George Grasso

A year after joining the New York City Police Department in 1979, George Grasso began attending the night program at St. John’s University School of Law, while he worked full time as a Police Officer assigned to patrol duties in Flatbush, Brooklyn, from midnight to 8 in the morning. Frequently on patrol without the availability of adequate back up, George Grasso worked to maintain control of highly charged situations in a calm, professional manner. When he made arrests he often spent days processing them. After graduating from law school, George Grasso's assignment took him to the Department Advocate's Office, where he earned a reputation as an extremely effective trial attorney, protecting the integrity of the Police Department by prosecuting corruption and serious disciplinary cases. These early experiences introduced George Grasso to the NYPD's flaws and inefficiencies and set a framework for his thinking throughout his career. George Grasso steadily rose through the ranks to eventually become the first Italian American to serve as Deputy Police Commissioner for Legal Matters and achieved the highest rank accorded to an Italian American in the NYPD when Ray Kelly appointed him First Deputy Police Commissioner. In 1992, George Grasso was assigned by then-First Deputy Commissioner Raymond Kelly, to a central role in the overhaul of the NYPD’s Internal Affairs system to establish a world class institutional process for investigating, prosecuting, and responding to instances of police corruption and serious misconduct. These systemic changes won the endorsement of the Mollen Commission and remain in effect today. In subsequent assignments, George Grasso worked successfully to minimize arrest-to-arraignment times, and increase the effectiveness and safety of patrol officers addressing systemic problems that frustrated him as a young police officer. In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, George Grasso was assigned as the NYPD’s primary representative at the FBI’s New York Command Post. George Grasso served as the point man for sensitive information flows between the FBI, the Mayor, and the Police Department. The next year, Commissioner Ray Kelly named George Grasso the First Deputy Police Commissioner, the man second in command of a 50,000-officer police force. In this capacity George Grasso oversaw budgetary and personnel matters, labor policies, crime justice administration, and disciplinary measures and assumed all the responsibilities of