Serving at the pleasure of the mayor: An exploration of political involvement in New York Police Commissioner departures 1901--2001

In 1901 New York City abolished the bi-partisan Board of Police Commissioners and replaced it with a single headed police commissioner. This legislation was intended to remove politics from policing and affixed a police commissioner's term at five years absent removal for the public interest by the mayor. Through a historical, political and institutional context, the present study explored mayoral involvement in the departure of all former New York Police Commissioners (N=40) between 1901 and 2001. Variations of the following areas found in the literature were included in the analysis; Wilson's police executive selection, Enter's police executive career path, Bynander and Hart's executive succession and Mastrofski's police governance. Two new areas were added to the extant policing literature; "Police Independence" (Professional, Autonomist, Antagonist) which measured the police commissioner's criticism of the mayor at the time of his departure, and "Civilian Control" (Political, Latent Political, Non-Political) which measured the mayor's level of involvement in police commissioner departures. Tepid support for Wilson's (1968) link between local political culture and police style was found using qualitative and quantitative measures. Historically, the study found that despite a mayor being actively engaged in police affairs, political involvement was not the leading cause of police commissioner departures. Multiple manifest rationale were cited for police commissioner departures and numerous latent reasons were identified which revealed underlying political involvement. The average police commissioner tenure was half the City Charter's stipulated five year term and 63% of successions were mid-term. During the period of the study the relationship between the police commissioner and the mayor progressed from servitude to estrangement to, ultimately, accountability and oversight. An informal tradition was identified which was exhibited by police commissioner's decision to resign rather than invoke the City Charter to complete an unexpired term. This tradition which allowed a new mayor the pleasure of selecting his own man not only disregarded the letter of the 1901 legislation intended to protect and insulate incumbent police commissioners from induced political departures, but also violated its spirit to separate politics from policing. These findings are generalizable only to New York City. Future research should focus on municipalities with different political/police structures.