Crime: Behind a Woman's Skirts

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The girl in the flowered babushka looked like an easy mark. Wearing a yellow dress, a black sweater and tan sandals, she was lolling on the lonely shore of a Central Park lake. A purse lay carelessly at her side and suddenly, darting out of the night, a man grabbed it. Just then the girl became a man—and a cop. When the thug fled, Patrolman Robert Hussey pulled out his revolver, fired two warning shots, quickly collared his quarry.

In such fashion New York City's army of muggers, rapists and robbers last week began to discover that the tottering drunk or the lonely girl might really be a masquerading policeman. Inspired by the success of St. Louis police with similar tactics (TIME, Aug. 24), Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy initiated Operation Decoy as a new means of fighting New York's soaring crime rate, which nightly leaves bleeding victims sprawled on the sidewalk (see cut).

The prize roles were played by members of the Tactical Patrol Force, who did their burly best to look like women. They shaved their legs, wiggled into tangerine Capri pants, padded themselves with balloons, pulled on curly-lock wigs, prettied up with plum-blossom lipstick, and practiced a seductive swing of their hips.

Some of the cops were over 6 ft. and 200 lbs. Some of them had peculiar bulges under their skirts that could only have been made by service revolvers. Few of them would have turned the head of a castaway sailor. But they got plenty of action—and results. By hiding behind a woman's skirts, New York City's decoys made 23 arrests in the first three days of the operation. They even hauled in three girls who, on closer examination, turned out to be males themselves.