High Pressure, Low Morale

Around 6:30 each morning, Sgt. Michael J. LoPuzzo walks through the tall wooden doors of the 40th Precinct station house. The cases that land on his metal desk — dead bodies with no known cause, strip club brawls, shooting victims hobbling into the hospital themselves — bring resistance at every turn, reminding him of an earlier era in the city’s crime-fighting campaign.

“I haven’t got one single phone call that’s putting me in the right direction here,” said Sergeant LoPuzzo, the head of the precinct’s detective squad, one day this summer as he worked on an answer to an email inquiry from a murder victim’s aunt about why the killer had not been caught. “And people just don’t understand that.”

Often it is detectives who most feel the effects of people turning on the police. Witnesses shout them away from their doors just so neighbors know they refuse to talk. Of the 184 people who were shot and wounded in the Bronx through early September, more than a third — 66 victims — refused to cooperate. Over the same period in the 40th Precinct, squad detectives closed three of 17 nonfatal shootings, and 72 of 343 robbery cases.

Part of the resistance stems from heavy-handed preventive policing tactics, like stop-and-frisk, that were a hallmark of the take-back-the-streets style under former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly. Near the height of the stop-and-frisk strategy, in 2012, the 40th Precinct had the third-most stops in the city, the second-most stops in which officers used force and the most frisks. Of 18,276 stops that year, 15,521 were of people who had done nothing criminal.

The precinct was also one of the high-crime areas that the department flooded with its newest officers. At roll calls, they were pressured to generate numbers: write tickets and make arrests. They had no choice but to give a summons to a young man playing in a park after dark, even if the officers had done the same growing up in the same neighborhood.

“I need to bring something in today to justify my existence,” Officer Argenis Rosado, who joined the precinct in 2010, said in an interview at the station house. “So now you’re in a small area, and day after day you’re hammering the same community. Of course that community’s eventually going to turn on you.”

The pressure warped the way officers and residents saw each other. Rookies had to ignore why someone might be drinking outside or sitting on a stoop.