David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

her J-RIP team. They made lists of each J-RIPper’s associates—the people they had been arrested with. They went on Facebook and downloaded photos of their friends and looked for gang affiliations. They talked to brothers and sisters and mothers, and they put together giant, poster-size maps showing the networks of friendships and associations that surrounded each person—the same way an intelligence organization might track the movements of suspected terrorists.
    “I have people out there 24/7,” Jaffe said. “So when a J-RIPper is arrested, I’m willing to send in a team if I have to. I don’t care if it’s the Bronx, or the middle of the night. There have got to be dire consequences. They’ve got to know what’s going to happen. It’s got to be swift. If you get arrested, you’re going to see my face.”
    She went on, “I tell them, ‘You can slam the door when I come to your house. But I’ll see you on the street. I’ll say hello to you. I’ll learn everything about you. You go from Brooklyn to the Bronx, I’ll know what trains you take.’ We say to someone, ‘Johnnie, come into the J-RIP office tomorrow,’ and Johnnie comes in, and we say, ‘You were stopped in the Bronx last night. You got a summons.’ He says, ‘What?’ ‘You were with Raymond Rivera and Mary Jones.’ ‘How do you know that?’ They started thinking we were all over the place. Since we had developed a folder on each kid, we’d show them what we had on them. We’d say, ‘These are all your buddies. Here’s all your information. Here are your pictures. We know you’re part of this development. We know you might be a part of a crew. We know your world.’ We started learning about where they’re supposed to go to school, who they’re hanging out with at school. When they’re not in school, we get a call. So my J-RIP team goes out and wakes them up and says, ‘Get up!’”
    But this was only part of Jaffe’s strategy. She also did things that don’t sound like typical policing strategy. She spent a lot of time, for example, finding the right kind of officer to serve on the task force. “I couldn’t put just any cop in there,” she said, sounding more like a social worker than a police chief. “I had to have a cop that loves kids. I had to have a cop that didn’t have an ounce of negativity about them, and who had the ability to help sway kids and push them in the right direction.” To head the group, she finally settled on David Glassberg, a gregarious former narcotics officer with children of his own.
    She was also obsessed, from the very beginning, with meeting the families of her J-RIPpers. She wanted to know them. It turned out to be surprisingly difficult. In her first attempt, she sent letters to every home, inviting the families to come to a local church for a group session. No one showed up. Then Jaffe and her team went door-to-door. Once again, they got nowhere. “We ended up going to each family, one hundred and six kids,” she said. “They would say, ‘Fuck you. Don’t come into my house.’”
    The breakthrough finally came months into the program. “There’s this one kid,” Jaffe said. She made up a name for him: Johnnie Jones. “He was a bad kid. He was fourteen, fifteen then. He lived with a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old sister. His mother lived in Queens. Even the mother hated us. There was no one for us to reach out to. So now, November of the first year, 2007, Dave Glassberg comes to my office, Wednesday before Thanksgiving.
    “He says, ‘All the guys, all the people on the team, chipped in and we bought Johnnie Jones and his family Thanksgiving dinner tonight.’
    “And I said, ‘You’re kidding.’ This was a bad kid.
    “And he goes, ‘You know why we did it? This is a kid that we’re gonna lose but there are seven other kids in that family. We had to do something for them.’
    “I had tears in my eyes. Then he said, ‘Well, we have all these other families. What are we going to do?’ It’s ten a.m., day before Thanksgiving, and I said, ‘Dave, what if I go to the police commissioner and see if I can get two thousand bucks and see if we can buy a turkey for every family? Could we do it?’”
    She went upstairs to the executive level of police headquarters, and begged for two minutes with the police commissioner. “I said, ‘This is what Dave Glassberg did with the team. I want to buy a hundred and twenty-five turkeys. Can I get money somewhere?’ He