–
RAs Rep. George Santos (R-NY) faces charges of being an allegedly shameless crook as well as a serial liar, those seeking to claim his seat include a retired detective who would be the only person in Congress with working knowledge of how to actually control crime.
During his time with the New York City Transit Police and then the NYPD, Det. Mike Sapraicone was one of a tight crew assembled by policing genius Jack Maple, whose strategies transformed New York from “Fear City,” with more than 2,000 murders a year, into the safest big city in America with less than 400.
Sapraicone had known Maple since they both attended Holy Child grammar school in Queens. Sapraicone was a Transit detective. Maple became a Transit lieutenant and covered a squadroom’s walls with what he called “the Charts of the Future,” computer paper on which his cops used crayons to color-code the details of each subway crime, thereby enabling them to spot patterns. Maple combined that with a basic precept as simple as those taught by the nuns at Holy Child: Treat every crime as if the victim were your mother.
When Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor in 1994, he appointed former Transit Police Chief William Bratton the new NYPD commissioner. Bratton had come to recognize Maple’s genius and promoted him in one unprecedented jump to Deputy Commissioner. Maple extended throughout the city the precept about the importance of each victim. He thereby pressed NYPD commanders to treat Black=on-Black crime as seriously as Black-on-white crime. And that changed everything.
At periodic meetings called CompStat, the Charts Of the Future were updated to computerized pin maps, where a crime was represented by the same size dot, whether it was on ritzy Central Park South or the toughest street in East New York. Maple was liable to point to any of these dots and ask a commander to detail how he or she addressed the particular crime with the application of four operating principles: accurate, timely intelligence; rapid deployment; effective tactics; relentless followup.
Nobody was more relentless than Sapraicone as the NYPD generated a reduction in crime so dramatic that Bratton became a celebrity. A jealous Giuliani subsequently drove Bratton out. Maple chose to go with him, later noting that Giuliani never understood what caused the drop in crime for which he demanded credit.
Read the full article from The Daily Beast.