Sicilian Culture: News: A Champion of the Police Zealous About His Beat

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A Champion of the Police Zealous About His Beat
By Glenn Collins, The New York Times
August 24, 2001 - - R. THOMAS REPPETTO certainly hadn't journeyed to Lieutenant Petrosino Square in Lower Manhattan for the inspirational view. As he surveyed the forlorn three-hundreth-of-an- acre triangle of asphalt and cement at the junction of Lafayette and Kenmare Streets, he seemed to clench his Dick Tracy jaw in frustration that the Petrosino name could not adorn some greater, well, civic grandeur.
"He was an honest, courageous cop, sent on an ill-conceived mission," he was saying of Giuseppe (Joseph) Petrosino, the only New York Police Department officer to be killed in the line of duty on foreign soil. That mission — a supposedly secret investigation of the Black Hand in Sicily — ended on March 12, 1909, near a statue of Garibaldi in downtown Palermo. There, Dr. Reppetto said, Petrosino was gunned down by two hitmen.
"It's good to see a park named after him, but we really don't remember these heroes anymore," he said regretfully.
This cannot be said of Dr. Reppetto — he insists on being called Tom — who is the co- author, with James Lardner, of "NYPD: A City and Its Police" (Henry Holt & Company, 2000). This happens to be the history that inspired the police movie series now at the Film Forum in Manhattan. A former Chicago police commander, Dr. Reppetto is the founding, and current, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization supported by a consortium of business leaders.
"He is the organization for all practical purposes," said former Police Commissioner William Bratton, "its face and heart and soul."
The commission has a staff of four and a yearly budget of $350,000 for its programs, including as many as a dozen yearly breakfast forums that bring together law enforcement heavy hitters for debate and schmooze. "We might be beating up on each other in turf wars," Mr. Bratton said, "but Tom provides a place where everyone can come together."
Dr. Reppetto is that rarity, a former crime stopper who rose to become commander, and improbably earned a doctorate at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Although other former flatfoots have walked a beat and earned Harvard degrees — former Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, for one — Dr. Reppetto is unusual in that "he puts things in historical context," Mr. Bratton said.
An irrepressible pan-media talking head, Dr. Reppetto, 69, has been described as a Brahmin of police culture. The phrase makes him laugh. "Look, I'm from the stockyards," he said, referring to the Chicago neighborhood of his birth. When he was 6 his mother, June, a civilian employee of the Chicago Police Department, divorced his father, George, a sometime saloonkeeper and, well, inveterate perp. "He was a good guy in his way, but I saw police work at first hand from the time I was very little," he said of his dad-with-a-rap-sheet. Father and son were able to bond, though, "since visiting day was Sunday."
Young Thomas joined the Chicago Police Department in 1952. That obligatory pop-psychology question (about the straight-arrow son rebelling against the shady father) draws a smile. "That would make a good plot for Hollywood," he said, adding, "I really think I became a policeman because I liked to be out in the midst of the pace, the life, of a big city at night."
He left Chicago in 1970 to do research at Harvard. After a professorship leading to a vice presidency at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, he was tapped to head the new crime commission in 1979. He lives in Westchester with his second wife, Christa Carnegie, a lawyer, and has a grown daughter.
FOR a former detective who headed the Chicago burglary squad, his conversational style can tend to the academic. (There is the phrase "Hegelian army" in describing a police force that questions itself "in seeking a higher synthesis," as he put it.)
On a recent afternoon he was perfectly attired in a summer- weight tan suit from Saks, accessorized with — befitting a former gumshoe — black brogans. Friends say that in his younger days, he bore quite the resemblance to Cary Grant, but these days with his straight, iron-gray hair, he's more of a 6-foot-2 John McMartin.
Dr. Reppetto hews to the belief that city police managers like Jack Maple, Mr. Bratton and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani lowered crime rates by strategically focusing on quality-of-life crimes and instituting computerized monitoring and accountability tools. A challenge for the next police commissioner "is to maintain the Compstat program and quality-of- life enforcement, but to blend them with more community-directed initiatives," he said, explaining that, for example, outstanding beat officers could be rewarded with pay and other incentives equaling the status of detectives.
But if the city's current crime-freeness is a cause for celebration (there are about 600 murders a year now in comparison to 2,245 in 1990), "there is still a long way to go," he said. Some politicians dismiss "après Rudy, the deluge" pessimism about city crime under a new mayor, arguing that changes in police management have reached a momentum that cannot be stopped.
Dr. Reppetto isn't so sure. "People take for granted that crime is going down, but nothing should be taken for granted in law enforcement," he said. "In policing, things go from bad to good — and from good to bad — very rapidly."
But that's surely something that Lieutenant Petrosino could have said in 1909.

Required Reading for Italian-Americans...

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