AUG 24, 2001
New York Times

R. THOMAS REPPETTO certainly hadn't journeyed to Lieutenant Petrosino Square 
in Lower Manhattan for the inspirational view. As he surveyed the forlorn 
three-hundreth-of-an- acre triangle of asphalt and cement at the junction of 
Lafayette and Kenmare Streets, he seemed to clench his Dick Tracy jaw in 
frustration that the Petrosino name could not adorn some greater, well, civic 
grandeur. 

"He was an honest, courageous cop, sent on an ill-conceived mission," he was 
saying of Giuseppe (Joseph) Petrosino, the only New York Police Department 
officer to be killed in the line of duty on foreign soil. That mission — a 
supposedly secret investigation of the Black Hand in Sicily — ended on March 
12, 1909, near a statue of Garibaldi in downtown Palermo. There, Dr. Reppetto 
said, Petrosino was gunned down by two hitmen. 

"It's good to see a park named after him, but we really don't remember these 
heroes anymore," he said regretfully. 

This cannot be said of Dr. Reppetto — he insists on being called Tom — who 
is the co- author, with James Lardner, of "NYPD: A City and Its Police" 
(Henry Holt & Company, 2000). This happens to be the history that inspired 
the police movie series now at the Film Forum in Manhattan. A former Chicago 
police commander, Dr. Reppetto is the founding, and current, a nonprofit 
research and advocacy organization supported by a consortium of business 
leaders. 

"He is the organization for all practical purposes," said former Police 
Commissioner William Bratton, "its face and heart and soul." 

The commission has a staff of four and a yearly budget of $350,000 for its 
programs, including as many as a dozen yearly breakfast forums that bring 
together law enforcement heavy hitters for debate and schmooze. "We might be 
beating up on each other in turf wars," Mr. Bratton said, "but Tom provides a 
place where everyone can come together." 

Dr. Reppetto is that rarity, a former crime stopper who rose to become 
commander, and improbably earned a doctorate at the John F. Kennedy School of 
Government at Harvard University. Although other former flatfoots have walked 
a beat and earned Harvard degrees — former Police Commissioner Raymond W. 
Kelly, for one — Dr. Reppetto is unusual in that "he puts things in 
historical context," Mr. Bratton said. 

An irrepressible pan-media talking head, Dr. Reppetto, 69, has been described 
as a Brahmin of police culture. The phrase makes him laugh. "Look, I'm from 
the stockyards," he said, referring to the Chicago neighborhood of his birth. 
When he was 6 his mother, June, a civilian employee of the Chicago Police 
Department, divorced his father, George, a sometime saloonkeeper and, well, 
inveterate perp. "He was a good guy in his way, but I saw police work at 
first hand from the time I was very little," he said of his 
dad-with-a-rap-sheet. Father and son were able to bond, though, "since 
visiting day was Sunday." 

Young Thomas joined the Chicago Police Department in 1952. That obligatory 
pop-psychology question (about the straight-arrow son rebelling against the 
shady father) draws a smile. "That would make a good plot for Hollywood," he 
said, adding, "I really think I became a policeman because I liked to be out 
in the midst of the pace, the life, of a big city at night."

He left Chicago in 1970 to do research at Harvard. After a professorship 
leading to a vice presidency at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, he was 
tapped to head the new crime commission in 1979. He lives in Westchester with 
his second wife, Christa Carnegie, a lawyer, and has a grown daughter.

FOR a former detective who headed the Chicago burglary squad, his 
conversational style can tend to the academic. (There is the phrase "Hegelian
army" in describing a police force that questions itself "in seeking a higher 
synthesis," as he put it.) 

On a recent afternoon he was perfectly attired in a summer- weight tan suit 
from Saks, accessorized with — befitting a former gumshoe — black brogans. 
Friends say that in his younger days, he bore quite the resemblance to Cary 
Grant, but these days with his straight, iron-gray hair, he's more of a 
6-foot-2 John McMartin. 

Dr. Reppetto hews to the belief that city police managers like Jack Maple, 
Mr. Bratton and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani lowered crime rates by 
strategically focusing on quality-of-life crimes and instituting computerized 
monitoring and accountability tools. A challenge for the next police 
commissioner "is to maintain the Compstat program and quality-of- life 
enforcement, but to blend them with more community-directed initiatives," he 
said, explaining that, for example, outstanding beat officers could be 
rewarded with pay and other incentives equaling the status of detectives. 

But if the city's current crime-freeness is a cause for celebration (there 
are about 600 murders a year now in comparison to 2,245 in 1990), "there is 
still a long way to go," he said. Some politicians dismiss "après Rudy, the 
deluge" pessimism about city crime under a new mayor, arguing that changes in 
police management have reached a momentum that cannot be stopped. 

Dr. Reppetto isn't so sure. "People take for granted that crime is going 
down, but nothing should be taken for granted in law enforcement," he said. 
"In policing, things go from bad to good — and from good to bad — very 
rapidly." 

But that's surely something that Lieutenant Petrosino could have said in 1909.