(photo: Rose Mattrey)

If you searched the entire history of the Buffalo Police Department you would be hard pressed to find a better crime fighter than Detective Eddie Cotter – even if you went back to the BPD’s horse-drawn patrol-wagon days of 1871. For years, he and his longtime partner Detective Timothy McDonald patrolled the streets of Buffalo, sharing their natural instinct for finding guns, drugs, robbers, cheats and burglars.

A 20-year veteran, Cotter’s name can be found in literally hundreds of Buffalo News stories over the years. The stories are usually short, but the headlines are almost always dramatic: “Officer Disarms Gunman After Walden Ave. Chase”; “Rifle Is Taken From Man After Threat To Kill Police”; “Detective Forces Suspect to Drop Loaded Weapon”; “2 Face Robbery and Kidnapping Charges”; “Police Seize 4 Men, Gun, Drugs at Reed St. Home”; “Detectives Spring Trap on Two Burglars”; “Report of Shots End in Drug Arrest”; “Police Seize 3 Suspects, 40 Bags of Crack Cocaine; Police Seize Shotgun,” and so on.

With newly elected mayor Byron Brown still deciding whom to appoint as police commissioner, we thought it might be a good time to hear the observations of someone who is actually in the trenches working law enforcement. For most of the Masiello administration there seemed to be two different police departments: those who worked at law enforcement and those who worked at politics. Our last police commissioner, Rocco Diina, was a politician whose political maneuvering is as well documented in Buffalo News articles as is Cotter’s crime fighting. Unfortunately, a police commissioner with a knack for fundraising and making friends with high-ranking Democrats didn’t make Buffalo residents any safer or suburban visitors more plentiful.

If we want the police to do the best job possible, we need to make sure the people telling them what to do and allocating increasingly scarce resources understand the job of policing. How do we most effectively distribute officers? What equipment is most needed? What shift assignments make the most sense?

Listening to Detective Cotter, as well as other Buffalo police officers, it appears policing in Buffalo is part scary movie and part side-splitting episode of the Keystone Kops. And for a long time, according to Cotter, this movie has no director.

“The police department has been a truck without a driver for a long time,” Cotter says. “This past administration has been like an absentee landlord as far as the police department goes.”

Too often political expediency trumps good management. Last year, for example, in response to the city’s fiscal meltdown, recently departed Police Commissioner Rocco J. Diina made a big show of returning $8 million from the police budget to the city’s general fund. This was a feel-good maneuver for Diina – he put himself forth in the public eye as a sharp manager, the man who had trimmed the BPD’s manpower by 25 percent, a ruthless pursuer of efficiency in his department and a man who could produce when the city needed to trim the fat. That $8 million giveback was a public relations victory for Diina.

Put your money where your mouth is

But that victory doesn’t look so shiny from the perspective of Cotter and his fellow officers on the street, who are sorely lacking in the basic equipment the job requires. An example: at B District headquarters, where Cotter works, five detectives share one computer.

“You may have a person coming in to make a statement that will help you to solve a case – something that’s not always easy to do – and when you finally get that person in your office you may have to say, ‘Do you mind just sitting here for 10 or 15 minutes? I have to wait for my turn on the computer.’

“When I have to print documents, they print downstairs from my office.”

The department’s Homicide division doesn’t have enough phones for all of its detectives.

The Homicide division consists of 16 detectives, administered by four detective sergeants, one lieutenant, two captains and a chief, supported by one report technician. The detective sergeants are supposed to do casework alongside the 16 detectives, though not all of them do. So there are between 16 and 20 detectives who actually respond to calls.

These detectives covet Nextel cell phones, which have the capacity to function like walkie talkies. This is better than communicating via police scanner, which uses open channels that are monitored by the media. The last people detectives want to deal with at a fresh crime scene are reporters who listen to police channels and follow officers wherever they are dispatched.

Homicide has five Nextel phones, which the detectives have to share. If you’re unlucky enough to work the night shift and get a call, the phones probably don’t have an adequate charge left in them; if you work they day shift at least they’ve charged overnight.

The Narcotics Squad shares phones too.

Yet the top administration in the department – those who work in the commissioner’s office, the deputy commissioners, the chiefs – have Nextel phones. They were purchased with a grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, through the Buffalo Police Foundation, which is meant to buy equipment that Buffalo law enforcement officials need to do their jobs better.

“We have five detectives and one computer in my office,” Cotter says. “We’re sharing phones. We can’t get overtime and we’re down to one-officer patrol cars. And they gave back $8 million.

“I don’t know if he was under the gun to return that money or if he was trying to make himself look good, but he returned that money to the general fund at the expense of quality of life, which is going to hell. Homicides are up, robberies are up.”

There were 39 homicides in Buffalo in 2000; there were 56 in 2005. According to Cotter, fewer of those homicides are being solved, as well.

Last February a shipment of new computers was delivered to the BPD. They sat idle until July because the department’s administration couldn’t figure out who to get to install them – they didn’t want to pay anyone in the department overtime to do it and they didn’t want to bid out the installation job either. So for six months the new machines sat in their boxes. In the meantime detectives like Cotter and his old partner McDonald continued to handle cases as best they could, sharing computers, running downstairs to pick up printouts of reports.

When the new computers were finally installed, the bulk of them went to the BPD’s top administrators. Homicide, by contrast, received two – one for the report technician and one for the 16 detectives to share.

Outdated and scarce equipment can make Cotter’s job absurdly difficult.

“Let’s say you call to tell me your place got held up and you say, ‘I’ve got a video of this,’” Cotter explains. “You download it on a CD and give it to me. I’ve got nowhere to play it. It just sits on my desk. I have to go to Target on Delaware Avenue, or go to Channel 7 or Channel 4, in order to watch it. My computer can’t play it.”

Nor is the lack of quality crimefighting equipment always the result of slashed budgets and poor priorities on the part of management. Sometimes the general malaise that has infected the department rears its head in fascinating ways.

For example, there’s a widely told story about a lieutenant, a long-time veteran of the force, who became bitter over the dissolution of his unit, the Burglary Task Force. In his position with that unit, he kept the keys to some of the BPD’s best high-tech toys – cameras, eavesdropping equipment, etc. When the unit was dissolved and he was transferred, the lieutenant, in his bitterness, made all that equipment disappear.

It is rumored that he keeps a cache of equipment – including either two or four cars, depending on who you believe – under the boards of Memorial Auditorium.

Plenty of Buffalo police officers know this story and believe it’s true – they certainly know the equipment has gone missing – but no one says anything. If Cotter’s old partner McDonald had his way, Internal Affairs would offer the lieutenant a choice between arrest and prosecution or handing over the stolen equipment and resigning.

“Supposedly there’s a nice station wagon down there,” says McDonald. “Give me the station wagon. My car’s got 109,000 miles on it.”

The administrators in the BPD’s top echelon all have late-model take-home cars; veteran officers like Cotter and McDonald don’t enjoy such perqs.

The tools of the trade

Another problem is training.

“We don’t have any,” Cotter says. “They don’t spend money on training.”

BPD officers have experience and they face a wide variety of crimes and situations – a far greater variety than their counterparts in the suburbs, for example. But they receive little training – and other law enforcement agencies know that. They know too that the BPD is a mess. Experience and adversity win BPD officers some respect, but the lack of training and discipline have ruined the professional reputation of the department. So the FBI and the DEA, for example, are reluctant to talk to the BPD about their operations inside the city anymore because they can’t trust the BPD not to screw things up.

It doesn’t help the department’s reputation that when the FBI shared information with Diina about an investigation into the BPD’s Narcotics squad, Diina proved incapable of keeping a secret, imperiling the FBI investigation.

Cotter and McDonald would love to receive training in the latest interrogation techniques, evidence collection and other useful disciplines. But there is no funding for it, and no provision for officer who possess specialized skills to pass their knowledge on to their colleagues.

Instead, young cops learn on the job, just as Cotter and McDonald did. Cotter has been a police officer for 20 years, 16 as a detective; McDonald is also a 20-year veteran of the BPD, and served with the housing police for four years as well.

Both Cotter and McDonald say that it takes several years for a new officer to get good at his job, and that even after 20 years both continue to learn more about human behavior that helps them on the job.

Cotter says that nowadays he tends to approach volatile situations with conversation and a smile, gambits that help him to get close to a suspect without provoking a reaction, until he is close enough to apprehend the person.

“When I was a young policeman I jumped out of the car yelling, ‘Get over here!’ Now it’s ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ – moving closer all the time.”

When they were partnered in B District, Cotter and McDonald were legendary in the community for their energy and zeal. Combining good instincts and years of experience, the team developed a reputation for making friends in the community – “The more people you know in the neighborhood, the better you do your job,” says Cotter. They demonstrated a gift for defusing tense situations, keeping their district’s streets safe and taking an astounding number of guns off the street – 60 in one year alone.

Like his fellow officers, Cotter has handled his share of gun-related calls.

“I was like a magnet,” he says, smiling.

With experience, Cotter says, you learn to see more than most people do – you read a person and a situation the way someone else might read a book, looking for information and anticipating what happens next.

In fact, Cotter explains, a lot of crime prevention is anticipatory. Four guys drinking on a stoop may not bother anyone at the beginning of the evening, but as the night wears on they may turn belligerent and provoke a confrontation. Why wait for the confrontation? Why not defuse the issue as soon as you see the guys drinking? In their days patrolling B District, Cotter and McDonald were big advocates of preventive medicine.

Once McDonald saw a young man sitting outside a hotel downtown; it was a busy night on Chippewa. McDonald drove by several times before stopping to ask him why he was sitting there. “If he had said, ‘I’m waiting for my sister, I’m going to walk her home,’ I would have said ‘Okay, good night,’ and that would have been it.”

Instead, the young man was evasive, which triggered McDonald’s concern.

“Turns out the kid had a loaded handgun on him. What was he going to do? Rob someone? Shoot someone? Assassinate someone? Yeah, probably. So I took him in, and I think I prevented either a street robbery or a homicide.”

A police department needs to be compassionate but also aggressive, according to Cotter and McDonald. You need to do some badgering to separate the bad guys from the good citizens.

But nowadays, in the era of single-officer patrol cars, police are told not to do anything unless they receive a citizen complaint; the department is too shorthanded to go after potential problems. In addition, the shift to single-officer patrol cars has left many cops unwilling to look for problems in the making.

“If you pull over and tell those four guys on the stoop to stop drinking, now there’s a decision to be made – beyond the decision you’ve already made to pull over. You tell them to stop drinking; so what if they say no?

“You tell them to stop drinking or you’ll throw them in jail; what if they say, ‘Who’s going to throw us in jail? You?’

“Now it’s four on one. Do you call backup or do you handle it yourself? If you call backup, you’d better be able to make some arrests – otherwise the guys who come to back you up are going to be angry and ask why you called them.

“So are you better off just driving straight past? With two officers in a car, you’re likely to be more aggressive, more proactive.”

But single-officer patrol cars are the rule now in Buffalo, a measure instituted by Diina in order to cut the size of the force.

“The Friday before we went to single-officer cars, in B District we had 10 vehicles and 20 officers,” Cotter says. “We worked the schedules, fixed it all up – the very next Friday we had 10 cars, 10 officers. There is bound to be a difference in the level of enforcement. It’s not the car that fights crime.”

A needs-based assessment of Buffalo’s neighborhoods might suggest that two-officer cars would be justified in some areas and unnecessary in others. But, as allocation of computers and phones indicates, needs-based assessment has not been a strength of the BPD’s top administrators. In its place, you get a political judgment: If you give a high-crime neighborhood two-officer cars, then other neighborhood leaders will complain that they aren’t getting the same treatment. It’s like Homeland Security giving North Dakota the same funding for antiterrorism programs as New York State. Too often politics trumps logic in the distribution of scarce resources.

Depletion of the

Rocco J. Diina, the recently departed police commissioner, posing for a Buffalo News insert celebrating his tenure. He had traffic stopped on the Thruway for the photo and paid for the insert with funds earmarked for police equipment.

rank and file

Buffalo’s decline in population and economic power have precipitated sometimes painful contractions in essential public services across the board. The BPD shrank under Diina’s watch, from about 1000 officers to about 750. The plan is to continue to let the force shrink to 675 officers.

So the BPD will continue to feel shorthanded, unless the new administration finds better ways to allocate its human resources and equipment.

However, the deliberate shorthanding of the department might soon be aggravated by a mass of retirements. Cotter guesses that as many as 200 officers will be eligible to retire and start collecting their pensions in the next year or so. He’s one of them.

Most of those officers will retire, because the job is harder and the department is not what it once was.

Unfortunately, there is no crop of new recruits waiting to take the place of these soon-to-retire officers. Even if there were, the BPD faces a future in which its resources are stretched and its personnel are inexperienced – and, of course, undertrained.

Cotter’s solution to this is one that has been employed by the New York State Troopers and the New York City Fire Department since the attacks of September 11. He suggests the Buffalo police officers who are eligible for retirement should be allowed to do so, and to collect their full pensions.

But the BPD would then hire those officers back, possibly as outside contractors, at full salary but without the substantial benefits that are such a burden on the city’s budget.

The rehired officers do well: They collect their pensions and a salary simultaneously.

City government does well: It keeps seasoned officers, whose experience helps to make up for the decrease in officers on the streets generally. The city saves money because it doesn’t have to pay into the pension fund for those retired officers it hires back on to the force. The pensions the rehired officers collect were going to have to be to be paid anyway.

Cotter figures that if all 200 officers who are likely to retire in the near future were to come back under these terms – and he says he would take that deal – then the city could save $5 million per year.

“You could make it a three- or five-year deal for these guys,” Cotter says. “Meanwhile you bring in new recruits and let them get some experience.”

Cotter’s idea is a short-term solution to an immediate problem. The long-term issue, however, remains administering the resources BPD has left. Not only are there fewer officers on the streets, but there are fewer shifts, meaning there are times when the only cops on the street are patrolmen. Detectives are on call only.

District detectives work from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Narcotics, Homicide and Major Crimes detectives work in two shifts, from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m.

That means that if you are hit on the head on Chippewa Street at 2:15 a.m., no detectives will respond to the call. Instead you’ll get a patrol car. The dispatched officers will take some quick statements, see that you get to the hospital and file a report, which will sit on a detective’s desk until he arrives at work in the morning. The detective will read the report and realize that all his leads are cold. All the witnesses are gone. Even if he wanted to talk to the bouncers at the tavern where the crime occurred, he couldn’t – he only works until 5 p.m., before the bars open, and there’s no way in today’s BPD that he’d be allowed to work overtime and visit the bar when it opens in the evening.

The only person the detective can talk to, in fact, is the victim, who is still in the hospital. Unless you know who hit you on the head, the detective is stumped.

Cotter’s solution is to eliminate some of the specialty squads, in particular Major Crimes, and distribute those detectives among the districts. So instead of five detectives in each district there might be seven. That allows the possibility of having detectives on duty 20 out of 24 hours in a day instead of only 10.

“In the days when Buffalo was going strong, and you had enough manpower to cover the shifts, it was okay to have specialty units,” he says. “We don’t have that luxury now. The district detectives have to take on more responsibility.”

Cotter believes the best detectives are generalists, and that the BPD should allow each district to be run like a small town police department.

“In the suburbs, they don’t have specialty squads. Whoever is working the night of a crime, that’s your case. I think Buffalo’s districts should be run almost the same way.”

Each district can then request support according to its needs; detectives become more informed about and responsive to the communities in which they work; they get to know people. Cotter thinks Homicide, Narcotics and the Sexual Offence Squad are the only specialty units that should remain. All those require special attention and skills. The others, he says, are a waste of resources.

Who’ll be the new boss?

As of our deadline, Mayor-elect Byron Brown had yet to name Rocco J. Diina’s replacement. He instead was wrangling with Common Council about the rules for nominating chiefs; the current rules require that the chiefs have previously attained the rank of lieutenant, but Brown wants to make chiefs out of some politically well connected detective sergeants. So, in the tertiary ranks of the BPD’s new administration, political considerations obtain. Surely that will be the case when Brown announces his new commissioner and deputy commissioners as well.

But maybe it’s not too much to hope that Brown will choose a candidate who knows something about law enforcement as it is practiced on Buffalo’s streets.

The BPD needs reform, Cotter says, but not just in its configuration and its priorities. It needs leadership that will inspire its officers to take a proactive, community-oriented approach to fighting crime.

Cotter, with 20 years on the force under his belt, can look back on a number of commissioners, their qualifications and their records. Ralph Degenhart was old-school; the union didn’t have so much power when Degenhart ran the department and his disciplinarian methods kept a tight rein on his officers.

By the time Richard Donovan came along, the union had started to win big victories in Albany and had more clout. Donovan, according to Cotter, was an adept negotiator, however, and frequently sat down with union officials to work out grievances.

Gil Kerlikowske was an educator – and an outsider, whose appointment was bundled with a federal grant to run the COPS program. Cotter says of Kerlikowske, “He brought us from the 1960s to at least the 1990s – we’re still 10 years behind. We never had computers before he came in.”

Diina’s qualifications for his job as commissioner did not include the kind of service Cotter and McDonald have done for the community. He did not present a strong record in law enforcement, like Degenhart. Unlike Donovan, he has tried to run roughshod over the union, sowing distrust as a result. Unlike Kerlikowske, he did not bring with him new ideas and outside funding. Rather, he was a political operator, adept at public relations and spin, with a good record as a fundraiser and lots of high-level contacts, most notably to Mayor Anthony Masiello and Mario Cuomo.

Nothing illustrates the priorities and ethics of a political appointee like Diina better than an insert that Diina had placed in the Buffalo News last month to tout what a wonderful job he’d done as commissioner. The eight-page, full-color, glossy piece of propaganda probably cost in the neighborhood of $33,000 to produce and insert in our daily newspaper. It was paid for by the Buffalo Police Foundation – the same Buffalo Police Foundation that is intended to purchase equipment to enhance the department’s policing ability.

That $33,000 would have paid for eight new Nextel phones and a year of service. Instead it paid to promote the image of an outgoing police commissioner who is looking for a new political appointment. That’s $33,000 the new commissioner will not have to spend on equipment.

Check out the picture in the opening spread of this article. That’s Diina leaning against a patrol car. To get this picture, Diina had the Thruway blocked off and paid the photographer three hours overtime.

“I can’t get overtime to help when cars are getting broken into on a street routinely,” Cotter says. “I know the timeframe when it’s happening but I can’t get overtime to sit there and wait for the guy – I tell people, after their car has been broken into four times, leave your car open. That’s my advice, because I can’t get overtime to catch this guy, even though it would be easy.

“And yet there’s overtime for the guy who took that photograph.”