Generations of Brooklyn commanders, particularly in the precincts serving Borough Park and Crown Heights, have made or broken their careers by doing the right favors.

One night in December 1978, hundreds of Hasidic protesters swarmed into the 66th Precinct station house in Borough Park, destroyed a Teletype machine, flung thousands of files onto the floor and got into a pitched battle with police reinforcements summoned by the four officers who were overwhelmed by the mob.

In the end, 60 police officers were injured. No one was arrested.

A T-shirt was created by patrol officers with a new nickname for the precinct: Fort Surrender.

In the same neighborhood two decades later, on an evening in June 1997, thousands of Hasidim chased off deputy sheriffs who had gotten into a scuffle with a scofflaw whose car they were trying to tow. However, the two-star police chief in charge of Brooklyn South, George Brown, refused to immediately release the young man from custody, despite the demands of community leaders and politicians.

Whether principled or stubborn, this was not the tactic of a clever careerist: Chief Brown was transferred two weeks later to Police Headquarters to a job doing nothing. And for good measure, in keeping with the Fort Surrender tradition, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s administration suspended the towing program in Borough Park for months, resuming it only when the suspension was publicly reported. First, though, the mayor announced that the sheriffs would be sent out for “sensitivity training,” a precaution apparently unnecessary elsewhere in the city.