Evidence, What Evidence?

Tavaris "Pumpkin" Parker got off the train in Brooklyn after finishing two work shifts--one, the night before, cleaning cars on the Long Island Railroad, and then his day job as a school aide. Looking forward to a few days off, he bought a slice of pizza and was almost home when gunshots rang out. Pumpkin joined the crowd gathered around a dying man. Someone there saw his face. Later that person would look at photographs and remember Pumpkin Parker not as a guy eating a slice of pizza but as the man who pulled the trigger. The witness even had a name for him.

"He picked him out as a person he knows as Derrick, and that's who he said shot the victim," a homicide investigator testified.

There was one slight problem. Pumpkin Parker wasn't Derrick.

The homicide detectives continued to gallop in the wrong direction. They never got around to showing photos of other suspects to the witness. Parker, 27, was planted in a lineup of sore thumbs--infirm older men rounded up as fillers from a homeless shelter.

Questioned for nearly 12 hours--and urged by detectives to make a claim of self-defense-- (continued on page 144)Evidence(continued from page 116) Parker stuck to his denial.

Arrested three days after Christmas 1999, Parker did not get out of jail until the following November--and then only because he told his lawyer that he'd heard the real killer had been locked up for another case.

A prosecutor in the Brooklyn district attorney's office showed a picture of the new suspect to the original witness, who immediately fingered him as the killer. In court, he looked at Pumpkin Parker and said the shooter was not in the room.

Oops.

The Brooklyn judge sitting on the case was steamed. Bad enough, said the judge, that the prosecution had held Parker in jail for 10 months, insisting on going to trial and demanding high bail.

"You had a detective who showed only one photo array of the shooter when he had four suspects," said the judge.

The prosecution immediately moved to drop all charges against Parker and to investigate the new suspect--who, while Parker was taking up space in jail, allegedly killed someone else.

In terms of police fiascoes, the cases of Pumpkin Parker and O.J. Simpson are exceptional--but not in the way most people believe. At least someone was arrested and tried for those murders. In most violent crimes, no one is ever brought so far as the booking room to be arrested, much less made to face a jury. It is shocking that Jon-Benet Ramsey could be murdered in her own home, behind locked doors, with no one called to answer. But, in fact, the bungled investigation of that crime is far more typical than the miracles retailed on NYPD Blue.

This is the dirty little secret about police detection. Getting any man, guilty or not, is a rarity. In Washington, D.C. two thirds of the homicides committed in 1999 were unsolved at the end of that year. Over the past three decades in the U.S., the rate of "clearances by arrest" has stayed below 50 percent. Detectives and police agencies busted suspects in 220,000 cases in 1971--about 47 percent of reported violent crimes. In 1993, they arrested 783,347, but those arrests involved just 45 percent of reported violent crimes. Most violent criminals just walk away from their crimes.

In 1994, when he became chief strategist for the New York Police Department, Jack Maple often asked cop buffs around New York how many collars a detective made during a year.

"Seventy-five to 100," was the usual first answer.

The head of the detectives' union guessed it was 20 to 25. In fact, most detectives averaged three or four arrests a year.

The dandyish Maple--he favors spats, bowlers and expensive suits--knows his work. Maple rose from patrolling the subways to become New York's deputy commissioner, devising tactics that helped drive down New York's crime rate in the Nineties. He has worked as a consultant with police departments in Baltimore, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Birmingham, as well as in Europe, South America and Africa. Despite Maple's wardrobe, no one would mistake him for being less than 100 percent cop. And he tells the truth. "In most cities, everyday murders, robberies, rapes, assaults, burglaries, thefts and auto thefts are often assigned to poorly led second-stringers who simply go through the motions of their investigations--if they even know what the motions are," Maple writes in his memoir, Crime Fighter, co-authored with Chris Mitchell. "Not surprisingly, these detectives are often unsuccessful. But even worse, they are often uncaring about the consequences of their failures."

In Chicago, an imposing detective sergeant with over two decades of experience who asked to be identified as Detective X echoed Maple's views. The cases that manage to get as far as the courthouse, Detective X says, are open to attack by defense attorneys. "They bring up the specter of bad police work," he says. 'And it's not hard to find it."

During New York's murder siege in the late Eighties, Mike Race ran the detective bureau in the homicide capital of the city, the 75th Precinct, which covers a forsaken spread of Brooklyn called East New York. "On paper, in that one precinct, we'd catch 125 murders a year," recalls Race, now retired and working as a private investigator. "Those are just the homicides. For every one of those, there are five or six shootings that are not fatal. So you're talking 600, 800 shootings a year."

East New York detective work had the same relationship to meticulous, classic investigations that street corner first aid has to brain surgery: necessary but not pretty. "We'd grab a suspect and show him to a witness. 'Is this the guy? Yes? Next.' Who had time to investigate?" recalls Race.

In such an atmosphere, no one would be surprised to learn that a compulsive liar enjoyed a romp through the courts at the expense of innocent people. During one month in 1989, a man named Dana Gardner told police he had witnessed two separate homicides and had himself been the victim of an assault. He testified at three trials, and not until years later were the innocent people he sent to prison able to prove their alibis and get a judge to listen to them.

Sloppy work is not simply a function of overbearing caseloads. In 1998, after an era of huge increases in police budgets, staffing, computerization and prison expansion, violent crime had dropped to its lowest point since 1984. Despite the shrinking crime rate and vast government expenditures, however, the 1998 clearance rate (the equivalent of "case closed") was just 49.1 percent, scarcely unchanged from 1984's 47.4 percent. As statistics go, clearance rates are relatively constant, regardless of the fluctuating crime levels. Clever public relations work, in addition to lame news coverage, make this dismal state of affairs a virtual secret.

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The typical police scandal orbits around a payoff to a cop from a dope dealer, a brutal beating caught on videotape, maybe a messy arrangement with a brothel or gambling den. The great number of unsolved crimes--and worse, the crimes "solved" by nailing innocent people--barely get a second glance. Yet if NYPD Blue's Andy Sipowicz put up clearance numbers like these, he'd be lucky to make it to post-midnight reruns on cable. "The problem with TV shows and movies," says Maple, "is that you never see detectives sitting around, not wanting to go after anyone."

A major study by the Rand Corp., published in 1979, found that "investigative activities play only a minor role in contributing to overall arrest rates." Very little has changed. On the other hand, Crime Stoppers International, a program of cash rewards for anonymous tips, claims astounding success. Since 1976, when the first program was launched in Albuquerque, New Mexico, it claims to have solved more than 700,000 cases. Since then, more than 1000 chapters have been set up worldwide, funded by donations and membership dues. "At the press conferences, (continued on page 156)Evidence(continued from page 144) whenever you hear that the case was broken by 'information developed through investigation,' that always means Crime Stoppers," said Maple.

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Modern detective work and the myth of the Great Detective were born at the same moment. On a Sunday morning in October 1878, the nearly deranged janitor of the Manhattan Savings Bank raced along Bleecker Street in bare feet, hands manacled. At dawn, five robbers had burst into his apartment over the bank and had tied him up. They made off with more than $2 million, a nice day's pay in the 21st century and a stupendous one in the late 19th. Among the first to answer the janitor's alarm was Thomas Byrnes, a broad-beamed, mustachioed Irish cop who ran the Greenwich Village police precinct.

Within a few days, Byrnes (by his account) cracked the Manhattan Savings Bank case, and soon he became chief of detectives in New York, the first true celebrity cop. Before Byrnes, detectives were seen as little more than second-rate cops. Byrnes masterminded the concept of organized intelligence gathering, creating "the template for detective work as it would come to be organized and practiced in every modern American metropolis," as James Lardner and Thomas Reppetto write in their authoritative history, NYPD: A City and Its Police.

At the core of Byrnes' legend is relent-lessness. His men stepped in and out of alleys, shadowing their prey around the clock. They traveled anywhere, any time, whether it meant interviewing a milkman at the first crack of daylight or the madam of a Mercer Street bordello in the heat of the night. So torrid were Byrnes' interrogation techniques that cops and reporters made a play on his name and created a new idiom: the third degree. The daily press referred to Byrnes as the Great Detective, and his men were nicknamed the Immortals. A few skeptics claimed that Byrnes' greatest invention was himself. They questioned how much of a role he had played in cracking the Manhattan Savings Bank caper, charging that a cop who later turned stoolie may have been one of the robbers.

But critics could not put a dent in his popularity, and Byrnes played well to the crowd in the good seats: He created a "deadline" at Manhattan's Fulton Street, an invisible barrier at the edge of the financial district. Any suspicious type who dared to enter the privileged zone was arrested on the spot.

In many ways, Byrnes' deadline was the start of a great deal of trouble. It ghettoized crime, sending the message that you could not commit crime on one block, but, by implication, were free to do so elsewhere. The devastation caused by big-city crime in the late 20th century did not arise from the occasional O.J. Simpson--type case, terrible as such murders were. It was brought on by the utter invisibility of most crime and the lack of interest by the press, the public and ultimately the police, who allowed entire stretches of cities to die. Until a few years ago, detectives were not assigned to investigate burglaries in the homes of New Yorkers if the property stolen had a value of less than $5000--except on Manhattan island. There, the threshold was $10,000.

The message? Crime pays--in small bills and in certain neighborhoods.

Byrnes was also a master manipulator of statistics, and his favorite yardstick was the prison time that was served by his captured prey. For instance, the public would read that under Inspector Byrnes' leadership, detective work in the previous four years yielded a total of 2488 years in prison. These were eye-catching numbers, but they were essentially meaningless.

In the Thirties, police switched to clearance rates to show the effectiveness of their work. This "detective math" became the ingrained, fundamentally misleading way cops spoke not only to the outside world but also among themselves. "You can have 100 homicides in a year, solve zero, and still have a 100 percent clearance rate--by solving 100 homicides from the past five years," says Maple. "This is every detective squad in the world. And how is a case solved?

"Let's say you get raped on a date, and you give the detectives the name of the guy. The detective tells you, 'You want to pursue it? It's 10 days in court. Think about it and let me know.' You decide not to pursue it. The case is cleared and he doesn't have to make an arrest. They would count it as a solved case.

"Another example: You have a string of robberies by a pair of guys with a gun, a stickup team that does 10 jobs. You grab one of the guys. That first catch clears all 10 cases. What about his partner in the stickups? Additional arrests result in no additional clearances, so detectives never went for accomplices. You can solve something without taking both bad guys off the street."

Nothing here suggests that detectives are less competent or less devoted to their work than doctors, or lawyers, or plumbers, or journalists. "You have 10 percent at the top who are the stars," says Maple. "You have 40 percent who are solid performers, who enjoy the work. You have 40 percent who are mediocrities, passing time. The bottom 10 percent are your anarchists."

Why isn't the middle group performing? "Same reasons as in other professions," Maple says. "Peer pressure. Laziness. Fear of failure."

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Many police departments provide formal training, but, as with every trade, the tricks are learned on the job. For instance, a confession is not only powerful evidence in court but also delivers details that support witnesses or crime scene evidence. By obtaining a statement that includes particulars of the crime, the detectives can corroborate the eyewitnesses--or protect against the most common cause of wrongful convictions: eyewitness error.

Those statements are not hard to get. Studies show that upwards of 80 percent of suspects will waive their right to remain silent, and three quarters will offer something incriminating. The video camera works like catnip. "Everybody wants to be on camera," says the veteran Chicago detective. "This is their 15 minutes of fame. It's unbelievable how successful it is."

"Everybody talks," said Maple. "Cops talk when they get in trouble and they're questioned, and they're supposed to know better."

Nobody talked in the JonBenet Ramsey case, which is already being studied in police academies and used in detective training programs. When Boulder police arrived at the Ramsey home, they were responding to a supposed kidnapping. The house showed no signs of forced entry. Later, the family reported discovering the little girl in the basement. The crime scene was a hopeless muddle. But that wasn't what foiled the investigation. "You go to a scene like that, with no break-in, and anybody who reads the ransom note says there's something wrong here. Get these people into the police station, put them in different rooms, we'll get to the bottom of this," said the Chicago detective, who followed the case closely. "The police lost control; they weren't in charge. The Ramseys were in charge."

So the opportunity was lost for an early, unrehearsed statement of the evening's events from the parents of the murdered child. Boulder detectives rarely face homicides, and they were slow to call in help from the cops in Denver, who see many more. But there were nearly identical problems with the O.J. Simpson investigation, which was handled by veteran detectives in Los Angeles. Simpson was in Chicago the morning after the murders and flew back to Los Angeles. Incredibly, Simpson's first lawyer permitted the detectives to question Simpson alone. Then detectives cut him loose after speaking to him for only 35 minutes, during which time Simpson never quite explained where he had been for two critical hours on the night of the crime, nor how he had cut himself. One of the detectives later said that the session was not an interrogation but an "interview." Now, their work seems cursory, even negligent.

In less-celebrated cases, detectives tumble into the unscripted chaos of crime scenes, the frayed remnants of an unraveled moment. "At the scene everything is flux," says Detective X, recalling cases he has seen over the years in Chicago. Cops arrive, some to help, some to gawk. So do screaming relatives, the morbidly curious, even a witness or two.

At apparent suicides, according to Detective X, the first officers on the scene will often unload the gun, instantly contaminating the evidence. "I ask, 'What is it about the gun in the dead guy's hand that you felt was threatening? I mean, he was dead, wasn't he?'" says Detective X. At one murder scene, a woman was choked to death, then dumped into a bathtub. Where was the murder weapon? Detective X arrived to find another officer casually using it. "I saw a uniformed sergeant talking on the telephone," the officer said. As it turned out, she had been strangled with the cord.

At one triple homicide, Detective X recalls, "the house was full of coppers--a fucking party. I turn around and there's one guy standing in the blood from the body. I said, 'What the fuck are you doing?' 'Well, I just wanted to see him.' I said, 'You're standing in the blood.' 'Oh, sorry.' He starts to walk away. I said, 'There's footprints all the way out the door.' He says, 'Sorry.' I say, 'You're a murder suspect.' 'Well, I just wanted to see, Sergeant.'

"Any scene, by definition, is going to be contaminated just by the arrival of the first officer. There are many times when the scene is totally disturbed by firemen or paramedics. We'll get there and the body will have been moved. The guy's as dead as a doornail, but they've got all these monitor things in him. I say, 'What are you doing that for?' They say, 'You see those people across the street? If we don't put on a show, they're going to brick our ambulance as we drive away.'

"You'll get there, and people are always screaming, yelling, 'That's my cousin, let me see.' It's unbelievable. Unless you've been to one you have no way of knowing what it's like. There are fights going on. People try to push through the crowd saying, 'I want to cuddle him one last time,' or whatever. You tell them, I'm sorry, this is a crime scene, you can't come through,' then they want to fight with you."

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Hundreds of thousands of rape kits sit in dead storage across the country. These are swabs of semen and blood collected from women who have been sexually attacked. In most cities and counties, none of this material is tested until after a suspect has been caught. By doing DNA tests on all rape kits right after the crime, investigators would be able to link multiple attacks by the same person. And by running the results through a DNA database of convicted felons, they would probably be able to solve--and not just clear--many serious crimes.

Similarly, the power of another kind of database, the ballistic signatures of guns, has been hampered by the U.S. Congress. Congress has refused to permit a national collection program of identifying marks from all guns, which could be shared by law enforcement.

The computer became Maple's favorite weapon in rectifying the shortcomings of police work. The cold numbers worked like alchemy, turning "every case into a big case," he says. Every crime got mapped, not just the ones that made the news. The innovation is now a regular feature on The District, the CBS crime series based on Maple. "The dots on those maps are the same size," says Maple, "no matter who the victim is. If you're mugged, it's a big deal whether you're Leonardo DiCaprio or a cleaning lady on her way home."

That's fine sentiment, and Jack Maple is hardly the first cop to utter it, but up against at least a century of calcified myth, American police have a long way to go.

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An audit of the costs of complacency should begin with the killing more than a decade ago of Meir Kahane, a radical right-wing rabbi and once-notorious hatemonger who founded the Jewish Defense League.

From the instant Kahane was shot and his body crumpled to the carpet of a Midtown Manhattan hotel ballroom on the night of November 5, 1990, Kahane's murder seemed to solve itself. An old man tried to slow down a short, round-faced guy who was running from the room, but the guy shot the old man and dashed down a flight of stairs. He jumped into a taxicab, pointed the gun at the driver and told him to drive. Two blocks later, he jumped out, waving his gun. Across the street, a postal police officer heard shouting and saw the gun. The cop drew his own weapon. The short guy fired at the officer, hitting him in his bulletproof vest. The cop squeezed off one round, wounding the gunman in the neck.

El Sayyid Nosair collapsed onto the asphalt of Lexington Avenue, bleeding to the door of death but no further. A gun lay on the street, inches from his hand. In Nosair's pocket were bullets for that gun. And the bullets from the gun fit the hole in the dying rabbi, two blocks away.

Upon arriving at the scenes, the city police had the following inventory of facts: a dead rabbi, a roomful of witnesses, a bleeding Arab and a smoking gun.

The next morning, New York's chief of detectives, Joseph Borrelli, held a press conference. Given that Kahane had the most hawkish voice in Israel, the reporters asked if his killing had been the work of anti-Jewish or anti-Israeli plotters. Borrelli quickly stepped back from that ledge. New York had not been the scene of a political assassination in years. With the United Nations based in the city, the streets were crawling, year-round, with political figures, many of them controversial. A plot? A political assassination? No way, said the chief.

"I am strongly convinced he acted alone," Borrelli declared. "Why he did it, we may never know."

Kahane's corpse was packed up without an autopsy, in deference to the tenets of Orthodox Judaism that forbid defilement of the body, and put on the first flight to Israel. His grieving followers had torn scraps of curtains and carpets from the scene of the crime, anything that might have captured blood or viscera, to be buried with his body. Two days after the shooting, Kahane's coffin was carried through the streets of Jerusalem, and thousands marched to the cemetery. Mourners stabbed two Arabs in shops. At the cemetery, they hurled stones at reporters.

In New York on the day of the funeral, the detective investigating the case said goodnight to the guys in the squad room. He walked under a sign that read through these doors pass the world's finest detectives and took off on a two-week vacation. Why postpone the trip when the shooter was in custody?

A year later, El Sayyid Nosair was acquitted in state court of murdering Meir Kahane. He was convicted of shooting bystanders as he ran from the hotel but not of the actual assassination.

The Kahane murder case was a fat pitch down the middle, but the investigators whiffed. Some years later, Nosair would be found guilty at a federal trial of Kahane's murder. Moreover, he had not acted alone. The federal case proved he was a member of a gang of murderous zealots who would go on to bomb the World Trade Center in New York and two American embassies in Africa--actions that killed 230 people. Papers detailing the gang's plans and a roster of the players were seized from Nosair's home and his work locker hours after Kahane was killed, but detectives ignored them until years later, after Nosair's terrorist cohorts had finished their bloody work.

Most blown cases don't involve an international network of terrorists, but that doesn't mean the mistakes are cost free. A hit man for drug dealers nicknamed Freddie Krueger murdered seven people in New York in the first seven months of 1992. The killings, while only two or three miles apart, were spread over several precincts and fell under the jurisdictions of both homicide and narcotics detectives, none of whom realized that a spree killer was on the loose. Only a small team of investigators inside the Manhattan D.A.'s office pieced together the evidence that caught the killer.

Too many detectives are working the myth rather than the case, argues Maple. As a younger cop, he passed many off-duty hours on the rail of the famous Upper East Side watering hole, Elaine's. There he'd see hotshot Manhattan detectives telling tales about the latest headlines. "They'd be at the bar, bragging about the big case they had just picked up. I'd think, You're working four to 12, what are you doing, surveilling the bartender? They were dreaming about books and movies."

And dreaming about the legends that are piled on top of myth.

If Sipowicz put up these clearance numbers, he'd be lucky to make it to midnight reruns on cable.

"What is it about the gun in the dead guy's hand you felt was threatening? I mean, he was dead, wasn't he?"