July 27, 2024

A life devoted to getting the story right: Al Baker reflects on his career

PERF members,

Al Baker has had a fascinating career. The son of a lieutenant in the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit, Al initially pursued journalism instead of following his father into policing. After three years with the New York Daily News and four years with Newsday, Al spent nearly 20 years reporting for the New York Times, including more than a decade as the police bureau chief. In 2015, I invited him to join a group of police chiefs I brought to Scotland to learn about their approach to use of force, and he wrote a nuanced piece about police leaders seeking to improve the profession.

Al (left) reporting on PERF’s trip to Scotland in 2015

Al joined the NYPD in 2019 as the executive director of media relations. Last October, he moved to the New York State Unified Court System to serve as the organization’s director of communications. In that role, Al was responsible for navigating press access to the six-week criminal trial of former President Donald Trump.

I spoke with Al about being the son of a police officer, his work as a journalist, his time with the NYPD, and his recent experience with former President Trump’s trial. We spoke for more than 40 minutes, so I’ve printed a few highlights below and made the entire discussion available as a podcast below.

This transcript was edited for conciseness and clarity.

On being the son of a police officer (1:16):

I had a great sense of his vulnerability as a young person. … At a very young age, I used to watch his taillights disappear down the road and listen to the sound of his stick shift as he drove off, and I remember hoping he came back. …

Al with his father, Lt. Al Baker (Credit: Al Baker)

He would show my brother and I in the newspaper events that had transpired in New York City that he had a part in. There were often times when he was quoted by name, or there was a portion of his photograph in some of the stories. … He would often point out what was accurate and what was not quite the full story.

On his father’s career with the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit (3:08):

He was in it for a long time, and I think he felt honored to be in it. I got a sense from him of the great camaraderie with the other officers. He felt very lucky to be among them. He always talked about the way they communicated with just a look in their eyes. There was a lot of trust. They would put their lives in each others’ hands, and they knew they would come out okay. … I think he was very humbled by his colleagues. He spoke about them as heroes of his, even though he was among them.

Al’s father, NYPD Lt. Al Baker (right), with colleagues (Credit: Al Baker)

He had a very searing experience when he was a kid. He grew up in Brooklyn, and his house filled with carbon monoxide. They had a coal heater in the basement. It wasn’t venting correctly, and the whole family was knocked out. He made it to the phone, and his mother was telling him to call 911. She was collapsed. And he remembers coming to, and when he came to, there was a giant, strong arm jostling him and picking him up. When he looked up, he saw it was a uniform, and on the sleeve of that arm was the Emergency Service Unit patch. So from a very early age, he was impressed with and thankful for them, and he became one of them.

On reporting on the crash of TWA Flight 800 for Newsday and winning a Pulitzer Prize for that coverage (7:48):

The first night I was out there, we were at the United States Coast Guard house in East Moriches where there were young volunteers from the Coast Guard and others, civilian boaters, bringing pieces of the plane that were floating and burning on the ocean. It was like 1,000 candles on the ocean. John Miller, a correspondent at that time and later an NYPD and FBI official, was out there on a boat that night as well. …

The big question was, why? What brought it down? All these details were very important. Was anything to be gleaned from the way the wreckage looked? Was there some clear charring or something that would show signs of an explosion, and would that explosion be believed to be from a device or a fuel tank explosion? …

Credit: Newsday

I remember when it was announced that Newsday had won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news, Tony Marro, the editor, stood on a desk in the newsroom and there was a lull in the newsroom when the news came that we won. It was quiet. And he stood up and said, “Don’t feel bad. You just told the world about something terrible that happened, and you should feel good that you fulfilled the mission of journalism.” So people felt a little better about that, but still there was no real celebration when we won that prize.

On his “Murder in the 4-0” series for the New York Times (11:16):

We covered every single homicide [in the 40^th Precinct in 2016] in a longform, narrative fashion. It was Benjamin Mueller and me, and James McKinley was added about six months in because the workload got so large we were really having trouble keeping up.

If a murder happened, we would run out and gather all the information contemporaneously. Then we would work on it and figure out who the people are – who’s murdered, and who did the murdering? We would write the story months later.

They were 4,000-word stories, and they were very deep. They covered different things – domestic violence, drug addiction, issues with public schools. We had one murder that happened in a public housing complex, and it illustrated the return of the mentally ill and how in a poverty situation, there’s no infrastructure for them to come home to and that can feed into these cycles of violence. We had a narcotics murder. We had the accidental killing of a lovely woman from Ecuador who had just had lunch with her daughter. A group of young men in a gang let some bullets fly, and one bullet traveled a block-and-a-half and struck her in the chest, and she fell dead right there. …

I learned how hard the police work, harder than I ever imagined. They would do things on their own time that the public doesn’t always see. They would bring the surveillance videos from the housing complex back to their own home to go over it, to see who came on the elevator at a time when a shooting occurred. …

Bruce Purdy was murdered, and his mother didn’t have money for an urn. She wanted to have him cremated. The police detectives, Rick Simplicio and Mike LoPuzzo, put their money together and purchased an urn for Thelma Johnson, the mother of Bruce Purdy, and delivered the urn to her. I remember we drove up there together, and she was so thankful, just hysterically crying. These are little things I saw that you didn’t always see when you didn’t stay on these stories for a long time.

On his move to the NYPD (19:23):

I had a steep learning curve, even though I had been in a policing family and had a father who lived it and then I wrote about it as a journalist. Even after all that, I had a steep learning curve about the culture, the bureaucracy, the way information moves within it, and how to best capture and share that information with the world and journalists. It was a very steep learning curve, but it was one I really embraced and came to love very much. …

Al (right) with NYPD colleagues in Times Square on New Year’s Eve (Credit: Al Baker)

I was able to channel what the journalists need in moments of crisis. When we had the killings of Officers Rivera and Mora in East Harlem, I had a very clear sense that I had to go see that scene before going to the hospital. That helped me serve the police department in communicating that night from the podium. It also helped me understand what journalists were going to want and need to understand this tragic event. I think there were times when I was able to utilize my skill on both sides to the benefit of everyone. Those were mostly in moments of crisis where it was moving fast, and I was able to use my instincts about what were important facts for the public to know and that the police would want to be known, and how to communicate that correctly.

On the challenges posed by former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York City (23:58):

When I took this job, I didn’t quite imagine that this would happen so quickly. … It became clear right away that we needed a plan. I spent many, many weeks devising a plan, and my ultimate goal was to serve the press. …

What I wanted to do was to build a more humane system for the press within the first priority of the safety and security of everyone involved, and also the safety and orderliness of the proceedings. … We really had a few pieces. We had the challenge of a trial with a former president. We had the challenge of providing a transparent process for the public. And then we had the rest of the criminal justice system to function around that – the rest of the cases that were going on in criminal court.

The U.S. Secret Service, the NYPD, and the New York State Unified Court System worked together like a triangle and set about a plan to ensure that the press had access, that the First Amendment rights of the defendant were secure, and that the trial was constitutionally open to the public. …

The U.S. Secret Service had the primary role to ensure that nothing would happen to the ex-president. … The second piece was the NYPD, in a support role to that primary position. New York City is a complex place. To navigate the complex streetscape and urban environment, every corridor has to be thought about by the NYPD Counterterrorism and Intelligence Bureau. … We protected the courthouse. We ensured that the proceedings were safe for everyone involved in Room 1530, where Judge Juan Merchan was presiding. And we had to ensure that every other criminal matter in that building could go on. …

There were a lot of considerations and moments when things had to be made up on the fly. Because it’s not like we had a guidebook that we could flip open to see the plan for former presidents indicted in state court. … We had to write that guidebook. … This was truly a historic and unprecedented operation that we all had to plan together.

Thanks to Al for sharing his time and unique experience. During his time as a journalist, I knew of few reporters with his depth of knowledge of policing. He was determined to accurately report every fact, even if it meant rewriting a story from top to bottom to capture a new detail. He’s one of the most credible and respected reporters I’ve known. From his time as a journalist through his time with the NYPD and the New York State Unified Court System, Al has worked to share factual information with the public. I encourage everyone to listen to the entire podcast.

Best,

Chuck