Hey, Kevin Costner — want to make “The Untouchables 2”?
It’s got a pretty good plot. After taking down Al Capone, the real-life Eliot Ness achieved even greater law enforcement success in his next job as public safety director of Cleveland. The city, now with Capone out of Chicago, would become the most lawless and crooked metropolis in America.
Granted far wider power (after all, despite his celebrated over-achievements, Ness in Chicago was simply a federal Prohibition enforcer), the supercop not only brought the Cleveland mob to heel, cleaned up police bribe-taking and reduced crime dramatically, he did so with innovative practices that have become commonplace in law enforcement today.
The truth is, because of TV and movies, Ness really gets too much credit for nabbing Capone — his liquor-smashing bravado was actually separate from the tax-evasion investigation that eventually sent the gangster to jail. Yet conversely, Ness never gets enough credit for revolutionizing the way police fight crime in big cities.
Starting in 1935, one of Ness’ first changes in tactics was the implementation of the patrol car over the traditional practice of cops walking the beat. Pre-Ness, a beat cop spots a robbery down an alley, so he . . . runs to the nearest Murphy call box, probably blocks away, to phone for backup before hot-footing it back (presumably out of breath, too, as police fitness standards were nonexistent) to sort through whatever was left of the crime that was previously in progress.
Ness’ squad cars were equipped with another novelty of that time: A two-way radio that linked them to a centralized radio bureau, the “nerve center of the police department,” as Ness called it.
Thirty-two new cars would patrol 24 hours a day, each painted in a tri-color scheme so bright — a lot of cops at the time hated their look — that they were impossible to not notice and thus intended to lower crime by appearing to be everywhere all the time.
Surprisingly, the shift to squad cars and two-way radios wasn’t because Ness had a blank check to clean up Cleveland. In fact, just the opposite. His force was being trimmed due to a lack of finances.
“Faced with severe budget cuts during the Depression, Ness didn’t have the manpower anymore to have cops walking beats all over the city . . . and the squad cars were leased because the city couldn’t afford to buy a fleet,” Douglas Perry, the author of “Eliot Ness: The Rise and Fall of an American Hero,” told The Post last week.
Another of Ness’ changes in approach to law enforcement was a scientific focus: Forensics and ballistics. Investigators, using cameras, reconstructed crimes by more closely examining bullet damage and angles. His investigators also pioneered the use of lie detectors. And beyond gangland activities, Ness was an originator in the measurement of skid marks at crash scenes to determine rates of speed.
A firm believer in crime data, his precinct captains were ordered to accrue and then analyze statistics on a monthly basis — including the volume, nature, location and time of wrongdoing in their areas.
Utilizing that data, Cleveland’s most dangerous neighborhoods soon were more precisely identified and thus saw a steadier stream of those flashy squad cars during peak bad-guy hours. And at the most dangerous intersections, curbs were rounded, safety islands built and traffic signals installed.
As a precursor to internal-affairs bureaus and deep undercover work, Ness rooted out corruption within Cleveland’s notoriously mob-bought police ranks by hiring secret officers — who’d come to be known as the “Unknowns.” These men, who reported to Ness exclusively, posed as janitors at station houses listening in on locker-room talk, or as parking attendants near Mafia hangouts in town to see if cops came and went — and which ones used the back door.
Ness created Cleveland’s first police academy, where he personally taught jiu jitsu and other defense courses.
Before his arrival, Cleveland’s cops received zero physical training and weren’t even required to prove their proficiency with a gun before being handed a badge.
Finally, and most progressively, Ness’ vision of crime fighting included crime prevention. That meant putting cops into community outreach programs.
It all paid off. Eighteen months after Ness took over, crime in Cleveland had dropped 25 percent.
“Faced with severe budget cuts,” Perry said, “Ness experimented fearlessly, and he ultimately showed Los Angeles and New York and other big cities what worked and what didn’t.”