He’s known as the “Father of Community Policing,” but for New Yorkers of a certain age, former Police Commissioner Lee Brown’s name is also synonymous with the Crown Heights riots that ripped the city apart 25 years ago this week.
Born in Oklahoma in 1937, the son of sharecroppers, Brown blazed an impressive trail through the ranks of various law enforcement agencies before he became the city’s top cop in 1990.
Brown, then 52, was the second African-American police commissioner in the city’s history, after Benjamin Ward, who held the title from 1984 to 1989.
The appointment of Brown, at the hand of the city’s first black mayor, David Dinkins, was meant to signal change was afoot between the NYPD and communities of color.
Brown promised the same kind of systemic overhaul in the NYPD that he’d achieved over a decade in the Houston Police Department.
In Houston, Brown perfected the model of “neighborhood policing,” which became “community policing” when he arrived in New York City.
Brown’s vision called for recruiting and training cops who had “the spirit of service, not the spirit of adventure,” he told the Daily News recently.
It also demanded that officers and cops forge deep connections to the neighborhoods they served.
As one of his first orders of business, Brown asked his team to identify which enclaves were potential flash points — and Crown Heights, Brooklyn, was chief among them.
“I had heard, over and over, that this was an area full of tension,” Brown said. “I was aware of that, and I had done my own research to find out what was going on between the police and the community, and between the communities themselves.”
A major sore point, he conceded, was the deferential attention lavished on the Jewish community by the NYPD — but mostly denied to the Caribbean and African-American families who shared the neighborhood.
“The police were providing an escort for the rebbe (Lubavitcher Grand Rebbe Menachem Schneerson), and nobody else got that,” Brown acknowledged.
“They had police cars assigned to the (Lubavitcher) religious headquarters, streets were blocked off during religious hours . . . there was an abnormal amount of time spent by police officers going to events in the Hasidic community, and many blacks were complaining,” Brown said.
Yet when he first stepped into his role as police commissioner, he didn’t necessarily see those things as wrong.
“I think the police were doing what they felt was right for the community and others did not necessarily agree with them,” he said.
“Some of the things were overdone — who do you give an escort to, and why? That’s a question a police department has to ask itself. But some of the things they were doing were perfectly OK in any community,” Brown said.
When he first got word on Aug. 19, 1991 — at his home in Manhattan — that violence was rippling through Crown Heights, Brown hastily convened all the community leaders.
Despite major criticism in the wake of the unrest — especially from Gov. Mario Cuomo’s office, which issued a scathing report on the NYPD’s response to the Crown Heights riots — Brown insists his officers handled it well.
“I did not agree with (the state’s) conclusions,” he said. “In fact, if you read most media reports from the time they were praising our handling of the riots. Newsday reported that our strategy followed textbook police response to such an event.”
Brown also strongly denies the accusation — still repeated today by some Crown Heights residents — that cops were ordered to stand down and let the protesters vent their anger.
“We responded appropriately to the situation. We met with leaders all night that first night; our goal was to dispel rumors. We saturated the area with police officers and we contained the problem — we kept the riot and protesting from spreading to other parts of the city,” Brown said.
He also notes that after the first night of violence there were no other deaths.
“We spent a lot of time with all segments of the community, a lot of my time, the mayor’s time, his deputies and the police — we all spent a lot time trying to keep things quiet, and that’s really what policing is about.”
As for his cherished dream of transforming the NYPD into a model of community policing, it fell victim to a more personal problem — his wife’s fatal cancer.
Brown left the NYPD in 1992, when his wife, Yvonne, diagnosed with the illness, wanted to go back to Houston.
Although many interpreted his departure as a sign of a rift between him and Mayor Dinkins — a rift that developed in part because of the political fallout from Crown Heights — Brown said that’s false.
“I have three priorities in life: God, my wife and my job,” he said. “The job lost that one.”
His leaving paved the way for the rise of First Deputy Commissioner Raymond Kelly, who Dinkins appointed as Brown’s successor, and within two years the era of “broken windows” policing was ushered in with the election of Rudy Giuliani.
Brown still believes he could have turned the NYPD into a groundbreaking example of community policing — a goal that’s gained new urgency today — if things had gone differently.
“Crown Heights did get in the way a little bit,” he said. “And then I just ran out of time.”
