FRIDAY morning and we're off to jail. Even against the New York skyline, the Manhattan Detention Complex is imposing - a tall, grim, institutional red brick building with narrow slit windows.
We're quickly into the heart of the prison the booking room on the third floor. Here prisoners are fed into the system from an enclosed bridge, which runs overground from the huge courthouse next door.
There's bedlam when we walk in. A prisoner has shouted something at a prison officer as he was being encouraged into a holding cell. The officer slams the door, laughs and shouts something back. It's all reasonably - good natured at least on the officer's side - but at a ferocious volume.
It's always busy here, but the officer in charge of new prisoners says he really has his hands full today. Last night the New York police arrested more than 1,200 people across the city and brought them before the night courts. Many of those who go to jail end up in this building.
"I've got 80 or 90 new ones coming over the bridge every night," he says.
From the moment they come over the bridge he has 24 hours to process them through the booking room and fix them up with a proper cell. Otherwise the prisoner gets $150 for every day he is kept waiting in the booking area. The area has "holding cells", and just now there are about 10 men in each. Most sit quietly, a couple sleep on the floor, some shout at each other.
"Booking" prisoners means taking down all their details, then routing them into the cells after a full body search a shower and a medical examination.
"I've taken in 12,400 guys so far this year," says the officer in charge. Thanks to years devoted to funding and building new cell space, the prison service has managed to keep pace with the new policing methods adopted by the New York Police Department, which have brought a surge in arrests and a dramatic fall in the city's crime rate over the last two years. The prison population is now close to 19,500 prisoners 700 more than last year and about 1,500 more than the year before that.
As we talk, two officers take a prisoner from a holding cell to start him on his way towards the main prison. As they go around the corner into the next room to start the body search, one officer pulls on a pair of rubber gloves.
TUESDAY morning and we're at a synagogue in North Brooklyn for a COMSTAT (computer statistics) meeting, the centrepiece of the new New York policing methods which have attracted interest from police forces all over the world.
There are two underlying principles. First: every minor crime might be an opening for the police to find out about a more serious crime. Prisoners guilty of lesser offences - if properly questioned might turn out to know about a robbery, or about a shooting. So the police should never turn a blind eye to a minor offence, but should do all they can to catch the offender.
Second: the details of every crime, every report of a crime and every arrest is fed into a computer daily. Every couple of weeks precinct commanders face their chief and explain what they are doing - not just to respond to crimes, but to reduce the over: all crime levels.
With all the statistics in front, of him, the chief should be able to spot any bluffing or laziness straightaway. If he does, he has licence to berate the precinct commander in front of his peers. When this policy was first introduced two years ago, not all of the 76 precinct commanders in New York proved able to handle the pressure. Half were moved out of their jobs.
We're in a synagogue because the Brooklyn police were never expected to have big meetings like this - with more than 60 officers and observers - and had nowhere else to hold it. So the local Jewish leaders have agreed to allow the police to discuss robberies, rapes and killings in their place of worship. This morning, local business leaders have been invited to attend, to see if they believe the police force is doing its job.
Joseph Dunne is the police chief with authority for the group of precincts which make up New York's north Brooklyn borough. He's 27 years on the force and was just promoted to chief in March. "The Mayor's office is looking for a citywide decrease in crime of ten per cent this year," he reminds his officers. "I want to do double that."
For the last six weeks things were looking good: serious crime was down 16 per cent in the borough compared to the same period last year, he tells them. "But we were murdered on Friday night with those shootings," says Dunne. There had been a sudden ripple of gun violence across the borough on Friday - 11 shootings in four separate precincts.
Dunne calls on the senior policemen of the 75th precinct to come forward. They walk up and stand around the rostrum. Their commander - is inspector Edward Mezzadri. With him is the head of his detective unit, the head of the narcotics squad, and various other senior officers.
Mezzadri's crime figures aren't bad. In his precinct, an area a couple of dozen blocks square, there were no murders in the last month and only a handful of shootings. Rapes are down 60 per cent on the same month last year, some types of robbery are down 20 per cent. But he has had a spate, of burglaries in the last month - almost 40 of them. The burglary figure is up 20 per cent. It's going to ruin the averages and Chief Dunne isn't happy.
A map of the precinct projected onto a screen shows the location of the recent burglaries. A few seem to be clustered into one corner of the precinct. "What's going on there?" asks Dunne. "What are you doing? Are you doing any stings?"
The detective chief for the area speaks up, saying they have just completed a sting which yielded $6,000 worth of stolen jewellery.
Dunne isn't falling for it. "Any of that jewellery been linked to these burglaries?" he asks.
"Eh, no," comes the response. "But we're working on that."
Mezzadri steps in to help his detective, saying he has set up a special unit to focus on burglaries, and track any burglary parolees who might have recently come home.
Dunne has found a piece of paper in his folder, which shows that for all the increase in burglaries in the precinct, there has been no effort to catch the sellers of stolen goods.
"There's been no fencing operation, and no fencing arrests this year, he says. "Now we're getting into six months of the year and I want to see something more proactive . . ."
Mezzadri is asked to display a map of all drug arrests in his precinct on top of the burglary map. There seems to be a correlation there is a concentration of both drug arrests and burglaries in the same corner of the precinct.
Dunne's deputy, Inspector Joe Esposito, asks the head of the precinct's narcotic squad unit to step forward. Esposito suggests the narcotics squad had been concentrating only on drug arrests, and has not remembered to interrogate its prisoners about the burglaries.
"I know you want your narcotics collars, but we want to know everything that's going on", he says.
The commanders of the 73rd precinct are up next. They get an even worse time. Shooting incidents are up 40 per cent in the precinct compared to the same month last year.
Dunne remembers that he told the precinct commander at their last meeting that he should start a sweep across the precinct's rooftops. It seems that a lot of people who buy or rent handguns in the area test them by going onto a roof and firing a few shots. Dunne wants his officers searching the roofs for any ballistics evidence which might be matched against bullets from a crime scene.
So what happened to the rooftop plan? Where are the results? The 73rd precinct commander looks a little embarrassed. "Eh, I sent a memo on that to Dunne interrupts. "Don't ever say you addressed a problem with a memo, he says.
THURSDAY morning and we head for one of the many huge skyscrapers that line 6th Avenue in Manhattan. This is where you'll now find William Bratton, the former commissioner of the New York Police Department, who takes credit for changing the way the force operates and making life better for all New Yorkers.
It comes as a surprise at first that the man is of average height. You expect him to be eight feet tall, because all his photographs in the magazines and newspapers seem to have been taken from below. A lot of them showed a stern Bratton on a rooftop, against the backdrop of the violent city which he claimed to be pulling into shape.
And he's got figures to prove it. In 1990 there were more than 2,200 homicides in the city. Bratton became commissioner in early 1994; for that year, the murder rate was down to just over 1,500. In 1995 it was under 1,200. Overall, crime in the last two years is down 27 per cent. "And people feel safer," Bratton says.
They are figures any police commander would be proud of, but they didn't keep Bratton in his job. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who had appointed Bratton, was said to be upset by all the publicity surrounding his commissioner. Giuliani's own political agenda is based around his tough law and order stance, but every time he opened a magazine there was Bratton, up on a roof and looking tougher. Bratton even made the cover of Time magazine, with the headline: "Finally, we're winning the war against crime".
Both men deny they fell out over the way Bratton courted publicity. But last March, Bratton's resignation was arranged, and the two shook hands and parted.
Now Bratton has taken a job with a private security firm. How does it feel to be up in this quiet office, compared to his position last March when he had a force of 38,000 officers to command?
"I've never been somebody to look back, I look to the future. I probably left at a very good time. It's a good time to leave, when you're on top off your game.
What about the suggestion that apart from police activity, there were other factors which helped the crime rate to fall? Some analysts say economic conditions, or demographic trends, or longer jail terms kept the crime figures down. Bratton is shaking his head.
"No, because we have to look at the speed with which this occurred," he says. He believes it all comes down to the way the NYPD began to handle crime. He also believes the police can "control behaviour" - the behaviour of people who would otherwise adopt a life of crime.
Could it work elsewhere? In Ireland, for example?
"Sure," says Bratton. "It's replicable, it's transferable."
However, Bratton accepts that at least some of his reforms were solutions to problems particular to New York and its police department.
A history of corruption in the NYPD had led to officers being instructed to keep away from drug dealers the wealthiest criminals and those believed most likely to corrupt an officer. Officers were told to report street dealing to the NYPD's narcotics unit, but sometimes the unit was too busy or had other priorities, and never showed up to do anything about it.
This obviously damaged the beat cops' morale. And it reinforced rather than changed public perceptions of the force. "People saw the dealing going on and the officer going past, and they thought `oh, he's corrupt'," says Bratton.
At least some of the crime reduction in New York is due to ordinary police officers being given back the right to take action against any crime they observe. In other words, a return to normal policing methods, to respect for the primacy of the officer on his patch.
So New York may have little to teach the world in that regard.
But other initiatives may e more relevant to overseas observers. Much of Bratton's philosophy centred on making the police concentrate on "quality of life" crime the range of less serious offences which may not directly endanger citizens, but can make them feel unsafe, and fear they are witnessing a breakdown of law and order.
Earlier this month the Garda Commissioner, Mr Patrick Culligan, asked why Irish people "feel there is more crime around". He said that some newspapers exaggerate crime. He also said thieves were increasingly using violence.
And he cited "an increase in loutish, ignorant behaviour by young people in public places which creates apprehension in citizens and can be very intimidating".
These are the sorts of offences Bratton was determined to tackle.