“Our biggest problem was drinking,” said Keller, remembering an especially raucous fight call with cops throwing suspects into the back of a police car only to have their friends let them out the other side. “If we were going to have any trouble it was going to be with kids in the bars Uptown.”
It was also a time when a young cop had the time to walk the beat and stop to chat with the hotel clerks, bartenders and street denizens who kept him informed of what was happening. As late as the mid-1980s, Keller said, the department averaged about 11,000 calls for service each year. Today, the KPD answers an average of 20,000 calls annually, even as the city’s population has declined and the department has maintained manpower at around 79 officers.
What changed, Keller said, was crack cocaine and the violence which it brought. First there were the little vials of white rock turning up in undercover drug buys. Before long, there were Jamaican drug gangs moving up from downstate to establish drug turf.
“At first it was just, ‘What the hell is this stuff,’” said Keller of the new drug scourge. “Then we started seeing people shooting each other over it and we knew we had a problem.”
In the thick of the crack war
What sociologists and law enforcement professionals have come to call “the crack epidemic” began in the mid-1980s and raged in cities big and small until reaching a peak and leveling off a decade later. By 1987 Keller was a lieutenant. When then-chief Jim Riggins reorganized the department, he placed Keller in charge of Special Operations — a catch-all that covered everything from SWAT teams and drug-busting plainclothes operations to outreach to the city’s black community, which was feeling the brunt of the crack-fueled crime wave and the police crackdown.
While drugs and attendant violence and blight remain issues in Midtown, Keller said, the height of the crack era brought levels of disorder which had not been seen before or since. From a rooftop observation post near Henry Street, you could watch dealers converge on a car from multiple corners competing to sell their wares to a potential customer. Police battering rams crashed through doors on a regular basis, part of a relentless offensive of search-warrant executions at suspected crack dens. (The department has since moved away from wholesale door-crashing warrant raids both because of their inherent danger and the fact that in an era of wireless communications, dealers are less likely to sell out of their homes).
At the time, the Broadway East houses on the Rondout equaled or exceeded Midtown as a center of the drug trade, forcing the department to fight what Keller called a “two-front war.”
