I asked Bill Bratton on a drizzly Friday afternoon about all the scare-campaign ads that claim a de Blasio administration would take us back to the crack- and crime-plagued days of the late 1980s.
“That is not going to happen,” Bratton said, his words as tough as a nightstick. “Not in this city. Not under my watch.”
OK, so what will his watch, his second watch as commissioner of NYPD, be like?
“Well, the first time around in the 1990s the emphasis was on reducing out-of-control crime,” he says. “We accomplished that with great success. But then after I left, came 9/11 and the city changed, the world changed. Today, my job will be to use the New York City Police Department to keep crime low and keep us safe from terrorism. But we also want NYPD to reestablish a better trust, a better relationship with the citizens of this city, especially in the minority community.”
That, of course, will come from a new approach to the policing tool called “stop, question and frisk” that Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and Bratton believe was abused under the Mayor Bloomberg/Commissioner Raymond Kelly administration.
“There will be an emphasis on new training and supervision,” Bratton says. “Not just for new recruits. But across the board. Everyone in the department will be retrained in the approach to ‘stop, question and frisk.’ We will train them to be more selective in whom they stop. They will be more respectful in their approach. And they will do it lawfully. We will not break the law to stop crime. In Los Angeles, we made certain that new recruits fresh from the academy spent a year with a seasoned training officer before going out on his or her own. In New York, we might not have the resources to do that in every case, but there will be much more supervision than there has been, especially of new recruits in minority neighborhoods where stop-and-frisk has been overused.”
He said instead of going after the “general population,” his cops will go after the “known criminal population” of a community. “In Los Angeles, we had a database of 40,000 known gang members,” he says. “We focused on them rather than good kids on the way home from school or work. We stop, questioned and frisked and often arrested those career criminals. Crime went down. The approval rating of the LAPD in the minority community rose to the 66% to 70% rate. Because we went after criminals not good citizens. In this regard, Bill de Blasio and I are joined at the hip, no daylight between us on how to readjust ‘stop, question and frisk’ to focus on the criminals not the general population.”
He told me he’s also making phone calls and “reachouts” to minority activists and politicians.
“I’ve called people like Al Sharpton, whom I had a strained relationship (with) the last time I was commissioner,” he says. “But in the years since we’ve both evolved. I worked with him successfully on several issues in Los Angeles. We appeared together at the White House. We respect each other a lot more now.”
He says that many of the minority activists of 1996 are no longer on the stage. So he’s eager to meet new minority leaders once he’s seated at his desk in 1 Police Plaza. But he has also spoken to old friend Eric Adams, former head of 100 Men in Law Enforcement who was just elected Brooklyn Borough President.
“Eric was a great cop and he’s a fine political leader,” he says. “He’s a friend I met through the late, great Jack Maple, who created CompStat with me. Eric will be very helpful in starting to mend the fences between the NYPD and the minority community in this city. And remember the NYPD is becoming more and more minority itself so this should be the right time to make this critical relationship work. We need the community as much as they need us. We both need that relationship to work in order to keep crime down in this city.”
I asked him about this disturbing, new violent trend called “knockout” where young punks go around sucker-punching innocent citizens — even women and the elderly — to see if they can render them unconscious with a single punch.
“We’ll attack trends like knockout the way a doctor goes after a basal cell before it becomes a melanoma,” says Bratton. “That’s what we did with the wolf packs of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Go after them aggressively.”
He wouldn’t discuss when he learned he had secured the top cop job. “I’m just honored that Mayor-elect de Blasio has given me the opportunity to have it again,” he says. “I love this city. My wife loves it. We live here and we want it to be the safest big city in America. But I want that to happen respectfully and constitutionally. I have passion for this town, and for police work, and especially for the NYPD, the best police department in the world. I can’t wait to go back to work.”
Welcome back.
