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Graft and influence fell on evil days in 1895, when 36-year-old Teddy Roosevelt bounded up the steps of the old Mulberry Street headquarters, was sworn in as police commissioner, and promised to make the department "clean as a hound's tooth." Roosevelt personally undertook to shield his men from graft. In the evenings Teddy tugged a hat low over his face, put on a cape, went out into the city to ferret out lax police officers. On one occasion the commissioner, dubbed Haroun-al-Roosevelt for his nightly forays, wandered to Third Avenue, four times sought a cop on post there. Eventually, Roosevelt found him in a saloon, chin-high in fresh oysters, told him sternly: "Get back to your post. I am the police commissioner." Jeered the cop: "Yes, and you're Grover Cleveland and Mayor Strong all in a bunch, you are. Move on now, or else." The barkeep settled the discussion. Said he: "Shut up. Bill. It's his nibs for sure. Don't you see the teeth and glasses?"
Teddy Roosevelt did more during his two-year stint than search out errant cops.
He introduced New York's first traffic policemen, four men on bicycles who stopped runaway teams, harassed "scorchers," i.e., fast-pedaling bicyclists who were the turn-of -the -century's hot-rodders. Most important accomplishment: when he stepped out in 1897 to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt had restored public faith in the police department.
Ice & Cloudy Beer. In the post-Roosevelt period, the public's faith went up and down. After World War I came Prohibition's bootleg and ballyhoo; New York cops collected royalties for looking elsewhere while cloudy beer and bad booze (just off the boat) poured into 30,000 speakeasies. And as recently as 1950, Bookmaker Harry Gross rocked the city with a running police scandal. To lighten his own sentence, Brooklyn Bookie Gross ticked off names of policemen who were getting his "ice money." Eventually, 18 cops were convicted of perjury or contempt of court, 41 more were fired from the force, and William P. O'Brien, the police commissioner appointed by ex-Cop (1917-25) William O'Dwyer, lost his job. But today crookedness on the grand scale, if it is there at all, eludes investigators. The privately financed Institute of 'Public Administration, which surveys U.S. police departments, ranks New York's with the best, alongside the police forces of Cincinnati, Milwaukee and Berkeley, Calif.
Scissors & Sign Language. Because of their work's scope, New York's cops have become Jacks-of-all-trades and masters of many arts. Among their units:
¶ Two mounted troops totaling 266 men; even in the mechanized age, horse-borne cops are still the best unravelers of theater and garment-district traffic, best at handling riots and forcing back crowds.
¶ Twelve radio-equipped police boats, four helicopters, 36 emergency trucks; the trucks are equipped with every tool from scissors to pneumatic drills to help extricate subway victims, deliver babies, coax down jumpers from skyscraper pinnacles or bridge peaks.
¶ A nine-man bomb-disposal squad that packs off hot bombs in trucks made of blast-dampening woven-steel cable.