personally opposed to Tuffey as they were upset with Jennings for his methods. Still, sentiment regarding the new Chief was guarded at best: Many police officers refused to attend Tuffey’s swearing-in ceremony, and a wishful group of detectives hosted a “retirement party” for the Chief one month into his tenure.26 Thus as he entered the APD in the middle of an organizational change effort, Tuffey faced a clear need to build support for his leadership.

The new Chief was able to capitalize on the fact that he was not entirely the “outsider” that union officials had pegged him as. His brother, a long-time union leader and a 19-year veteran of the force, was the most obvious example of Tuffey’s ties to Albany. Indeed, the Tuffey family had a history with the department, as the two brothers’ uncle had been Albany’s Police Chief from 1953 to 1968, and both of their grandfathers had worked for the APD. (As Chief, Tuffey keeps photographs of these relatives on his office wall and an old service record for the department in his desk, as if to remind department members how his genealogy connects him to Albany.) Finally, outside of his family ties, since Tuffey had grown up in the city and associated with law enforcement circles, he had a few friends and colleagues in the department (for example, he and Grebert had occasionally run together before Tuffey came to the APD). All of these ties together meant that Tuffey was not without influential allies in the APD, and at the very least he was able to get a sense of the department’s goings-on more quickly than a complete outsider would have.

More substantively, officers got some reassurance about their new Chief when he made a few long-sought staffing decisions that filled six vacant promotional slots and brought twelve new hires onto the force. In part these moves helped simply by addressing what had been the burning issue with the police union, which simply wanted to see these opportunities for its members made real. But Tuffey argues more generally that this wave of promotions and those that followed over the years helped him to gradually build a core of loyal supporters. “I think by everybody knowing that they have their position because I recommend them to the Mayor, it helps a lot,” Tuffey explains. “That’s how you develop your loyalty and trust.” Indeed, many department members—particularly those at high levels—openly acknowledge an obligation to follow Tuffey’s lead that stems from the positions they have been given in the department.
But some department members insist that the most important factor in neutralizing the “Chief Tuffey” issue was a perception that Grebert was still making most of the APD’s important decisions at first. Tuffey himself hardly discouraged this view: When a newspaper reporter asked him about his inexperience in urban policing (the implication being that he did not understand Albany), Tuffey answered: “The architect of that plan [the department’s community policing plan described above], or one of the architects, was Deputy Chief Grebert. Deputy Chief Grebert’s still going to be there. So as for my lack of knowledge of the inner workings of the city of Albany Police Department and urban policing, he’ll be there to assist me.”27 In any case, Tuffey had no plans to upend the plans the department had recently put together, except that he wanted to beef up departmental training even more, and unlike Grebert, he wanted to physically open up at least one new substation to advance community policing.

In any case, while many officers still see Tuffey’s appointment as evidence of cronyism in the city of Albany, outright opposition to the Chief died down over time to the point that he became at least as well-accepted as his predecessor. Jennings’s reputation, too, rebounded from its low point at the time when he appointed Tuffey—largely, union members explained, because promotions and staffing did begin to increase under the new Chief, even if the total force never reached the promised 345. In any case, Jennings never became a bête noire for the police union, which eventually endorsed him in his bid for re-election in 1997.

3. Reforming the APD
The Tuffey appointment and the Grebert plan laid the two central foundations of the reforms that would follow. On the one hand, the plan Grebert spearheaded set the basic course for organizational change in the Albany Police Department—and indeed it had already begun to do so by the time Tuffey took over the Chief’s job. On the other hand, Tuffey brought a strong commitment to the Mayor and his vision for Albany, and these forces would elaborate, modify, or strengthen some elements of the initial plans.

Consolidating Authority
Tuffey’s first elaboration of the community policing plan came barely three months after he took office, when the new Chief called a group of a high-level department members together to develop a plan to reorganize department management. This second plan was not an attempt to revise the community policing blueprint that Grebert had spearheaded: Instead it helped complete unfinished elements of that blueprint, notably its vague but significant exhortation to establish “a command structure . . . that clearly defines duties and outlines the chain of command” (p. 15).

The team that examined these issues consisted of a half-dozen APD managers who would eventually become Tuffey’s command staff. As one of the participants remembers their meetings, the group tried to understand and improve upon the department’s organizational structure.

The main conclusion that emerged from these sessions was that the department needed to restructure upper management essentially along the lines that Jennings had laid out in his campaign platform: First, the APD would add two assistant Chief positions to bring the total to four, dividing responsibility among them for patrol, investigations, administration, and special operations (which included things like the K-9 unit and the mounted patrols). Second, the department would create three new appointed positions with the rank of Commander. Two of these non-unionized positions would oversee all department operations after 5 P.M., and the third would oversee the communications unit.

A number of goals underlay the new command staff positions. One was simply to provide more high-level management, which many felt had declined too far in recent years: During the Whalen era of little hiring and few promotions, the number of APD Captains had fallen from 10 in the late 1970s to 2 by 1995, and many blamed the problems of coordination and oversight—particularly during the night shift and in the narcotics unit—on the lack of high-level management. “There was lack of hierarchy to give those mid-managers their direction,” one participant in the planning sessions explains. “You need the pyramid effect, [where] the Chief is at the top and then it gets wider as it goes down. What we found was there was really no upper pyramid—it kind of flattened off.” Jennings too agreed with this diagnosis, and he argues that the lack of upper management was particularly inappropriate in Albany because of its retirement system: “When you have twenty year retirement,” he explains, referring to the number of years officers must work in Albany before they are eligible for their full pension, “you end up having a very young police department [that] necessitates a lot of supervision, or good strong supervision.”

But beyond this somewhat abstract desire for “more management,” there was a more specific intention to shore up the authority of the Chief’s office compared to the union. Union power was a comparatively recent force in Albany, where city hall and the Democratic party had long resisted organized labor. But after the initial unionization of police officers in the mid-1970s, other ranks in the department quickly followed suit, and by 1994, the only non-union positions left were the Chief’s job, two Assistant Chiefs, and a vacant Deputy Chief position. Just as Jennings had argued during his 1993 campaign, the planning group felt that this situation undermined effective management. “There were situations where decisions were made by the ranking officer on duty that clearly benefited the union position rather than the department’s agenda,” one APD manager explains. Another argues that union presence on the command staff was undermining the authority of the Chief’s office, pointing out that a Captain who also worked as a union official was essentially “wearing two hats” (an idea department managers and city officials use often when justifying the changes they made).28 He gives this hypothetical example of the problems that arrangement led to:

Participants in the planning sessions hoped that new command positions would help solve this problem for them. “That’s the reason for these [new] ranks,” one explains. “He [Tuffey] wanted them on board with the command staff, not on board with the union.”

Finally, Grebert agreed with the need for more non-union command staff positions, but he also saw the reorganization as an opportunity to rationalize department management. “When I was in grad school,” Grebert explains, “one of [my professor’s] things was that what makes police organizations so complex—and it always stuck with me—is that they have to be organized on three separate dimensions: Task, geography, and the time of the day.” Community policing had already begun to entrench geography as an organizing principle, and the reorganization offered a chance to firm up organization by task and time:

Grebert concedes that these goals came somewhat at the expense of geographic focus: For example, by putting shift-based commanders on duty during the night and evening shifts, the department essentially re-centralized authority not just from the six recently-created “sectors,” but even from the two divisions that had existed for years.29

In any case, the six sectors were still intended to have some degree of autonomy, and in the near future the department would take further steps towards decentralization.

Putting the Plan in Place
At the time, the most controversial aspect of the plan had nothing to do with decentralization and everything to do with the question of union power. “It’s classic union busting at its best,” union president Leonard Crouch said of the plan to a Times-Union reporter. Crouch went on to lambaste the administration’s tactics in putting the plan through, insisting that the Chief’s office shut the union out of decisionmaking about the reorganization and that it even tried to hide the reforms it was making—to the point that he himself did not learn of the new positions until he ran across an entry in the newspaper’s legal notices that advertised the required public hearing for the new positions, which the Civil Service Commission had to approve. “I don’t like reading it in the newspaper first,” Crouch explained. “This is back to where we were”—an apparent reference to the poor relationship the police union had with Mayor Whalen.30

Charges of “union busting” aside, many in the APD simply disliked having so many appointed positions, and they expressed concerns about what one calls “politicization of our upper ranks.” When the plan was first announced this was simply an abstract concern about the potential for political influence over high-level promotions. But as Tuffey filled the new jobs with people who some viewed, rightly or wrongly, as part of Jennings’s “inner circle,” some of the old sentiments about cronyism re-emerged.

These objections from the union and some of the rank-and-file did not, however, derail the reorganization proposal. “They resisted,” one department manager remembers. “[But] we kind of did it by the books, according to New York State civil service law . . . So, although the unions griped about it, ultimately there was really nothing they could do about it.” The Civil Service Commission’s cooperation was obviously crucial in this process, and APD management took pains to present a clear rationale for the new positions to them (including many of the reasons already described), and the reorganization ultimately received the Commission’s endorsement.31

Different concerns arose in the political world, where some city leaders decried a plan that proposed “too many Chiefs and not enough Indians.” But here too one key ally was all that was needed: Jennings clearly approved of the proposal, which essentially reproduced a significant element of his campaign platform (which in turn apparently emerged out of discussions Jennings had had with friends and acquaintances in the policing world—including Tuffey and Grebert). In any case, the Mayor was more than willing to sign off on the roughly $100,000 price tag the plan carried.

Tuffey filled most of the new positions in January of 1996, when he appointed three Commanders and one new Assistant Chief (the second Assistant Chief would be appointed the following year). The move gave the Chief his first chance to put his own stamp on the department’s direction, and he sought to assemble a “young command staff [that was] innovative, creative, [and] that wanted to move forward,” as he puts it. The Assistant Chiefs had responsibility for reforms that (for the most part) fell under each of their assigned functional areas, and these reforms will be described below. The Commanders, however, had newer and therefore less-familiar responsibilities.

One of the first people to be appointed to this position was a 23-year veteran named David Epting, a Lieutenant at the time who had worked in patrol for most of his career. Epting remembers his charge from the Chief clearly: “He called me in and said to me, ‘I’m going to make you Commander. You’re going to run the City from five to one.’” But Epting admits that it took his subordinates some time to adjust to his new role.

Over time, Epting maintains, middle managers did get used to the new Commander role, and he believes that the new position has worked out well.

For many in the APD, this reorganization was far from a minor issue: When asked about organizational change in their department, they insist that the restructuring of upper management—not community policing or any other substantive reform—has been the most significant recent change in the Albany Police Department. Consequently, it is perhaps not surprising that the reform sparked the initial resistance it did, and that it took some time to settle in. In any case, most department members seem to have become accustomed to the new arrangement: When asked what happened to the initial concerns about creating the new positions, one department member explains, “I think it’s just an accepted fact.”

The Retirement of Robert Grebert
The reorganization helped consolidate support for reform among upper management by giving Tuffey the ability to appoint much of his own command staff. But that process did not come to completion until early 1998, when the APD and the city as a whole underwent a large-scale turnover of personnel.

Tuffey made a total of four more command staff appointments during this second wave of personnel moves, but the central APD figure in the effort was Deputy Chief Grebert. More than anyone else in the department, Grebert had been inextricably associated with community policing, which to the public, at least, was the single most prominent reform in the APD. But although top management, city officials, and community leaders all credited Grebert with making that reform possible, the Deputy Chief was becoming increasingly unpopular with his immediate superiors. “The relationship went downhill from [my first day],” Grebert says of his rapport with Jennings.

Indeed, Grebert was frequently a voice of dissent on many of Tuffey and Jennings’s initiatives, including their decision to open a substation in Arbor Hill and the Mayor’s decisions about the composition of a community advisory board.

Such simmering tensions apparently boiled over in January of 1998, when Tuffey asked for his Deputy Chief’s retirement and got it. Tuffey and other local officials refused to comment on the reasons for his request, and Jennings insisted that he had nothing to do with the decision, telling a reporter, “I’m the mayor—I’m not going to micromanage the Police Department.”32 But the refusal to comment only fed speculation, and many local observers concluded that Grebert had been ousted because he had gone overboard responding to recent allegations of police harassment. The case in question centered on a local college basketball star’s claims that two off-duty officers had handcuffed him and beaten him after a bar fight. When the officers were suspended without pay and subjected to a thorough investigation, many APD officers attributed this zeal partly to Grebert. Unpopular with the rank-and-file, and perhaps at odds over the case with Tuffey, Grebert, this theory held, had to go.

But even on the issue of discipline, Grebert’s unpopularity extended beyond this one incident, for officers and other managers alike had long complained that the Deputy Chief favored punishments that were too strong. Even more broadly, some department members explain that Grebert simply was not on board with Jennings’s and Tuffey’s vision, pointing to disagreements like his dissent on the Arbor Hill station for evidence. In an environment where loyalty was prized highly, such independence simply did not sit well: One department member explains broadly that “Grebert had to go because he wasn’t grateful to the people who made him [i.e., promoted him];” and a local political scientist commented on Grebert’s situation by saying that although there was a fine line between legitimate political influence and unacceptable meddling, it would be well within Jennings’s right to let someone who didn’t share his vision go:

Thus although a specific incident may have catalyzed Grebert’s ouster, it seems unlikely that it alone could have caused it, particularly given these much broader disagreements over the APD’s direction.

Decentralization and Problem-Solving
In any case, well before Grebert’s star had fallen, the APD began its implementation of the community policing plan he had spearheaded, and which had been handed back to him for implementation after the group that wrote it disbanded. Manpower constraints and other considerations forced Grebert to make a few changes to the plan at that stage (for example, the number of foot beats was cut from 20 to 18). But for the most part Grebert sought to implement the plan as it was.

Reforms to the patrol force were the central thrust of this community policing effort, and they divided into three distinct elements: The creation of a 6-officer directed patrol unit, creation of an 18-officer community outreach unit, the and the organization of six coherent teams defined by geography that focused the APD’s attention on individual neighborhoods. Consider the latter two reforms here.

The Community Outreach Unit
Foot patrols had a long and visible history in Albany in both the old neighborhood outreach units and in the Whalen-era community policing efforts, so it is perhaps not surprising that public attention focused most intently on that element of the APD’s reforms. For example, the many newspaper articles that announced its arrival tended to mention the directed patrol unit and the reorganization by sectors only in passing, saving most of their reflections for the foot beats.34
The foot patrol officers took their assignments in late November of 1994 after a week of training arranged by Grebert, in which officers learned about the resources other city agencies could offer to solve community problems. After that orientation, the officers took to their beats with a mandate to be visible in their assigned neighborhoods and get to know the people who frequented them—everyone from the block captains of local neighborhood associations, to area landlords and businesspeople, to those perceived to be troublemakers; and they were also expected to make contacts with city agencies like the Department of General Services, to which they could relay neighborhood concerns. The officers were freed up from most 911 responsibilities, giving them considerable time to take care of such business: In fact, as it turned out, some officers often found that they had too little work to occupy their shifts until their supervisors came up with ancillary duties—things like following up on domestic violence calls or trying to serve outstanding warrants in their zones.

Indeed, the potentially light workload, as well as the flex-time options the beat officers enjoyed, initially created something of a problem fo the outreach unit, which reportedly attracted some veteran officers for less than virtuous reasons. Management had little recourse to block bids from these officers, since it had agreed during the planning phase to assign the positions based on seniority; and supervision problems made it hard to motivate officers who simply wanted an easy assignment. As Grebert puts it.

Grebert admits that he would have preferred to have more supervision for the unit, but he explains that the department was unable to increase the number of Sergeants in the budget, so it had to make do with one outreach supervisor. In any case, he and others insist that most outreach officers took to their jobs with enthusiasm, and that most of those who did not were eventually “weeded out” through the disciplinary process: Thus the result, after some fine-tuning at the start of the program, was a good group of officers who the department has been satisfied with. Many community members were also happy with the outreach program, feeling that the officers had markedly improved APD visibility and begun to tackle longstanding problems in their areas. A few neighborhoods complained that their officers were not visible and that they tended to keep banker’s hours, but for the most part the outreach program received strong praise from Albany residents.

Bringing a Neighborhood Focus to the Patrol Force
Less widely-noticed by the public were the APD’s reforms in the rest of its patrol force, where officers were assigned to six geographically-defined “sectors” in order to create viable teams for problem-solving and instill a sense of ownership over particular neighborhoods.

The APD kicked off the effort with directions to its commanding officers about how to form the six sector teams and some suggestions for how to run them. At first officers received no direct training about how their jobs would change: It was simply expected that neighborhood assignments would somehow lead to ownership and problem-solving. As Grebert explains it, the main change at this stage was in holding periodic team meetings in each sector for everyone assigned to that area, including cruiser officers, the foot patrol officers, and investigators (most units within the detective division began assigning their cases by sector, and special units like SIU were directed to designate a liaison for each sector). On occasion, some sectors also invited community members, and others invited representatives from neighboring police agencies to help deal with problems crossed jurisdictional boundaries. “That sort of thing was never done before,” Grebert explains of the meetings.

The monthly team meetings turned out to be fairly informal events (one department member describes them as “brainstorming sessions”). For the most part they simply focused officers’ attention on the areas identified by the group as troublespots along the model of what other police agencies refer to as “directed patrol.” For example, in a Spring meeting, Sergeants might remind officers that they could expect activity to increase in a sector park as the summer approached, and that they should therefore make a particular effort to drive past it and enforce quality-of-life laws. The Sergeants who ran the meetings summarized their proceedings in an interdepartmental correspondence to the Chief, focusing on new issues raised and on the progress made in dealing with older problems.

In a few cases, sector teams went beyond the directed patrol model to craft less traditional responses to area problems. For example, a number of department members mentioned one sector’s novel attempt to deal with the problem of false robbery alarms from local convenience stores. “We were having problems with the stores that were open on the midnight to 8:00 tour, [which] were obviously like little mom and pop [stores],” explains then-Sergeant Lauren Signer of the A sector’s midnight shift. “They would hit their panic alarm for a lot of things, and we’d get there and the people would just not be able to communicate with us.” Officers were particularly concerned with a Clinton Avenue store that, as they later discovered, had generated 117 calls for service in the first five months of the year. Assembled for their monthly sector meeting in June of 1995, the A sector officers on the midnight shift identified two major problems with the store: First of all, employees were apparently treating the panic alarm as an all-purpose way to summon the police, and officers reported being called to the scene for relatively minor suspicious person calls; in police eyes, the alarm was to be reserved for serious incidents, and when they got a call from it, they assumed that a robbery was in progress. The second problem was simply that responding officers had trouble communicating with employees, for the store was owned and operated by recent immigrants from Afghanistan who did not speak English very fluently. Moreover, some APD officers felt that the store owners simply were not cooperative when they did show up to investigate incidents.

The problem fed in to a larger team project to assign “liaisons” to various community institutions, including hotels, neighborhood bars, and convenience stores. Responsibility for the Clinton Avenue store fell to Officer Michael Romano, who had taken the assignment as convenience store liaison. After discussions within the team about how to handle the problem, Romano began meeting with the owners during his regular patrol in order to establish better communication. The APD officer used these encounters to ask the owners what safety concerns they had, to suggest possible ways to manage them (including controlling the number of people allowed in the store at one time), and to explain to them when and when not to use the panic alarm. Since Romano was also the liaison to all other area convenience stores, he began applying the same techniques in other locations, making a particular effort to educate store employees on the proper use of their panic alarms.

By late fall the team began to feel that the Clinton Avenue store’s problems in particular were subsiding, as officers reported fewer false alarms and better cooperation when they responded to calls. As Romano’s supervisor, Signer decided to verify the progress statistically, and with Grebert’s help she was able to get call data on this particular store over time. In the department’s eyes, the statistics showed a clear improvement: In the five months immediately before the team established its liaison, the Clinton Avenue market had made 117 calls for service, but in the next six months it made only 78; and unfounded calls fell from 15 to 8 over the same period. It was not feasible to do the same analysis for all the sector’s convenience stores, and Signer concedes that the analysis did not constitute a full-blown study of the liaison program’s impact. But it provided the department with rare statistical evidence of community policing’s success, which otherwise had been restricted to anecdotes.

The team went on to develop its other liaison programs as well, and Signer made a special effort to document her officers’ projects, going so far as to publish a regular newsletter that reported sector activities and that printed the minutes of its meetings. All of these projects pushed the envelope of Albany’s young community policing program at the time: The sector was the only one to turn informal pressure to “get to know the community” into a formal liaison program, and Signer paid much more attention to documentation than most teams.

In developing the A sector’s community policing program along these lines, Signer admits that high-level support was crucial, and happenstance played an important role in helping her to get it. A newly-promoted Sergeant at the time, Signer had recently completed her Master’s degree in criminal justice at SUNY Albany on a competitive scholarship for police officers. While she was away from the department attending school, her contact in the APD had been Grebert, and the two began to talk frequently about community policing. “I had that open communication with him that in some organizations you shouldn’t have, because you’re violating the chain of command,” Signer explains.

The convenience store liaison was itself an example of this process, as traditionally officers had been discouraged from socializing with store owners. “Sometimes people think it is an invitation to corruption because you don’t want the officers to hang around these businesses,” Signer explains. But Grebert was quick to approve of the idea:

Moreover, when Signer decided to evaluate the project statistically, Grebert was able to help her expedite the data request by telling the administrative services division to expect her call. (At the time, the APD did not have anyone assigned full-time to crime analysis, and its computer system did not make it particularly easy to process the sort of request Signer was making.) Indeed, on several occasions Grebert was able to help the team get needed resources, including things as simple as a file cabinet for the team’s problem-solving records, as well as larger expenses like a color printer for the sector newsletter. Signer points out that these are “things that normally take a long time [in] organizations,” but she and her officers were able to get them done quickly by showing upper management what they were trying to accomplish.

Not all of Signer’s officers were enthusiastic about the many projects her team embarked upon, and some viewed her interest in their work as “micromanaging.” But she received recognition for her efforts from the department’s top management, and she was even able to get Tuffey and Grebert to attend one of her team’s 6 A.M. sector meetings. “People were totally astounded,” Signer explains of the two Chiefs’ arrival. “The fact that they physically came and showed that they thought this was important enough to put on their sweat suits and drag their butts out of bed to come to a meeting at 6:00 o’clock in the morning was tremendous support. It legitimizes what you’re trying to do.”

Signer found the experience immensely rewarding, and she attributes the team’s success not just to help from Grebert, but also to the freedom she was afforded by her Lieutenant. “I had a great Lieutenant who, while not convinced that community policing was necessarily the way to go, saw that the things that we were trying as a team, did, in fact, meet with law enforcement goals,” she explains.

Some of the APD’s other teams had similar experiences, in that they were able to generate new ideas for handling problems in team meetings, and they had the flexibility they needed to carry those ideas out. But many department members also report some difficulties with the fledgling community policing effort, and it is useful to examine how the department responded to them.

Particularly at the outset, many officers simply felt that they had not been sufficiently informed about what community policing meant for their jobs. “Community policing was a phrase that many people didn’t understand,” one APD manager concedes, going on to explain that in response, the department decided to offer a wave of in-service training for officers on community policing and related topics, such as cultural diversity. The department took particular care to give these sessions a community focus, bringing in neighborhood leaders and representatives from other community groups to one forum in order to introduce them to sector officers and to give a sense of what community concerns were. But the main message the training sessions tried to convey was that sector officers should look behind the incidents they responded to for underlying problems, and that they should feel authorized to develop solutions on their own—including making contacts with other divisions and other agencies. Indeed, describing the resources that other agencies could offer was an important part of the training sessions.

Many department members report that these training sessions and growing experience with the new style helped diffuse community policing ideas through the force, but most also maintain that there is more work to be done, and they concede that the training efforts got “mixed reviews.” As one department manager puts it:

Still other department members reportedly rejected community policing at a more fundamental level. For example, though Grebert insists that after the first year many officers did begin to develop a sense of ownership for their areas, he admits that the department is “still a long way from [having] complete acceptance of the concept,” and he attributes this problem to some officers’ preconceived notions that community policing is “soft.” “I wish we had used any other expression rather than ‘community policing,’ because ‘community’ is a soft word,” Grebert explains. “Cops are tough guys . . . . If we called it ‘Assertive Policing’ or something they all would have jumped on board.” Other officers did not necessarily reject the message entirely, but neither did they completely assimilate it: As one department manager puts it, officers were “pretty accurate in identifying law enforcement-related problems,” but they had more difficulty coming up with solutions other than patrol and arrest. Finally, a number of officers and Sergeants report that there was uneven support for community policing at higher levels as well, as some squad Lieutenants simply did not see the need for change. “It was like, ‘Do it this way because I’m the Lieutenant. This is the way we’ve always done it,’” one department member recalls.

Management was not unprepared for such reactions, and it tried to get the message out to officers to be patient: “We tried to tell them that you don’t go from here to there without doing some transitional work in between,” one APD manager explains. In particular, upper management often reiterated the idea that it would take a generation to fully implement community policing, in order, as one puts it, “to get rid of the older guys that are used to doing it a certain way.”

In the meantime, the department continually revised its in-service training to meet the needs upper management identified. It did not, however, decide to repeat the entire community policing curriculum, despite the desires for some department members to do so. For different reasons, many APD managers explain that staffing limitations partly underlay this decision: First of all, given the vagaries of the police workload, management felt that it was difficult to schedule the entire department for training on any given week. As it was, the APD—like most police departments—found it logistically difficult to give large groups of officers their yearly in-service training, and it often needed to shift work hours and use other officers as backfill to do so. So instead of repeating the training en masse, the department opted to repeat key sections of the original community policing curriculum—like problem-solving and interagency service referral—as part of its standard in-service training, which came to at least 40 hours a year per officer (including firearms training).35 Second, the training division itself had somewhat limited manpower, as even by the time of my Spring 1998 site visit, only three officers worked for the division that covered not only training, but also research and computerization. The APD’s original community policing plan called for the addition of two new full-time training specialists to Administrative Services, and for another staffer to be added to help with other administrative functions. But in an era of tight budgets, these positions did not materialize for some time. Recently the department did expand ASB, adding two officers, a Sergeant, and two civilians in June of 1998, and in comments on a draft of this paper, one department manager expressed optimism that these new positions would help improve the APD’s ability to offer training.

In any case, some department members argue that the challenges in building support for the young community policing effort had less to do with training than they did with other administrative practices. For example, one argues that department decisionmaking has been too closed, and that the result is too little sense of ownership and understanding about the reforms:

Others argue that the zone meetings were and are too “unwieldy” to focus attention on problems effectively, and the lack of administrative systems to document and track problems may have contributed to this sense. Finally, important secondary reforms did not always go off as planned. For example, although the community policing plan called for a close relationship between SIU investigators and the sectors (particularly community outreach officers in the zones), many department members report that SIU still rarely notifies patrol officers when they execute search warrants in their neighborhoods—a practice that the plan explicitly encouraged. (In fact, one officer goes so far as to say that “the main [problem] with community policing is that this relationship with the special units isn’t there.”) On the other side, some special units maintain that sector teams sometimes fail to notify them about their team meetings even though they are supposed to attend.

Monitoring Change
In any case, department managers have not always been able to tell for certain whether or not community policing is “working” in the city. Arrest data for low-level offenses did seem to show that officers were beginning to take quality-of-life problems more seriously—as described below, that element of community policing seems to have made the most progress in Albany. But without any type of record keeping on neighborhood problem-solving or any new forms of performance measurement, it has been difficult for department managers to tell for certain how well other aspects of community policing—such as problem-solving and the development of community trust—have taken hold in the city.36

To be sure, when asked how they know whether or not community policing is both accepted and effective in the city, many APD managers are able to point to an overall decline in the city’s crime rates since 1994, when community policing began in earnest. But Grebert, at least, concedes that these aggregate trends are somewhat ambiguous: “It was happening all over the country,” he explains, referring to the decline in crime rates Albany began to experience at the time, and admitting that “people talk about demographics and there being that crack cocaine epidemic [as explanations of crime trends].” (Some historical perspective is helpful here, for the city’s recent drop in crime reversed the trend that immediately preceded it: Index crimes gradually rose from 6,800 per 100,000 residents in 1990 to 8,600 by their peak in 1994, and then they fell again to 7,700 by 1996.) But Grebert insists that community policing may have had something to do with Albany’s trends, continuing his concession to the possibility of other explanations by saying: “Other people do talk about police tactics as being part of that movement to bring the crime rates down.” In any case, he maintains that for all the problems in untangling its cause, the drop in crime rates did convince some in the city that community policing was effective: “When that happened, more and more people said ‘Gee, maybe some of this stuff is working,’” he explains.
The absence of any alternative way to evaluate community policing did not result from a lack of interest in the subject. For example, early on in the APD’s reforms, the local newspaper called for comparisons of crime rates in foot beat areas versus car patrol areas, saying, “it will satisfy more than idle curiosity to record exactly how effective one officer on the beat is in comparison to one officer in a car. It will give the city a better idea how to spend its money and how to protect its citizens.”37 And within the department, the community policing plan itself charged the Administrative Services Bureau with “developing and implementing an evaluation system that will determine the effectiveness of the community policing plan and recommend changes to the plan.” Indeed, the department did begin to identify a few novel ways to evaluate the community policing, and in some cases it even drew up fairly elaborate plans to do so. But in the end, nothing apparently came of these ideas. For example, Grebert explains that the department had “a fairly well-developed plan” to hire interns to administer a community survey that would measure perceptions of safety and of the police department, and that he himself supported the idea. But in the end, the department did not follow through on it. So absent more formal measures, APD managers have looked to anecdotes and other indicators to get a sense of the progress of reform.

Modifications to the Plan
As implementation of the original community policing plan was taking shape, some department members and city officials began talking about ways to extend and hopefully improve it. The major effort that emerged came to be known as the “four station plan.”

That plan emerged out of a 1996 proposal to re-open or simply replace the old Arbor Hill substation, which was championed at the highest levels of city government—including both Tuffey and Jennings. “I always thought that was wrong,” Tuffey says of the decision to close Arbor Hill.

During his campaign for Mayor, Jennings had said that he did not think the police department needed to open a new station. But after hearing “loud and clear” from neighborhood residents that they wanted one,38 he eventually came around to Tuffey’s view. Today, he explains his thinking on the matter in essentially the same terms as the Chief:

The two men also saw a new substation as a way to help alleviate long-standing tensions with the largely-black Arbor Hill community, which had repeatedly complained of police harassment (most recently when state correctional officers swept the neighborhood in search of an escaped convict). “In all honesty, there’s some distrust between the minority community and the police,” Tuffey explains of Arbor Hill. “And I felt that putting a station over there [would help]. We have a community room there where people come in and use it. It’s a step to build up the trust between the community and the police. Because a lot of times all they see over there is a cop . . . making an arrest. And we have to build that trust back up again.”

Jennings announced the plan to open an Arbor Hill station in March of 1996, and while his first proposal fell through over cost considerations, a second and more modest design eventually garnered support in the Common Council. Even then some Council members expressed concerns: For example, Alderwoman Sarah Curry-Cobb, whose ward encompassed some of the neighborhoods that the new station would serve, argued that a building alone was not enough to deal with tensions in Albany’s minority communities, and she proposed further reforms designed to fill the gap. (One proposal asked the APD to offer Arbor Hill officers added training on topics like cultural sensitivity, and another asked Jennings to institute a neighborhood advisory board for the area.) Other aldermen worried that the new station would rob their own wards of police staffing, and one simply felt that the proposal was rash. “It’s not well thought out,” Alderwoman Shawn Morris told a reporter. “There isn’t a plan for this building other than to put one person on the desk. . . . Do we need a 3,500-square-foot, $400,000 building to do that?”39 All told, five Albany aldermen expressed opposition to the plan, and their votes alone would have been enough to derail it: In order to expedite the project, the city intended to sell the site to a quasi-public agency called the Albany Local Development Corporation, which was exempt from regulations like bidding requirements. But to do so it needed 12 votes on the 15-member Council.

Nevertheless, Jennings refused to compromise on the plan, and he dismissed Curry-Cobb’s proposals as an attempt to “bog this thing down with additional legislation,” specifically rejecting the idea of a neighborhood advisory council on the grounds that his citywide Police-Community Council—then nearing completion, and described in detail below—made more sense.40 Ultimately, his position prevailed: The five council members who initially opposed the substation eventually backed off, and the vote for the new substation was unanimous.

From Arbor Hill to a Four-Station Plan
Some people within the APD agreed with the dissident aldermen, arguing that Jennings and Tuffey were placing too much faith in physically opening up a station. Deputy Chief Grebert was the most prominent among them. “Albany is not that big of a city,” he argues.

Grebert eventually became resigned to the fact that the city was not going to build a new headquarters or even put money away for such a project, and given this reality he conceded that it “was not a bad idea” to put a station in Arbor Hill. But he and others still had concerns about the potential for the new station to fragment the patrol force, worrying that the need to reassign existing staff would wreak havoc with the existing pattern of patrol deployment.

These concerns eventually led Tuffey to appoint a 5-member committee headed up by Grebert to study how the new substation would affect the APD. The group’s main conclusion was that the substation should not simply be grafted on to the existing organizational structure: Instead, the department used the opportunity it presented to reorganize the patrol force completely. Physically, Arbor Hill would allow the APD to decentralize into four separate stations: The existing Division I and Division II buildings, Arbor Hill itself, and an old underutilized substation in the West end of the city—a station that had opened in the late 1970s with roughly 8 officers per shift but was now down to only one or two. Organizationally, the department would do away with the old divisions and give officers permanent assignments to the four stations, and it would reorganize management at the same time.

Lieutenants would see their roles change most dramatically, trading in their current responsibilities for squads for a new responsibility for the stations. In doing so, they would take on responsibility for handling community concerns and identifying neighborhood troublespots, thereby replacing Sergeants (who had overseen the sectors) as the department’s primary point of geographic accountability. The old temporal structure would still be superimposed over this newly-strengthened geographic logic: The night and evening Commanders would still have final say over the street during their shifts, and two of the department’s six patrol Lieutenants would take on new assignments as their assistants. But the new plan clearly sought to strengthen neighborhood focus, which it essentially pushed up in rank and therefore importance.

Grebert was still concerned that the Arbor Hill station would upend the department’s patrol deployment: Although his committee had broad scope to examine organizational roles and structure, it had to work within a fixed budget, and that constraint in turn affected the distribution of manpower. The result was that staffing for Arbor Hill was fixed by the capacity of the building that the Mayor had proposed there: “Rathe