NYPD’s new leader: Helping people is at heart of police work
NEW YORK (AP) — On the Bronx streets where New York City’s new police commissioner started as a patrolman in the crime-ravaged early 1990s, gunfire and burned-out buildings were everywhere.
Sometimes the police radio would crackle with a different kind of call, not for a shooting or stabbing but for a sick child, a locked apartment door or a marriage on the rocks.
“I remember thinking, 'Well, why do they call the police for this? It's not an emergency,'” Commissioner Dermot Shea told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “And, you know, you kind of get a little wiser over time. The reason they call the police is because they really have nobody else to call.”
Shea, 50, is drawing on his early days as he pushes the nation’s largest police department to cultivate deeper bonds with the communities it serves — a key, he says, to building trust and cutting crime.
Shea, the son of Irish immigrants who grew up with four siblings in Queens, wants the NYPD’s 36,000 officers to remember their jobs are primarily about people — whether that means rushing to a crime scene, comforting a victim or merely lending a hand.
In many ways, he said, officers are "the glue that holds the city together.”
“Hopefully that’s the message we get to our cops and recruits, that everything you do is about helping people, working with people, serving people,” Shea said.
Shea was sworn in Dec. 2 as the city’s 44th police commissioner, succeeding James O’Neill, who left after three years on the job to become a security chief at Visa. Mayor Bill de Blasio said he was awed by Shea’s intellect and saw him as “the future of the NYPD."
Critics chided de Blasio for picking another white man to lead the department, which has had only two black commissioners. Since...