If D’Addario had stayed tight with the captain, the threat wouldn’t be so severe. Lately, however, a conflict that had been percolating for months has suddenly come to full boil. Simply put, the captain doesn’t want D’Addario as one of his shift lieutenants; to D’Addario, the decision to bypass him on the Monroe Street probe said as much. And now, with his solve rate so low, the captain has leverage with which he can press the point-unless D’Addario can, like a cat with a canary locked in its jaw, go to the colonel with a fresh victory in one of the major cases, or at least a hint that the solve rate is turning around. It matters not at all that D’Addario has done the job for eight years; the consciousness of the command staff rarely strays beyond the latest red ball and as a result, the departmental hierarchy often expresses itself in that timeless query of practical politics: What have you done for me lately?
If the rate is good, if the red balls fall, it doesn’t matter how D’Addario runs his shift. You say your detectives and sergeants are told to follow their own judgment on cases? Obviously, a fine example of a leader emphasizing confidence and responsibility. You say you leave it to the sergeants to train and discipline their men? Obviously, a man who knows the value of delegated responsibility. You say your overtime is running 90 percent over budget? That’s fine, you’ve got to break some eggs for that omelette. Court time, too? Well, that just proves that more of these murders are going to trial. But let the rate slip and the lieutenant’s image is suddenly transformed into that of a man incapable of directing and disciplining his men, a commander who leaves too much in the hands of his subordinates, a manager who can’t control his budget.
On the midnight shift just before the colonel’s brief oratory, five or six detectives were adrift in the admin office, floating on a sea of paperwork from the fresh spate of open murders. Eddie Brown, James, Fahlteich, Kincaid, Nolan-a fair cross section, a gathering of veterans who had all seen both good times and bad in the homicide unit. Inevitably, the talk turned to whether this year would really turn out any worse. Some argued that it always evened out, that for every stretch of stone whodunits there was a supply of dunkers waiting to take up the slack. Others pointed out that the rate would be higher if the shift had bothered to save a few December clearances to pump up the current year’s stats. But for all of their talk, none of the detectives could remember a rate as low as 36 percent.
“And I’ll tell you something,” said Fahlteich, “I have a feeling it’s only going to get worse.”
“Oh, it’s going to get a helluva lot worse,” Nolan agreed. “We’ve been coasting around here for a long time and now it’s catching up to us.”
Suddenly no one in the room was typing or collating anymore as voices competed with one another in a recitation of longstanding grievances. They complained about the equipment, about cars without radios and about a major urban department that still doesn’t provide a polygraph examiner suitable for criminal investigations, requiring detectives to use the state police facilities. They complained about the cutbacks in overtime, about the department’s reluctance to pay for pretrial preparation so that good cases wouldn’t come unglued in the months between arrest and trial. They complained about the lack of money to pay informants and, consequently, the lack of informants. They complained about the inability of the trace and ballistics labs to keep up with the violence, about how the state’s attorney’s office no longer charged anyone with perjury when they lied to a grand jury, about how too many prosecutors allowed witnesses to back up on their grand jury testimony. They complained about the growing number of drug-related murders, about how the days of the domestic dunker and 90-plus clearance rates were long gone. They complained that the phone didn’t ring the way it used to after a murder, that fewer people were willing to drop a dime and risk becoming a witness to an act of violence.
As a bitch-and-moan session, it was entirely satisfying. After a good forty minutes, the group was still thumping on dead horseflesh: “Look at Washington,” said Brown. “That ain’t but thirty miles away from us.”
For a police detective, a detail with the District of Columbia’s homicide unit had suddenly become synonymous with being assigned to hell itself. Washington was well on the way to becoming the U.S. murder capital in 1988; only two years earlier, the capital and Baltimore had posted similar rates and fought for whatever distinction comes with being the nation’s tenth deadliest city. Now, in the wake of a cocaine epidemic and a series of Jamaican drug wars in the capital’s Northeast and Southeast quadrants, the District’s police department was contending with an incidence of homicide double that of Baltimore. As a result, Washington’s homicide squad-once one of the best-trained investigative units in the nation-was now posting a clearance rate in the low 40s. Awash in a deluge of violence, there was no time for follow-up investigation, no time for pretrial preparation, no time for anything but picking up bodies. From what the Baltimore detectives gathered in passing encounters, morale in the D.C. unit was nonexistent.
“The same thing’s going to happen here and nobody’s doing a damn thing about it,” said Brown. “Wait until we start seeing some of that crack up here. We already got the Jamaican problem up in the Northwest, but does anyone give a damn about that? Hell, no. This town’s gonna break wide open and this department isn’t even gonna know what hit it.”
Fahlteich pointed out that in some ways the homicide unit was its own worst enemy: “Every year we give them a clearance rate above the average, so every year they figure we can make do with what we have.”
“That’s it exactly,” said Nolan.
“So,” Fahlteich continued, “when we come back and ask for more detectives, or better cars or radios or training or whatever, the bosses can look at the rate and say, ‘Shit on that, they don’t need anything more than they got last year.’”
“We’ve done with so little for so long that now it’s coming back to haunt us,” Nolan said. “I’ll tell you, if we get two more nights like this last one, we’ll never climb out of the hole.”
“We might not climb out anyway,” said Fahlteich. “We’ll be lucky to get above sixty percent from where we are now.”
“Hey, if we don’t,” said Ed Brown, “it won’t just stop with the lieutenant. They’ll go and have themselves a housecleaning, and a lot of people up here are gonna be out the damn door.”
“No shit,” agreed Fahlteich.
Then Nolan brought the room to silence. “I think this just might be the year,” he said with the barest of smiles, “when the wheels fall off the cart.”
You are a citizen of a free nation, having lived your adult life in a land of guaranteed civil liberties, and you commit a crime of violence, whereupon you are jacked up, hauled down to a police station and deposited in a claustrophobic anteroom with three chairs, a table and no windows. There you sit for a half hour or so until a police detective-a man you have never met before, a man who can in no way be mistaken for a friend-enters the room with a thin stack of lined notepaper and a ballpoint pen.
The detective offers a cigarette, not your brand, and begins an uninterrupted monologue that wanders back and forth for a half hour more, eventually coming to rest in a familiar place: “You have the absolute right to remain silent.”