PB: Commissioner O’Neill, thanks for being on the show. Appreciate it.

JO: Thanks, Preet. Thanks for inviting me. Glad to be here.

PB: So I was present at your swearing in, which was about a year and a half ago. And your first day on the JOb was an interesting day. Why is that?

JO: Well, it was September 17th. Got unofficially sworn in the day before on the 16th by the mayor, and the 17th was the Chelsea bombing.

PB: So you’re literally getting the reins of the New York City Police Department handed to you and there’s an operational terrorist in New York City.

JO: Yep. I had worked all day, moved from the 13th floor to the 14th floor. I thought, as commissioner, you’d have people to do that but I moved myself with a few other people. And I was driving and I got a phone call from Sergeant Dan Shelly. I don’t know if you know this, the initial report was that a bus blew up on 23rd Street.

PB: No, I don’t remember that.

JO: Yeah. That was the initial report. Turned around, came into work taken aback a little bit, but then I got myself together and thought about all my years of experience and all the people that I work with and I knew we’d get to the bottom of it and do what we did. It was a pretty amazing day.

01:15

PB: My recollection is that Rahimi, who is the person who detonated the pressure-cooker bomb, was actually captured while you were on stage taking the oath. I saw that that happened and I kept looking up at the stage to see someone telling the new commissioner that the guy’s in custody. Did someone tell you? Cause I didn’t see you look at a phone.

JO: No, I did not look at my phone but in the middle of the swearing-in ceremony, I don’t know who was speaking, whether it was the mayor or Carlos, somebody handed me a note.

PB: What did the note say?

JO: That Rahimi was in custody. Kind crazy cause as we were walking up to the stage, I said JOkingly to JOhn Miller, “Hey JOhn, could you make sure you get this guy in custody before the end of the ceremony? Cause we have a press conference after this.” And then, in the middle of the ceremony, they handed me a note saying he was in custody.

PB: And Rahimi, as you know better than I, got sentenced to two consecutive life terms recently for his conduct on that day, as he should have been. Can I ask you a personal question, putting aside that you were diverted in focus because of this important, violent act that had happened in New York City? You’ve been a cop in some capacity or another for 35 years, 36 years?

JO: I just hit 35 on January 5th.

02:25

PB: So you’re a person on the line at all sorts of different opportunities, at the police department including as a transit officer at one point. And now you’re going to lead up, some would say, I would say, the best police force in the world. How’d you feel personally about that? And the reason I ask is, I had a somewhat analogous experience. I’d worked on the line as a prosecutor in the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and when I tried to get my arms around the fact that I was going to be the US Attorney, it was a bit overwhelming. How was it for you?

JO: So, I came on the JOb as a transit cop back in 1983 and I’m an ambitious person, but I don’t think overly ambitious. I always wanted to do well at the JOb I’m presently in. And I figured at some point if I could make captain or deputy inspector, I thought it would be a success. I had the opportunity in 1990 to work for Bill Bratton when he was the chief of the transit police, and I worked for him again in ’94 when he became the commissioner. And then in 2014, 18 years after he left in ’96, he came back and I was a one-star chief at the time running the fugitive enforcement division. So did I ever foresee myself as the commissioner of the NYPD? Absolutely not. But having the opportunity to work with Bill for the time he was here from ’14 to the day I took over was really, for me, a transformational experience. He’s a guy that absolutely has such a broad view of not just policing but of life in big cities. So I think working with him, when Mayor de Blasio told me I was getting the JOb, made me somewhat comfortable.

04:05

PB: Okay. Did you get goose bumps? Did you cry? Did you celebrate? I need something human here from you, Commissioner.

JO: No, I didn’t cry. I think I was overwhelmed, sure. As chief of department, you’re number two, [there’s] a lot of responsibility, a lot of things going on, but it’s not being number one. Number one, it all falls on your shoulders.

PB: Believe it or not, we have listeners all over the country and all over the world, and many people may not be fully familiar with the NYPD. So can I just ask you some basic questions?

JO: Yeah, sure.

PB: How large is the NYPD?

JO: There’s 36,000 police officers, uniformed members of the service. That’s police officers, sergeants, lieutenants, all the way up to one-star chief. And then there’s 18,000 civilian employees, with the brunt of them being school safety officers. There’s 5,000 school safety officers, and then 4,000 traffic agents.

PB: And how does 36,000 compare historically as to size?

JO: We were at our peak back in 2000, right before 9/11, we were at 41,000.

PB: And we have fewer people than we had after 9/11?

JO: Yeah.

PB: Does that make sense?

JO: There were some tight budget years. We actually went down to 34,000 police officers and then about two years ago the mayor and city council approved an increase of 1,300 uniforms plus they created 700 civilian positions. So we actually increased our patrol strength by 2,000 cops.

PB: Among the 36,000 uniformed cops, men versus women?

05:33

JO: We’re 17.5% female in the police department.

PB: How was that compare nationally?

JO: We’re in pretty good shape. We are probably one of the most diverse police departments in the country. The demographics don’t match exactly to the diversity of the city, but it’s pretty darn close, especially at the police officer level. And we just had a sergeant’s test a couple of months ago and we got the results and the diversity numbers look really, really good. That’s positive.

PB: Could you describe some of them? How many African Americans, how many Latinos?

JO: Off the top of my head, we’re, at the police officer level, 49. We’re actually a maJOrity-minority police department. I think it’s 48 or 49%. It’s about 28% Hispanic, about 15.5% African American and about 8% Asian. I don’t know if those numbers add up to 100 but it should be close. I didn’t do that in my head.

PB: My math is not great either. What kind of training do cops get?

06:26

JO: You get six months in the police academy, all sorts of different subjects: tactics, firearms, police science, how to deal with emotionally disturbed people. The curriculum is pretty broad. But then after you get out of the police academy, you do six months in a precinct or a transit district or housing police service area in the field-training program. So two recruits, when they get out of the academy, are assigned to one field training officer. You go around the clock. You do two months of midnights, you do two months of day tours, and you do two months of 4-12, so the afternoon shift. That’s important. This way you get to see the whole precinct, how it operates.

PB: What are the qualifications necessary to become a cop?

JO: You have to have 60 college credits. There’s physical and medical requirements. There’s the entry-level test that you have to pass. And then once you pass that test, you get assigned an investigator to do a complete background investigation on you. Then you start going through the medical and psychological testing, and physical testing too eventually. In the NYPD for every 10 people that take the test, we hire 1 person.

07:28

PB: What kind of psychological testing?

JO: It’s pretty extensive. It’s a written psychological test and there’s an oral with a psychologist.

PB: I don’t think many people know about that. What’s the point of that? To make sure that you don’t have somebody wielding a gun that shouldn’t?

JO: It’s not only carrying a firearm. There’s so many different things that police officers do. We have to make sure that we’re hiring stable individuals.

07:51

PB: How often, last year, did NYPD officers fire their weapons?

JO: In adversarial situations, that’s a police officer with deadly physical force being used against him or her or against another person, 23 times.

PB: 23 times? That’s it?

JO: 23 times. 23.

PB: Out of 36,000 officers.

JO: Right. And in 2016 it was 37.

PB: What else would a police officer fire the weapon [for] if not an adversarial [situation]?

JO: There are dog shootings. Unfortunately, there are suicides. There’s accidental discharges. Those numbers are down, too. I think the total number is in the 60s.

PB: When you tell people the number of times that an officer fired a weapon throughout the entire department is something like 23, are they surprised?

08:34

JO: Yeah. I don’t have the exact numbers on rates in other police departments but we have a very low rate of firearms discharge. And each and every officer-involved shooting is fully investigated by our force investigation division in conjunction with the local district attorney’s offices.

PB: How many homicides were committed in New York City last year?

JO: In 2017, we had 292 homicides. You’ve got to take a look at 1990, which was the peak year for New York City.

PB: How many was that?

JO: It was 2,245.

PB: That’s a big drop.

JO: Yeah. That’s a huge drop.

PB: People have been talking about it for a long time, so I want to talk about that for a minute. There are a lot of theories that circulate about why New York has such a low homicide rate, and why crime rates continue to go down even though some people in other parts of the country are experiencing something slightly different. Is New York just better? Are the cops just better? Are the people less violent? Have people aged out of the demographic of being violent? What do you think is the reason?

09:32

JO: I think that there’s probably a number of reasons, but I think the most important reason is that we started doing this in 1992 when Mayor Dinkins hired an additional 7,000 cops and then Mayor Giuliani came in and hired Bill Bratton in 1994. From ’94 to the present we have a system of accountability in the NYPD that makes precinct commanders accountable for not just the cops that work in their command, but to the whole community, to the whole precinct.

PB: Meaning they’re accountable for the crime that happens in their watch?

JO: Yeah, absolutely. There’s got to be that accountability. And we have a system called CompStat. I’m sure people have heard about it.

PB: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. CompStat is an unbelievable, I guess you would call it, tool, or an approach, to policing that’s statistic-based, relies on science, relies on accountability. Why don’t you explain, for a minute, what CompStat is?

10:25

JO: Sure. I actually ran CompStat when I was chief of department for two years from November of ’14 until September of ’16. So, every Thursday morning mostly, sometimes it’s on Fridays, at eight o’clock, we have a weekly crime strategy meeting called CompStat. It started back in 1994 and it’s really evolved. There’s many iterations of CompStat. So if I work in a patrol bureau in a precinct and my crime is up, or the crime is up in the patrol bureau, you hear about it, and then you get invited to come down to 1 Police Plaza.

PB: Invited? Like, summoned.

JO: Yeah. I’m being nice.

PB: Right. It’s a serious drill.

JO: It is. I was a precinct commander in Central Park Precinct for two years, the 25, which is in East Harlem, for two years, and then in the 44 Precinct for about two and half years, so I have that precinct commander experience. So if your crime or violence is up, the whole bureau comes down, you stand up there at a podium with the people that you work with, precinct detective, lieutenant, narco commander, the vice commander, the gang commander, and you let people know what’s going on, what the crime is, where the increases are. But most importantly, you get the opportunity to explain what your strategy is to make sure that you control crime, especially violence, homicides and shootings.

PB: You also have people who are just focused on intel on the ground at every precinct, right?

11:47

JO: Right. We have field intelligence officers.

PB: Right. They don’t make routine callers or pound the pavement to try and investigate particular cases, they’re there to get a general sense of what the hell is going on in the precinct, right?

JO: Right. And it’s important as people are processed through the precinct, that the FIOs, the field intelligence officers, have the opportunity to debrief people as they come through the system. Obviously, you’re not going to talk about that specific crime that they’re arrested for. You can talk about what’s going on around them.

PB: To solve other crimes.

JO: Right, to solve other crimes.

PB: Right. Because, I don’t know if people fully appreciate this, every time you arrest someone who’s been involved in some crime, they probably have information about 10, 20, 30 others. And you want to exploit that.

JO: Right, and it’s a real skill to be able to do that, to be able to talk to people and get them to give you the information so you can help solve other crimes.

12:39

PB: What makes someone good at that JOb?

JO: I think there’s a couple things. I think your communication ability is important, but it’s also your experience and having very good knowledge of the precinct where you work. I worked in the 44, which is in the South Bronx and the area around Yankee Stadium. And I had an FIO there that had worked there for a number of years before I got there, had an intimate knowledge of not only where the issues were but who the players were and where the violence might come from.

PB: So take us through it. Let’s say there’s a spike in shootings or robberies, some aspect of crime goes up in some part of Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, wherever. What happens?

13:19

JO: I’m going to use my old precinct as an example. Say, in the 44th Precinct, if I have a spike in shooting in and around Mount Eden Avenue and Townsend. A shooting happens or a homicide happens, detectives go in there. Obviously, they respond to it and they interview people and they’ll do a background check on everybody involved. They’ll take a look at the history of the person that was shot, see if they belong to a gang or a crew. If they belong to a gang or a crew, they investigation can actually expand. Once that happens, we can go in there. If more information is needed, we can go in there, send narcotics teams in there if it’s narco related.

PB: When you say send them in there, is that for the purpose of investigating or to be present and deter people by a show of force?

JO: Ideally, it should happen both ways. If the shooting is narco-related, we’ll send a narcotics team in there. They’ll do buy-and-bust, and then the FIOs and the detectives from narc will have an opportunity to debrief the people that they lock up and maybe get some information about why the shooting occurred, who did the shooting. There’s a lot of technology involved now, too. There are cameras. We have ShotSpotter.

PB: How many cameras in New York City?

14:33

JO: On my phone, I have access to over 10,000 cameras.

PB: From your phone?

JO: From my phone. Yep.

PB: That’s a lot of cameras.

JO: Yeah, it is.

PB: Do you just look at them for fun sometimes?

JO: No. If there’s an issue or a problem somewhere in the city, I’ll take a look to see what’s going on. I try not to drive myself too crazy cause there’s a lot that goes on in the city.

14:53

PB: Is there a room at 1 Police Plaza, which is right next to my old office, where every camera is able to be viewed?

JO: Yeah, there’s the Operations Center downstairs, the JOint Operations Center where we have access to those cameras. And some of them are public cameras, they’re called Argus Cameras. Some of them are privately held. And this is just part of 2018. They’re an important part of what we do. It helps us solve a lot of crimes.

PB: Do you have any regrets about the loss of privacy people have?

JO: Yeah. You always have to strike that balance. You can talk to the commissioner or you can talk to Jim O’Neill. There’s security versus privacy. I know what the arguments are, but when it comes to violence I think it’s important that we use all resources available to stop that violence.

15:37

PB: Just further the question about why New York has done so well with respect to violent crime. Other cities are not faring so well, Chicago, Baltimore in particular. I love Chicago, I’m going there soon. My in-laws are there, wonderful city. But, I was looking at the stats very recently to prepare for this interview, and New York City has, depending on what stat you look at, 1/7 or 1/8 the number of homicides per capita as Chicago. Do you have any theories?

JO: Yes, I do. And again, it goes back to we’ve been doing this since 1994. We’ve been working on this issue of homicides and shootings and overall crime.

PB: But don’t you think Chicago has too?

JO: I’m not sure if they’ve used the CompStat system over that period of time.

PB: Well, has anybody called and said, “Hey, can we set up CompStat here?”

JO: Actually, I belong to MaJOr City Chiefs. I belong to the Police Executive Research Forum. We have conferences all throughout the year. We share information. The command staff from Chicago has come into New York City a few times. They’ve sat at CompStat, they see what we do. I’m not overly familiar with the demographics or of the geography, mostly the geography of Chicago.

16:49

PB: You have a full-time JOb.

JO: Yeah.

PB: But any thoughts about Baltimore? Where, I think, the homicide rate is even higher?

JO: Yeah. And again, it’s the same situation, the way we approach our work. And a big part of this is, and it’s something that I found out going to these conferences, the relationships that we have with our local prosecutors, the Southern District, the Eastern District, the FBI, the DEA, the Marshall Service–

PB: You talk a lot.

JO: –ATF. Not just talk a lot. We work together a lot. After Randolph Holder was killed in East River Houses in October 2015, look what we managed to accomplish. And that wasn’t the NYPD by ourselves, it was NYPD, the FBI, the Southern District. We made life a whole lot better for the people that live in East River Houses. I think that that’s a big difference too.

17:44

PB: When I was line prosecutor, a lot of the people we worked with were cops, even though we were a federal prosecutors office, in part because there were all these task forces. I did narcotics cases and they were JOint DEA, NYPD task forces and I did a lot of my work with detectives of the NYPD. And obviously, the JOint Terrorism Task Force is a collection of people from lots of different agencies but a huge presence by NYPD and obviously also the FBI. Do you think cities are different, though, in some ways? In other words, if we picked you up and put you in another city that had a worse violent crime problem, would you expect to do all the things that you do in New York or do you think there’s just something different about the feel of a different city?

JO: I don’t know if I can answer that. I do know, and it’s another advantage of growing up in the system of NYPD–

PB: You know how it all works.

18:34

JO: Yeah. Not only do I know how it all works, I have relationships with people all over the city. And not just people in law enforcement, with electives, with community members, with tenant associations, with business associations. I think that’s a big part of helping to reduce crime. We’ve embarked, almost 3 years ago which I find hard to believe, on neighborhood policing, which is a different model of policing at the precinct and the housing PSA level. And we’re actually going to move it over to the transit soon, too, where we put the same cops in the same sectors every day. We have a position called the neighborhood coordination officer. There’s two per sector, and their JOb is to be the conduit between the community and the steady sector cops. This way we can identify problems together, work out solutions together. I think that does three things. It makes the cops feel good about what they do, and everybody’s got to admit that law enforcement has not been shown in the best light over the last three or four years. Neighborhood policing makes the community feel that policing is something that’s done with them, not too them. And if those two things are done correctly, you’re going to see a drop in overall crime.

19:42

PB: Describe what you mean by community policing, cause I think it’s an important issue these days.

JO: Again, I’m going to go back to the 44 Precinct, which, for me, was a transformational two and a half years. That is a precinct right around Yankee Stadium. It’s 1.9 square miles. There’s 150,000 people that live in that 1.9 square miles. Prior to neighborhood policing, the 44 was 18 different sectors and the lines [are] kind of drawn arbitrarily. If you’re a cop in the 44, you’re not necessarily working in the same sector every day. With neighborhood policing, we went from 18 sectors down to 5 sectors, and those sectors now represent natural neighborhoods. We have Concourse Village.

PB: They’re not gerrymandered.

JO: No, they’re not. It’s a geographic neighborhood. And what we do is we put the same police officers, whether you’re on a 4-12, midnight shift, or a day tour shift, you’re working in that sector every day and that’s a priority that you stay in that sector.

20:38

PB: So, you get to know everybody.

JO: Correct.

PB: And they get to know you.

JO: Right.

PB: Is that always good?

JO: It is, and I think I know what you’re driving at. We have a very robust system where we’re looking for corruption all the time. And then, in those sectors, we have two neighborhood coordination officers. I think it’s important that we lean towards this method of policing. I know there are some challenges with it, but I think the people in the city really need to get to know the cops that serve them and understand why they do it, just to see them as fellow human beings and how much they care about this city.

PB: The theory being, if you got to know your cop, you would like your cop?

21:18

JO: Yeah, it is. And you would get to understand who they are. And then the biggest part of this neighborhood policing philosophy is that instead of answering 911 JObs all day long– cause prior to neighborhood policing if I’m a cop in the 44, one radio car, one police car could be handling 20 to 25 radio runs in an 8 hour shift. So in that model, there’s no chance you’re going to ever meet anybody.

PB: But are you telling beat cops to do things other than the traditional JObs? Are they going to picnics? Are they going to school events? Are they getting involved in the community in deeper ways than just– right?

JO: I don’t know about going to picnics.

PB: Okay. We don’t picnic in New York City anyway.

JO: They are going to schools. They’re going to community meetings.

PB: Do you tell them to do that?

22:02

JO: Yeah. Absolutely. We put enough police officers into the precinct, now, where they have a third of their day where they’re not chasing 911 JObs. They have time to do other things. They have time to go to meetings. It’s not just about going to meetings. I’s not just about making connections. There’s a lot of other things they have to do in that 1/3 of their day where they’re not answering radio runs. There’s still quality of life conditions. There’s still traffic conditions, wellness visits. That’s an important component. And people get to see that.

PB: What’s that?

22:30

JO: Say if we get an incident where somebody’s sick and gets taken to the hospital, and then we find out they’re released from the hospital. We’ll go back a coupe days later just to check up on them, do some follow-up. Somebody’s a victim of a crime, we have an elderly that’s a victim of a robbery, we’ll go back a couple days later to make sure that they’re okay and if there’s anything else that they need. It makes the cops feel good about what they do.

22:52

PB: Look, part of the problem in every walk of life is people make assumptions about why other people do their JObs and how they act. And the more you can show that they’re human beings, I think, the better. All the cops that I’ve known have done the JOb because they care about the people. But sometimes you need to make that more plain, in ways that people can see.

JO: I know why I became a cop, and I’ve been a cop for 35 years. I’m certainly not a naive person. But I do know that most people become cops cause they want to make a difference. And not all 36,000 cops are good and wherever I go I say that. We are going to have issues, we are going to have people that do things that are not right. They commit crimes, and we’ll take care of that.

PB: Look, I know. I don’t think we ever had cases like that but during my time in office, I think we prosecuted 20 cops on different occasions for different things.

JO: Yeah. Just take a look in my old precinct, depending on the time when I was there, it was anywhere from 250 to 300 cops there, and see what they do every day and see how much they care about not only just each other, which is important, about how the people out in the community and how quick they respond to crimes.

24:04

PB: Is there a difference between the way cops do their JOb if they’re policing in the community in which they live, or do you try not to have that happen? Is that a conflict?

JO: We don’t have police officers assigned to precincts where they live. That would be problematic.

PB: It’s too much.

JO: Yeah. There would be plenty of issues there. You’re talking about, if you’re married, your spouse. You’re talking about, if you have children, your children.

PB: Safety issues.

JO: Yeah, there are some serious safety issues there,

24:27

PB: So many people don’t trust cops. I will tell you that, and I think part of it is from these terrible shootings that have happened and you’ve spoken about them and we’ll talk about that a little bit more, people have known when I was in my prior JOb that I have a relationship with the NYPD and feel a certain way in kinship with law enforcement. But people felt comfortable telling me in a blanket way from time to time, “I hate cops. I don’t trust any cops,” which I thought was extraordinary that you’re saying it to me. Why do you think that happens?

JO: I think we get painted with a broad brush. And again, we’ve had cops in New York City do some real bad things. We had two cops from Brooklyn South Narcotics get locked up for rape. And I think when people see that, they think that, unfortunately, all cops are like that and they’re certainly not. You look at what people watch on TV. What do people watch on TV? They watch shows about cops. I think there’s a big conflict there. On one sense, every day they’re looking at cop shows and I’m sure there’s some sense of admiration there, but that doesn’t transform itself to reality.

PB: Right. On a cop show, I think, there are 23 shots fired in every program.

JO: Yeah, without a doubt.

PB: Which is the average in the whole year, right?

JO: Yeah, without a doubt.

PB: So what do you do about it? How much does it bother you?

25:45

JO: Of course it bothers me. I became chief of department in November 2014 right after the Ferguson decision, right after the Garner decision. I lived through those protests. I was there every day. Jian Liu and Rafael Ramos were killed in December of 2014 by a mentally disturbed man. I’m not sure if it was directly related but I’m sure it had something to do with it. So, this is something that’s on my mind constantly. And anything that we’re trying to do in the NYPD now is to build trust and to let people know that they can trust an NYPD cop. A police officer is there for all the right reasons.

PB: How do you measure these things? CompStat is very metric-oriented. You know how many shootings, how many solved cases, how many homicides, how many times have the firearms been discharged, but an important glue to all of this is, as you say, community trust. Are there metrics that you have that you can measure, or is it a feel?

26:45

JO: Yeah, there are. It can’t just be anecdotal. Anecdotal is good but it’s not going to really help us be where we want to be. It’s in beta right now, it’s in testing. It’s called the Sentiment Meter.

PB: The Sentiment Meter?

JO: The Sentiment Meter. If you’re in New York City, and this is down to the sector level, you might get a pop-up question about New York City. And I think it’s in 7,000 apps. It’ll be an innocuous question about New York and if you answer that question, there’ll four, five other questions about trust in the NYPD and whether or not you feel safe in your neighborhood.

PB: It’s like a poll.

JO: Yeah, it’s research. So it’s one way to measure. We can get that information out to the precinct commanders and they can see, down to the sector level, if they have trust and safety issues throughout the city, and there’s different ways that we can make that better.

27:39

PB: Are you more worried about the lone world one-off people who will swerve their car into a crowd, like we’ve seen in these other cities and in New York, or wield a knife on the subway somewhere or have a single firearm and shoot people, are you more worried about that these days than you are about some big organized high profile attack?

JO: My degree of worry is probably consistent. I’m worried about all of those. But the lone wolf attack is very challenging.

PB: And there have been more recent instances of smaller attacks that can be just as terrorizing.

JO: Yeah. If you look at the suicide bomber and the truck attack, those were one-offs. We didn’t know those people, Saipov or Ullah, but we did know about people that were connected to them. So this is a challenge cause we’re constantly monitoring the threat stream, all the threats that come over that threat stream are investigated by either the JTTF or the intel bureau, but it’s got to be not just New York City-centric. Rahimi was from Jersey, Saipov was from New Jersey, and the JTTF in New Jersey, they do a great JOb too.

PB: You should maybe build a wall between New Jersey and New York.

28:52

JO: There’s no need for that.

PB: That was a JOke. I’m from New Jersey.

JO: I went to high school in Jersey.

PB: Where’d you go to high school?

JO: Montville Township High School, Morris County.

PB: All the best people are from New Jersey. Let me ask you about another aspect of that, which is in the news and has been on people’s minds for a long time. So you’ve got a guy, may or may not be disturbed, who gives off some signals that he’s thinking about doing harm, either becoming a school shooter or says he wants to wage Jihad against Americans, but hasn’t done anything, hasn’t directly threatened any particular person, but says some stuff. This happens all the time. We had cases like this in the NYPD. You chase them down. What do you do about a person like that, if they haven’t actually pulled the trigger anywhere, but they worry you? Explain to the public, so that they both have confidence that people’s rights are not being violated, but also have confidence that people are on the JOb. What do you do?

29:52

JO: If we get a lead about someone, and we do an investigation, and you have to stop if nothing comes to pass, if there’s nothing criminal. We have to constantly pay attention to the people that come up on our radar. And also, like you said, we have to make sure we’re not infringing on people’s rights.

PB: But you don’t want 17 dead kids at a school.

JO: Absolutely not. So we have to make sure that we don’t alienate communities in New York City. We have to make sure that communities all across the five boroughs have trust in who we are and what we do and if they see something, again, that doesn’t look right, that they’re comfortable enough to come to us and we can take a real hard look at the person or persons that they’re talking about. It’s hard. A lot of people. We have a lot of resources but we don’t have unlimited resources either.

PB: Do you have people who are monitoring social media for threats like that?

30:45

JO: Part of monitoring the threat stream is, of course, looking at social media.

PB: Yeah. So, maybe this is too difficult a hypothetical cause this just happened but, if tomorrow, you found out about a person, 19-year-old graduate of a New York City public high school who was saying some nasty things on Instagram or on Facebook, do you go talk to the guy? Do you keep him under surveillance? Is there an ability that you think you have to put cuffs on him for a period of time, or not?

JO: That’s the whole picture there. If somebody makes us aware of a threat, or if we become aware of a threat ourselves, of course, we’re going to do an investigation there. Maybe that means that we want to talk to that person, maybe not. Maybe that means surveillance, maybe it doesn’t. I don’t want to go too deep into what our tactics are.

PB: Yeah, of course.

JO: If a threat like that comes to our attention, of course, we’re going to take it seriously and make sure it’s fully investigated.

PB: I want to go to the other end of the spectrum. Terrorism is the thing that we fear most and we had the most traumatic event that any city has ever had in America on 9/11. But at the other end of the spectrum, what you and others call “quality of life” crimes, where does that fall on the priority list, and why is that important to do?

32:00

JO: Again, this goes back to my experience–

PB: At the 44?

JO: –as a precinct commander, not just the 44. Quality of life is what people are, believe it or not, mostly concerned about. I just went to the 83 Precinct Community Council meeting. I go to community council meetings as often as I can. And every community council meeting that I’ve held, every tenant association meeting that I’ve gone to, every business association meeting that I’ve gone to, people are concerned about quality of life issues.

PB: But what does that mean? What’s an example?

JO: It could be noise, people smoking weed. It could be a blocked driveway. It could be any number of things. It’s things that affect people’s everyday lives. And as a precinct commander, if you don’t take care of quality of life issues, guess what? You’re not going to be a precinct commander very long. One of the big changes we’ve made in CompStat over the last couple of years is, there is quality of life enforcement. But sometimes when you’re doing investigations, shooting, homicide investigations, you have people that might not be shooting anybody at this time, but they’re committing a quality of life offence or violation. And I want most of our some reinforcement to be directed back against people who aren’t directly involved in crime and violence.

33:12

PB: But the quality of life crimes, or the quality of life policing, is a portion of that not intended to be prosecuted? So we’re just telling people to knock it off? Or is actual prosecution an important component?

JO: There’s a range here, all right? Quality of life issues have to be addressed, whether you address it by a warning, by talking to somebody, it could be by a c summons, a criminal court summons, or it could be by an arrest. So there’s a whole range there. And it’s important that if we’re going to arrest somebody for a quality of life crime, if it rises to that level it’s important that the prosecutor’s office work with us, especially if that person has a connection to crime and violence.

PB: Is quality of life policing different from broken windows policing?

33:59

JO: Quality of life policing is something that the NYPD will never walk away from. It’s evolved over the years. But it’s important that we stay connected to it. We’ve just had an issue over the last couple of weeks with fare evasion, which some people consider a quality of life crime.

PB: You mean jumping turnstiles at the subway?

JO: Jumping turnstiles, or not paying your fare once you get on the subway. And it’s important that we continue to address that. My experience as a transit cop comes in handy here. You need to control the entry areas to the system. You need to control the turnstiles to make sure that people who are coming into the subway system are coming into the subway system to get from point A to point B, and not coming to commit crimes. So if I’m coming into the subway to commit a crime, chances are I’m not paying my fare.

34:49

PB: Well, that’s how Bill Bratton began too, right?

JO: That’s right.

PB: He oversaw the transit police. Didn’t a district attorney in New York City recently declare that they would no longer prosecute fare-beaters?

JO: Yeah, it was in Manhattan.

PB: How do you feel about that?

JO: It was probably a miscommunication. Listen, we’re always looking for ways to reduce online arrests, which means somebody that’s going to go through the system. If I lock you up, I’ll bring you to the station-house, you get booked, you get fingerprinted, you get photographed, you come down to central booking, and then you get arraigned. And then you get released on your own recognizance or maybe pay bail or maybe you have to stay in. We’re always looking to reduce that number cause I’d rather have a police officer on the street, but there’s also got to be a balance there. 75% of the people that beat the fare get a TAB summons, a Transit Adjudication Bureau summons, which is a civil summons. 25% of them get arrested for various reasons. But if I’m somebody that consistently beats the fare, if I’m somebody that consistently commits crimes down in the subway, I don’t think it’s right that there’s a decline to prosecute there. I think that person should be prosecuted. We’re working with Cy’s office now.

36:07

PB: Cy Vance, the Manhattan District Attorney, right?

JO: Yeah. Cy Vance. We’re working with him to come up with a determination of who presents a public safety threat. And we’ll get there.

PB: Do you worry that quality of life policing, in some places, means that there’s a disproportionate effect in terms of having a rap sheet in communities of color?

JO: Yeah. This is a discussion that we have all the time. When we’re doing quality of life policing, most of it’s driven by complaints, complaints from the community, and I think that’s why it’s important that the police officers are in steady sectors and they get to know the people in those sectors so they know who’s involved in the crime. I don’t want to be given a summons to the guy coming home from work and maybe he’s sitting on his stoop and having a can of beer, that’s not the person I’m looking to give a criminal court summons to.

37:00

PB: So if there’s a community that, you have a block where they like to have late parties and the community’s not complaining, you’re not imposing your own NYPD “the way things should be” on them.

JO: No.

PB: The community itself is complaining, then you take care of it.

JO: Right. This is the critical component of neighborhood policing. We have to listen to people to figure out what the problems are and what the solutions are. Not to mean that you can have a late-night block party unpermitted till three o’clock in the morning cause, you know what? People are going to complain about that. People are going to complain.

PB: Have you noticed, or have people in the department noticed, in the current climate with respect to immigrants and particularly undocumented folks in New York City, that there’s a reluctance to come forward and report crime?

37:47

JO: We haven’t seen that. I think I’ve taken a pretty strong stand.

PB: You have?

JO: Yes.

PB: Describe your stand. Tell people what your stand is.

JO: It’s consistent with city law. We do not conduct civil immigration enforcement. We do not ask people their immigration status when we contact them. Again, this goes back to trust. Everybody in New York City has to trust us. They’re a victim of a crime, they’re a witness in a crime, they have to feel that it’s okay to come forward to us and let us do what we need to do to keep them safe. And it’s important for people to report crimes, cause this way we can deploy our people properly.

38:27

PB: How do you think this standoff between police commissioners like you who say that versus some folks in Washington including the president and the attorney general who say something different?

JO: They, and I know they have, need to take a look at what’s going on in New York City, and look at our levels of crime and our levels of community engagement, and I think they really can’t argue with what we’re doing here. Our homicide rate now, I think, is 3.5 per 100,000. If you go to other cities, it’s double, triple, quadruple, some even more than that. There’s a good formula here and our successes are, for the whole city not just for the NYPD, pretty apparent.

PB: Do you think teachers should be armed in schools?

JO: Teachers should teach.

PB: So that’s a no.

JO: That’s a no. Yeah, I don’t think that’s a good idea.

PB: What do you say to people who think that’s a good idea? Why do people think that that’s a good idea? It has some surface logic, right? I saw, recently, the head of the NRA make an argument that I don’t agree with but I want to give you an opportunity to respond. He literally went on television and said, “We protect our jewelry stores with armed people, we protect our politicians with armed people, we protect celebrities with armed people. Do we love our children less because we drop them off at school and they’re not protected by anyone with a firearm?” What do you say to someone like that?

39:50

JO: I think the way we protect our school children in New York City is excellent. We have over 5,000 school safety officers. They’re not armed, but they are in all 1,800 schools. We have a school safety task force of almost 200 people, a uniformed task force that we assign to various schools. And then we have, in each and every precinct, the neighborhood coordinations officers and the sector officers that have relationships with people in the schools. So I think the way we’re doing business here, it’s proven to be successful. If you’re going to carry a firearm, you need to have the proper training. You certainly do. You need to be fully engaged. If I’m a teacher, I want to concentrate on teaching somebody how to read, how to write, how to do math. I think carrying a sidearm is definitely not the solution so I wouldn’t agree with that at all.

PB: Have you changed, in a way that you can describe, any of the ways in which schools are protected in the wake of recent mass shootings?

40:52

JO: Obviously we pay attention to it. We have made some changes. The precinct commanders are all very aware of what’s transpired down in Florida. One of our missions is to protect the children in the 1,800 schools in New York City. That’s just public schools, not to mention the private and other parochial schools. I do need to talk about, one bill that’s pending, if we’re going to talk about firearms, is the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act. Cy Vance and I were on 60 Minutes a couple weeks ago and we’re both outspoken about it. Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act means that the New York State would have to recognize somebody that has a concealed carry permit from another state and the fact that that’s legal in New York State, and the degrees to which people get carry permits in different states vary, some of them good, some of them not so good. We have some of the best gun laws in New York State and that’s why our gun crime’s so low. It would make us much less safe if this bill was to pass the Senate. It did pass the House, which I find hard to believe, and now it needs 60 votes in the Senate. And we’re not looking to tell other states how they should license people. If you come to this state, you should abide by our laws.

PB: To end, Commissioner, if there’s one message you could give to the public about police and what they’re about so that there’s more trust, what would it be?

JO: That police officers take this JOb to make a difference, and to do good. They’re not in it for the money, that’s for sure. They’re not in it for a pat on the back, for the appreciation. But if you do have a chance to say hello and to thank a cop, I think that’s important. I think they might be a little surprised at first, but I think it would definitely make their day.

PB: Commissioner O’Neill, thank you so much for being on the show.

JO: Thanks Preet. Pleasure to be here.