Anthony Bouza, police commander who ruffled feathers, dies at age 94

Anthony V. Bouza, who drew both praise and criticism as New York City police chief for his emphasis on investigative work and his often blunt remarks on police work, and who later pioneered anti-crime tactics as Minneapolis police chief, died June 26 in Bloomington, min. He was 94.

His death, in a care facility, was confirmed by his son Anthony S. Bouza.

In a paramilitary hierarchy where conflicts are muted, Mr Bouza (pronounced BOE-za) – who was born in Spain and who was the top Spanish official when he left – stood out for voicing his opinion as a self-confessed non- conformist and ‘chronic dissatisfaction’. “In New York,” he once said, “the police code of silence is stronger than the mafia code of omerta.”

Such remarks, as well as provocative phrases like “feral children” and “malignant neglect,” made him a lightning rod. Critics pigeonholed him as an unabashed, aloof logician who sometimes played fast and loose with statistics. But the backlash was also caused in part by his courage to disrupt the status quo by experimenting with innovative policing that tapped into patterns of crime.

“It’s hard to find a police officer before or since who made such great strides in police investigations,” Lawrence Sherman, emeritus professor of criminology at the University of Cambridge in Britain, said in 2012.

Professor Sherman praised Mr. Bouza’s “evidence-based policing,” added Professor Sherman, “Bouza was the first to articulate the importance of medical-style clinical trials of police practice with individual offenders and specific street locations.”

Among other things, Mr Bouza proved – at least statistically – that “if you can train the police to be less violent, less violence will be directed against the police”, as he put it in 1986 when discussing the findings of a report by the non-profit Crime Control Institute, of which he was president. He also stressed that two-man patrols were sometimes wasteful, as was keeping suspects on the backburner.

Mr. Bouza often sounded frustrated because his role in the criminal justice system was limited to law enforcement.

“There must be a restructuring from the top down, removing the psychopaths, the criminals and the unfit,” he told the City Club of New York in 1976. (He later gave a more charitable assessment of police officers: “Ninety-eight percent of them are doing or trying to do their job, their work ranging from mediocre to heroic and brilliant.”)

Addressing the debate over whether, given the staggering rise in violent crime in the 1970s, teenagers should be tried as adults, he said, “American society has given up punishment for rehabilitation, but rehabilitation has failed, so society stands naked and helpless.” before the attack.”

He could be blunt and caustic in tracing urban ills, including crime, to America’s racial divide.

On September 18, 1976, a rowdy protest of 2,000 off-duty patrols and a robbery by marauding teenagers, most of them black and Hispanic, converged to cause chaos for officers assigned to maintain order outside Yankee Stadium, where Muhammad Ali was fighting. Ken Norton for the Heavyweight Championship. The off-duty agents protested the city’s latest contract offer; the teens robbed and harassed brawlers. The officers on patrol gave their off-duty colleagues plenty of room.

At the time, Mr. Bouza was an assistant superintendent and commanded 3,000 uniformed officers in 11 counties in the Bronx.

“The kids have tarnished the consciousness of more prominent Americans,” Mr Bouza said in response to the anger of the mostly wealthy white ticket holders at the teens who ran amok that night. “If I failed, it’s because I didn’t continue to make these feral kids invisible to middle and upper class Americans who aren’t used to seeing them.”

He continued that theme in one of the many books he wrote, How to Stop Crime, published in 1993.

“The crime and violence that ensues,” he wrote, “are the consequences of the racist policies and poverty that the white overclass has inflicted on the black underclass. “The Bronx,” he continued, was “symbolic of America’s contemporary frontier, where the nation fought for its soul — and lost.”

Anthony Vila Bouza was born on October 4, 1928 in El Ferrol, in northwestern Spain (which, by the way, is also the birthplace of the dictator Francisco Franco). His father, Jose Antonio Bouza, was a merchant mariner who fired coal-fired boilers; his mother, Encarnación Vila, was a seamstress. His father jumped ship and entered the United States illegally, but he became a citizen before returning to Spain and getting married.

When Anthony was 10, with his father often at sea, he, his 17-year-old sister, and their mother moved to Brooklyn Heights, where he attended Manual Training High School.

In addition to his son Anthony, Mr. Bouza is survived by his wife, Vivien (known as Erica); another son, Dominick; and four grandchildren.

While working in the clothing center after a stint in the military, Mr. Bouza enrolled at the Delehanty Institute, a government school, to study for the police exam. He became a probationary police officer on New Year’s Day 1953.

He quickly rose through the ranks while attending Baruch College, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration, and City College of New York, where he earned a master’s degree in public administration.

In addition to ‘How to Stop Crime’, Mr. Bouza’s books include ‘The Police Mystique: An Insider’s Look at Cops, Crime, and the Criminal Justice System’ (1990) and ‘Expert Witness: Breaking the Policemen’s Blue Code of Silence’. (2013), discussing his testimony as a civilian before plaintiffs in lawsuits against the police for assault and false arrest.

Mr. Bouza gained a lot of attention after the Yankee Stadium incident in 1976. “Wild kids,” the term he used to characterize the marauding teens, became famous.

“What I do is discuss publicly what we all discuss in private,” he said at the time. “I’ve been saying this for 10 years. For once, the world listened.”

Twenty-eight youths were arrested by some of the 400 police officers Mr Bouza had deployed. He was a potential scapegoat, but he was cleared of charges that he assaulted the off-duty officers’ demonstration. (“We have not found any grounds for initiating disciplinary action in this matter,” said Police Commissioner Michael J. Codd.)

But by then, Mr. Bouza had already announced that he would be leaving the police force after 24 years to join his former boss, Sanford D. Garelik, as second-in-command of the Transit Authority Police Department. He remained with that force until 1979.

“The department made me everything I am today,” he said of the New York Police Department in 1976. “It’s been my Harvard and Yale.”

In 1980, Mr. Bouza was appointed police chief in Minneapolis, where he put some of his police ideas into practice. He ordered, among other things, that the police arrest perpetrators of domestic violence instead of mediating disputes, and he moved patrols to the places where the most crime took place.

He served nine years in Minneapolis, often drawing the wrath of the police union with his emphasis on substantial changes—although he did come to admit that he had underestimated the city’s gang problem.

In 1983, Mr. Bouza led the arrest of his wife during a demonstration against a weapons manufacturer. “I’m sure,” he said at the time, “she’ll come out with all sorts of comments about prison reform.”

After his retirement, Mr. Bouza was a frequent defense witness in lawsuits against police officers across the country.

“With all due respect to Minneapolis, he should have finally become chief of police departments of one of the giant cities – New York, Chicago, Los Angeles – to show what he could do,” said Thomas Repetto, the former president of the Citizens New York City Crime Commission, told The Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2013. “I like to say he’s the best police commissioner New York City never had.”

May Coleman reporting contributed.