Posted on 12/05/2004 3:05:22 PM PST by freespirited
Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik looked out at the commanders assembled in his office. He had heard enough. New York City lawmakers were complaining that it was taking too long, 12 minutes, for patrol cars to respond to reported crimes. Mr. Kerik ordered the commanders to deliver a blunt message to the rest of the force: Every crime scene had to be reached within eight minutes, or he wanted an explanation from the precinct commander.
Within a few weeks of that warning in 2001, the average police response time fell by more than a minute, and Mr. Kerik saw it as another reason to trust the simple management principles that he had long relied on.
Accountability counts. Time is not to be wasted. "What gets measured, gets done," Mr. Kerik said in an interview that year.
Those principles guided Mr. Kerik as a municipal manager in New York, where he ran a jail system in which violence plunged and a police force that curbed crime.
But as he approaches the job of federal Homeland Security secretary, the task before him is exceedingly more complex. The department he has been nominated to lead was created by a shotgun marriage of 22 government agencies in the wake of 9/11 and has nearly four times as many employees as the New York Police Department. It has an evolving mission, a budget nearly the size of that of the entire City of New York and a bureaucracy rife with infighting. Already, some are questioning whether that unwieldy structure can be tamed by a man who operated most comfortably within the ordered world of paramilitary organizations.
"He has some great challenges," said Thomas Reppetto, president of the Citizens Crime Commission, a group that monitors police policies in New York. Mr. Reppetto said Mr. Kerik has shown an ability to meet challenges, but as he noted, "Homeland Security is not the N.Y.P.D. Washington is not New York. The N.Y.P.D. is a 160-year-old agency with great traditions. Its members have a common identity. Homeland Security is two years old. There are 180,000 people in 22 separate agencies and they have completely diverse tasks, from screening airport passengers to guarding the president of the United States."
Experts say it will take creativity to meld the department's disparate fiefs. Mr. Kerik, a former street cop and undercover drug detective, was able to establish a bond with police and correction officers under his command by showing up on the beat or at jails without fanfare. In his new role, that background may give him common ground with local law enforcement officers who have complained about lack of cooperation with Washington, but he may have a more difficult time rallying some of the department's employees whose resistance to change has often thwarted the departing Homeland Security secretary, Tom Ridge.
Former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Kerik's patron in government and business, said people have long underestimated the one-time street cop. "He was always doing better than even I thought he would do," Mr. Giuliani said.
If any stretch of Mr. Kerik's career resembles the uncharted management challenge he now faces, it is the three and a half months he spent in Iraq in 2003, at President Bush's request, trying to build a police force. He had hoped to use his familiar statistical measures and tactics, associates said, but he found the situation too chaotic and violent.
He won praise for rebuilding police offices, inspiring recruits and visiting dangerous areas. But others criticize Mr. Kerik for seeming to focus more on seeking publicity than meeting goals like expanding training programs for new Iraqi police officers.
"He was terrific about inspiring people and creating a goal, but he was often not very good about following up and getting it done," said one former American official who spent time in Baghdad and asked not to be identified because he still had dealings with the administration. Mr. Kerik left to return to the United States just one day before insurgents blew up the Iraqi Police Academy, at a time he had been scheduled to speak.
Mr. Bush, in nominating Mr. Kerik for the Homeland Security post, called him "one of the most accomplished and effective leaders of law enforcement in America" and read a list of Mr. Kerik's jobs, omitting his stint in Iraq. Mr. Kerik's law enforcement career contrasts with the political background of Mr. Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania.
"I don't think we really know what the qualifications are for the chief of Homeland Security," said Jerome H. Skolnick, a New York University law professor who is an expert on police practices. "Certainly the administration first thought being a governor gave you the qualifications. This time we have somebody who's been the lead executive of what is probably the chief police department in the western world. My own sense is that it is a better qualification than being a governor. But it all depends on the person and the personality."
In the 1990's, Mr. Kerik thrived on the hard-nosed management style that pervaded the Giuliani administration. As correction commissioner he ordered subordinates to meetings on short notice where he grilled them on their operations. Mr. Kerik hurled the questions while sitting on a raised platform. Several managers who failed to supply the correct answers were swiftly replaced.
He was also credited with cutting violence on Rikers Island, partly by using simple innovations like clamping some inmates' hands in footlong protective tubes to keep them from wielding razor blades.
Mr. Kerik's 16-month tenure at the Police Department, which included Sept. 11, was marked by declining crime, improved community relations and a rise in morale that had been sapped by pay disputes, and the lingering cloud from the police torture of Abner Louima and the police shooting of Amadou Diallo, which occurred before he took office.
Mr. Kerik's steely resolve in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center earned him respect, but there has also been considerable criticism of the lack of coordination between the police and firefighters that day. Mr. Kerik has defended the efforts as the best that could have been done under the circumstances.
Overall, it remains unclear how much of Mr. Kerik's success as a crime-fighter stemmed from his skill and how much from policies set up by Mr. Giuliani and his previous police commissioners.
"Most of the crime strategies had been developed by Bratton and Giuliani," Mr. Skolnick said, referring to Mr. Giuliani's first police commissioner, William Bratton. "So he did not have that much to do with that. But his greatest success was to realize that the department's relations with minority groups had been hurt by the Louima and Diallo affairs, and he went out of his way to develop positive relationships with those communities."
Mr. Kerik's allies point out that he revamped the police Intelligence Division, dropping barriers to the sharing of information, fashioned a new program to bolster community relations and ordered renovations to decrepit police stations.
Among those officials Mr. Kerik dismissed when he became commissioner was the department's budget director, who Mr. Kerik said had not moved quickly enough to rectify problems he wanted solved. The man was quickly rehired by Mr. Kerik's successor, Raymond W. Kelly, when he took over the department in 2002.
In his autobiography, "The Lost Son," Mr. Kerik recounts the time he told his first deputy, Joseph Dunne, that he "was sending someone to interview for the job of management and budget."
"Joe asked if I was going to get rid of the guy in that job. 'I already did,' I said."
The move typified Mr. Kerik's management style, described as decisive by some and impulsive by others.
Mr. Kerik's supporters say it is a mistake to view him as a person who makes snap decisions. In fact, Mr. Kerik has often expressed confidence in his skills as a management analyst. He often refers to lessons he learned from management guidebooks, and is a devotee of performance indicators, which he used to gauge everything from sick time to progress in community relations.
Among some police executives who have come to believe that advanced degrees are prerequisites to promotion into the upper tiers of law enforcement, Mr. Kerik's rise to a cabinet position with a general equivalency high school diploma and a mail-order college degree seems startling.
One law enforcement official who worked with Mr. Kerik in the past and declined to be identified because he may do so again, said he could point to no evidence that Mr. Kerik ever had any large vision for the Police Department. "I never saw it," he said.
But others saw Mr. Kerik's high energy and considerable bluster as charismatic. He would show up at a jail in the middle of the night or visit with a police detail in Times Square to see how things were going. The rank and file often spoke of Mr. Kerik as one of their own, and he would hug officers or whisper in their ears as they passed by him on stage during promotion ceremonies.
While Mr. Kerik often said he promoted employees based on performance, several current and former police officials say that Mr. Kerik, who has advanced in part because of his fierce personal loyalty to Mr. Giuliani, was more likely than his predecessors to reward friends and those he knew.
Norman Siegel, a civil rights lawyer, said Mr. Kerik threatened to retaliate against employees who he believed were disloyal. Mr. Siegel, who sued the Correction Department on their behalf, said loyalty trumped merit in the department. "The United States Senate must take a hard look at Bernard Kerik's past management and leadership," he said.
Mr. Kerik's toughest management challenge began in May 2003 when he took a leave from the management consulting firm where he is a partner with Mr. Giuliani and went to Baghdad to re-establish the Iraqi police force. People involved in the effort said most policemen had abandoned their posts, and nearly all the police stations had been burned or looted.
Mr. Kerik and a small team of advisers were supposed to recruit and equip a new force and run other parts of the interior ministry, like customs and immigration services, until Iraqi officials could appoint a new interior minister.
Some critics wonder whether he agreed to go to Iraq partly to gain favor with the Bush administration. But James Steele, a retired Army colonel who advised the Iraqi police, said Mr. Kerik worked hard "to show that the police had some capability and to get them out in the streets."
Thousands of police officers were recruited during his time in Iraq, and Colonel Steele said he and Mr. Kerik assembled a 25-man SWAT team to go after kidnappers and insurgents.
Mr. Kerik tangled at times with American military leaders, associates said. He vetoed a military officer's recommendation to give the nation's top police job to an Iraqi who had once been filmed taking a blood-oath to Saddam Hussein, said Ahmed Ibrahim, who later became chief of Iraq's national police force.
Mr. Kerik has said that a shortage of American aid limited the training that could be done then. He left Iraq in September 2003, when Iraqi officials named a new interior minister.
Colonel Steele said despite Mr. Kerik's accomplishments, the rise of the insurgency after Mr. Kerik left Iraq "went beyond what any police force could handle."
Among some police executives who have come to believe that advanced degrees are prerequisites to promotion into the upper tiers of law enforcement, Mr. Kerik's rise to a cabinet position with a general equivalency high school diploma and a mail-order college degree seems startling.
The startled bunch should make an effort to get the facts. Kerik's degree is from Empire State College, which is no mail-order diploma mill. It's a distance learning program that is part of the State University of New York. It is regionally accredited just like every other SUNY campus. Actually I suspect the lowlifes at the Times knew this and just wanted to take a really cheap shot at Bernie.
The continuing education students are often the sharpest in the classroom.
His is the stuff from which the great American Dream is made.
What condescending nonsense.
They still want to believe that the only people who support President Bush are mouth-breathing 'tards.
And what, pray tell does a Journalism degree qualify one to do...?..LIE
Kerik's a dumb cop who won't be able to master the astoundingly complex intricacies of Washington D.C. and its attendant federal agencies.
Tell me something, if these wunderkind in the New York-D.C. media matrix are so friggin' intelligent, how come they couldn't grasp the simple fact that John Kerry was a dud of a presidential candidate?
To libs, someone with a blue-collar background need not apply for a high position in Washington.
Some of our best legislators have been of modest backgrounds with scant formal education.
Lincoln gets mentioned, of course. He didn't have much in terms of classroom education, but he certainly was very well read and a master of prose.
Truman was a shop keeper and farmer. He did, however, learn how to lead and administer as a young politico.
I think how the left derides Tom DeLay, because he's an exterminator, and they ridicule him at their peril.
Let's also hope he starts "cleaning house" of the liberal dims that are in the HS like Goss is doing. If he does this, he won't be popular with some but will be effective.
I've gotta say, thus far, he's probably been the best selection President Bush has made for his second cabinet.
I think it is neat! He is not a lawyer. A high school drop out makes good. Terrific role model.
As much as people may criticize him for being a "loyalist", I don't think that quality is necessarily a bad character trait in someone who is being given a post that requires him to insure the security of the entire nation.
LOL
Maybe Kerik should give Joe Arpaio a call about the pink bvd's......
Newsday is essentially a left-wing rag like the NY Times, dumbed down for South Shore inhabitants. ;-)
The liberals keep asking if Kerik has the "management skills" necessary to manage the department.
Would one liberal give me one example of the mighty Colin Powell's "management skills" in managing the State Department???
Just one will do.
absolutely true - two main factors leading to the quality of life declines here on long island - are Newsday and News 12 Long Island local cable TV news.
You know what? I think that, if Bush appointed Jesse Jackson to something, they'd turn on him, too.
are they referring to Judith Regan when they talk about his "book publisher"?
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