On a bitterly cold night in February, William Bratton, New York City’s police commissioner, joined several hundred uniformed officers for an informal memorial service at the corner of 107th Avenue and Inwood Street, in Jamaica, Queens. It was past midnight, and everyone was waiting for Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was due to speak. Twenty-seven years earlier, on February 26, 1988, a twenty-two-year-old officer named Edward Byrne was shot and killed on that corner, on orders from a drug dealer, as he sat in his patrol car guarding the home of a witness. The memorial is an annual rite for many city cops, and is a reminder of how much tougher New York’s streets were at the time of the murder. That year, there were eighteen hundred and ninety-six homicides in the city, many of them drug-related. In 2014, there were three hundred and twenty-eight, a record low. Byrne’s death drew national headlines, and President Reagan phoned the Byrne family to offer his condolences.
Before the service, the Mayor’s staff worried privately about how the officers would greet him. Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, the use of stop-and-frisk—in which officers stop, question, and pat down someone if there is a “reasonable suspicion” that a crime has occurred or might occur—became more frequent, and minority leaders were speaking out against the aggressive tactics of the N.Y.P.D. De Blasio, while campaigning for mayor, had called for more civilian oversight of the police, and vowed to crack down on “discriminatory” police practices. The comment did not sit well with many cops. “He ran an anti-police campaign,” Kelly told me recently. “He parsed the electorate. He did it very skillfully. He aimed at the fringes.”
In appointing Bratton, de Blasio hoped to reassure both the public and the police. Bratton, who is sixty-seven, served as New York’s police commissioner from 1994 to 1996, under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and oversaw a sharp reduction in crime. From 2002 to 2009, when he was the chief of police in Los Angeles, violent crime there fell by fifty-four per cent. Bratton embraced both stop-and-frisk and broken-windows policing, the latter a strategy based on the idea, proposed in 1982 by the sociologists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, that cracking down on “quality of life” crimes and disorderly behavior—turnstile-jumping, squeegee men, public intoxication, aggressive panhandling—makes citizens feel safer and discourages more serious crime. In 2009, a Los Angeles Times poll showed that eight of ten voters, including seventy-six per cent of Latinos and sixty-eight per cent of blacks, approved of the L.A.P.D.’s performance.
Upon returning to New York, Bratton confronted a police force that had serious issues. A survey of seventeen thousand city residents, ordered by Bratton and conducted in May and June of 2014, found that forty-one per cent of blacks and thirty-one per cent of Hispanics held a somewhat negative or very negative view of the police, compared with just seventeen per cent of whites. A second survey, involving a third of the city’s force of thirty-five thousand officers, revealed that seventy per cent of them lacked confidence that their decisions “would be backed by the department.” Three-quarters of white cops said that they expected fair treatment from their supervisors, but only a third of black officers and half of Latino officers felt that way. Before hiring Bratton, de Blasio called the two former mayors of Los Angeles whom Bratton had worked for, and both assured him that Bratton believed that communities and the police must work together to combat crime. Bratton “understood that policing had to be community-focussed and constitutional,” the former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told me. Bratton helped convince de Blasio that broken-windows policing was effective, but he also agreed that the N.Y.P.D.’s use of stop-and-frisk was excessive.
Then, in July of 2014, came the death of Eric Garner, a forty-three-year-old black man arrested on Staten Island for illegally selling loose cigarettes—a classic broken-windows offense. According to the medical examiner, Garner died after being put in a choke hold by police, who were trying to restrain him, but no officer was indicted; a federal investigation is still under way. (On July 13th, the city agreed to pay the Garner family $5.9 million to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit.) The following month, in Ferguson, Missouri, Michael Brown, an unarmed eighteen-year-old black man, was shot and killed after an encounter with a white officer. That officer, too, was not indicted by a grand jury, and protests erupted in New York and other cities. In a press conference, de Blasio, who has a biracial son, admitted that he and his wife have “had to literally train” him in “how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.” Patrick Lynch, the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, complained to the press that de Blasio had thrown cops “under the bus.” Then, in December, a mentally ill man shot and killed two officers as they sat in their patrol car in Brooklyn, after which he killed himself. Lynch declared that de Blasio had “blood on the hands,” and, when the Mayor met with grieving family members, a wall of police officers turned their backs on him.
Recently, Bratton defended de Blasio’s remarks about his son: “Every black I’ve ever dealt with tells me that they tell their kids the same thing. Don’t you as a white parent tell your kids certain things when they’re going out driving?” He added, “Not being black, how do we put ourselves into his shoes?”
At the memorial service in Queens, de Blasio, who is six feet five, towered over Bratton, who is five-ten. He wore a blue police windbreaker with the word “Mayor” emblazoned in yellow across the back. With his hands clasped in front, he followed and seemed to defer to Bratton, who introduced him to members of the Byrne family. Patrick Lynch was there but did not offer to shake hands, and de Blasio avoided eye contact. Bratton addressed the crowd, saying of Byrne, “His life, his sacrifice, began a change in this city.” He talked about the unity of the N.Y.P.D. “family,” a word that was mentioned several times that night. The Mayor then spoke, and concluded, tepidly, “Tonight, it’s so important just to remember a good young man, a good young man who represented all that we aspire to be.” Afterward, a senior police official whispered to me, “He’s passionate about pre-K. I guess he’s not passionate about cops.”
Not long ago, I joined Bratton in his black S.U.V., as he was being driven to a farewell reception for the retiring commander of Brooklyn South, at the Sixty-seventh Precinct, in East Flatbush. He told me that the winter and early spring had been “the most trying period of time for me in my whole career. If you look at the turbulence, not only in the city but the country, you had attacks on the police, you had anti-police momentum being generated by Washington and Eric Holder”—the Attorney General, who in March declared that the people of Ferguson feel “under siege” from the police. “And, at the same time, police were saying, ‘This is crazy. We are saving America.’ ”
On most days, Bratton can be found in his office, on the fourteenth floor of One Police Plaza, a short walk from City Hall. Tall windows offer grand views of the East River and the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg Bridges. A portrait of Teddy Roosevelt—the police commissioner from 1895 to 1897—faces Bratton’s wooden desk, which, he proudly notes, was once Roosevelt’s. When I visited, Bratton was wearing a blue custom-tailored pin-striped suit, a tightly knotted Hermès tie, a crisp white shirt, and polished black shoes; his thinning gray hair was carefully combed. When he receives visitors, he sits in a leather armchair. Behind him is a shrine to Jack Maple, a friend and former deputy commissioner who died, of cancer, in 2001. A carved puppet likeness of Maple sits on a credenza and is dressed, as Maple often was, in a blue double-breasted blazer with four gold buttons. Bratton once said, “Jack is the smartest man I’ve ever met on crime.”
Bratton was raised in a working-class Catholic household in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and as a child he dreamed of being a cop. In 1966, at nineteen and unable to afford college, he enlisted in the Army and served as a military policeman in Vietnam. When he returned home, he was offended by the protests and the social unrest. “I believed in order and conformity and the need for everyone to abide by social norms,” he wrote in an autobiography, “Turnaround: How America’s Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic,” published in 1998. In 1970, at twenty-three, he joined the Boston police force, and by 1980, after graduating from Boston State College, he had risen to executive superintendent, the second-ranking official—in a department where the average cop didn’t become a sergeant until the age of fifty. The mayor’s press office encouraged him to let the magazine Boston do a profile of him. It put his ambitious side on display. When the reporter asked about his future, Bratton responded, “My personal goal is to become commissioner. Be it one year, or four years, that’s what I want.”
The commissioner soon exiled him to a district office, and Bratton left the department to become chief of police for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, and then the superintendent of Boston’s Metropolitan District Commission Police. In 1990, Robert Wasserman, who had worked with Bratton in Boston, and was a consultant to the New York Transit Authority, successfully pushed for Bratton to be appointed head of the four-thousand-member New York Transit Police. The city was in the grip of the crack epidemic, and the violent-crime rate was at a peak: that year, there were more than twenty-two hundred murders and more than a hundred thousand robberies. In the Transit Police job, Bratton met Maple, a tough-talking lieutenant whom he promoted to be his special assistant. Within two years, subway felonies declined twenty-seven per cent and robberies by a third. Fare evasion, which typically means turnstile-jumping, and which, according to Bratton’s book, deprived the city of eighty million dollars annually, was reduced by half.
In 1992, he rejoined the Boston police department and soon became its commissioner, and in 1994 he was hired for the top post at the N.Y.P.D., replacing Ray Kelly. He assembled a team made up of several former colleagues, including Maple and Wasserman, and took on the city’s staggering crime rate. Led by Maple, the deputy commissioner of crime-control strategies, the N.Y.P.D. established a computerized system called CompStat, which has evolved into a tool that, among other things, can identify and track the hard-core criminals who commit a disproportionate percentage of crimes in the city. Between 1993 and 1995, felony crimes fell by nearly forty per cent. Some credit goes to Giuliani’s predecessor as mayor, David Dinkins, who added six thousand officers to a police force that eventually grew to nearly forty-one thousand, and saw crime decline, on average, six per cent annually in the last years of his administration. With Bratton as commissioner, the annual decline more than doubled.
The press celebrated Bratton, which angered Giuliani, who eventually drove him out. In April of 1996, Bratton was recruited to work in New York for a Boston private-security firm, and for the next six years he worked as a corporate executive in the security business. Then, in 2002, he became L.A.’s chief of police. The city was still recovering from the arrest and beating of Rodney King, in 1991, and the police there faced “charges of excessive force, false arrests, and unreasonable searches and seizures,” Bratton said. “It was an opportunity to reform and reshape the department.”
In 2009, Bratton returned to New York to run a large private-security firm. At the time, the N.Y.P.D. relied heavily on stop-and-frisk. In 2011, there were nearly seven hundred thousand stop-and-frisk incidents in New York, ninety-one per cent of them involving citizens of color. Fully half of the stop-and-frisks were based on “furtive movements,” a vague category that can be easily abused if an officer is uncomfortable around people of color. By the end of 2013, Kelly, facing public pressure, had reduced the number to less than two hundred thousand, and in 2014, after a federal judge called for changes to the practice on the ground that it violated the Fourth Amendment, Bratton brought it down to fifty thousand. Despite many fewer stop-and-frisks, the crime rate remained low.
“The No. 1 issue we heard over and over again was that the black community—rich, poor, middle class—was concerned about this issue,” Bratton told me. “The commissioner, whom they liked quite a bit, and Mayor Bloomberg, who polled well for a long time, just weren’t listening. They were kind of tone-deaf to this issue. So we worked really hard, myself and Mayor de Blasio, to respond.” When I mentioned this to Ray Kelly, he fumed. “That was not the feeling of much of the communities of color,” he said. “It was the view of activists. I’m telling him, he’s wrong.” He defended stop-and-frisk as an essential crime-fighting tool, noting that the police department had twenty-three million citizen contacts and answered twelve million calls per year. He emphasized that there was perhaps “one frisk every two weeks per patrol officer. Nobody ever puts that in proportion.”
CompStat continues to be central to the N.Y.P.D.’s operation, and the model has spread to other cities. The CompStat meeting is held every Thursday morning, from 8 a.m. to noon, in the cavernous Jack Maple Room, on the eighth floor of Police Headquarters. A rotating group of officers from the five boroughs takes part, and sometimes Bratton attends. On the day I sat in, the officers were discussing the recurrent problem of neighborhood gangs. In the Sixty-seventh Precinct, for example, they have identified two hundred and eighty-seven gang members, who were responsible for the majority of the felonies in the district.
“Police departments all over the country use CompStat,” Jeffrey Fagan, a prominent criminologist and a law professor at Columbia University, told me. “They’re looking to see where the crimes are happening and what to do about it. So Bratton gets credit for starting CompStat and for allocating cops. That’s a very good thing.”
Bratton’s embrace of broken-windows policing is more controversial. He credits it with playing an important role in reducing crime in New York, Boston, and L.A. And the most recent F.B.I. data, from 2013, show that, of the nation’s twenty-five largest cities, New York has the lowest rate of major felonies. Detroit’s murder rate is ten times New York’s, and Philadelphia’s and Chicago’s are three times as high. In his autobiography, Bratton notes that when he ran the Transit Police, in the early nineties, one out of seven people stopped for fare-beating had an outstanding warrant, and one in twenty-one was found to be carrying a weapon.
“More than any other factor, what caused this amazing change was Broken Windows, or quality-of-life policing,” Bratton wrote in a department report in April. He told me, “In the early nineteen-nineties, we were losing tourists because of the awful crime numbers we had.” Today, he said, most New Yorkers “feel safe. Just look at the sheer volume of people riding the subways at night.” Broken-windows, he says, “is about quality of life, about freedom from fear, about freedom from disturbance.” Minor crimes—patronizing a prostitute or a drug dealer—had been ignored because they were seen as victimless. “What was not understood was that the victim was the neighborhood.”
Bratton is at pains to emphasize that broken-windows policing is not stop-and-frisk. With stop-and-frisk, he said, “an officer has a reasonable suspicion that a crime is committed, is about to be committed, or has been committed. Quality-of-life policing is based on probable cause—an officer has witnessed a crime personally, or has a witness to the crime. It’s far different.” The difference is irrelevant to many critics, who see an approach that presumes guilt and unfairly targets minorities. Broken-windows theory and stop-and-frisk “have the same ideology,” Josmar Trujillo, a co-founder of New Yorkers Against Bratton and a member of the Coalition to End Broken Windows, told me. Trujillo added that he’d happily see the N.Y.P.D.’s force reduced by half. “We live in a place where police are constantly in our lives, acting as if they expect crime.”
Joo-Hyun Kang, the director of Communities United for Police Reform, a citywide umbrella group comprising dozens of organizations, said that, at least anecdotally, far more summonses are issued to people “in Bedford-Stuyvesant who may be on their stoop enjoying a can of beer” than to, say, picnickers in Central Park sharing a bottle of champagne. Broken-windows invites “the N.Y.P.D. to go on a fishing expedition,” Kang said. “It’s basically racial profiling for people under the assumption that they have outstanding warrants.”
Bratton argues that many broken-windows arrests are prompted by 911 and 311 calls from citizens, most of whom complain about misdemeanors, such as traffic offenses, public intoxication, urinating in public, drug use, disorderly youths, and street noise. Vanessa Gibson, who chairs the City Council’s Committee on Public Safety, and whose district includes part of the South Bronx, said that she is more open to broken-windows. “I was of the mind-set that police basically patrolled neighborhoods, stopped when they saw young people on a corner, and started asking questions when they saw suspicious activity,” she said. “I didn’t understand, as I do now, that police are responding to 911 and 311 calls.”
Bratton also notes that most violent crimes take place in minority neighborhoods. In 2014, ninety-eight per cent of the suspects in shootings were black or Hispanic, and seventy-six per cent of rape victims, seventy-one per cent of robbery victims, and seventy-one per cent of assault victims were people of color. Between eighty and ninety per cent of citizens support the broken-windows strategy, he said. A Quinnipiac University poll released in May found that, when black voters were asked if they generally supported broken-windows, sixty-one per cent said they did. But, when the same citizens were asked if they approved or disapproved of the way the New York City police were doing their job, fifty per cent of blacks and forty-one per cent of Hispanics disapproved, whereas just twenty per cent of white voters disapproved.
Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, who retired from the N.Y.P.D. as a captain in 2006, explained the contradiction. Adams said that he supports broken-windows but that “there has been a systemic problem, because of twenty years of aggressive, unequal enforcement.” Under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg, officers felt encouraged, he said, to “make as many contacts as possible with people based on their race and ethnicity and where they live. These contacts were done through stop-and-frisk” and misdemeanor arrests. Adams went on, “It was about instilling fear in people. It has started to change, but it’s like moving an ocean liner.”
Critics say, however, that broken-windows is not nearly as successful as it claims to be. The crime rate in New York fell in the nineteen-nineties—but it also fell in San Diego, Houston, Dallas, and other cities that were not using the same strategy. “There’s no good scientific evidence that broken-windows works or has much to do with crime,” Fagan said. “And the few claims for it that people try to make have been contested. None of them stand up to really close examination. So what’s left? Bratton can say all he wants that broken-windows works, and he can look at large correlations between misdemeanor arrests and declines in crime, but there’s no plausible connection between the two. Marijuana smokers are not criminals on their day off.”
Bratton conceded, “You’re not going to find the scientific study that can support broken-windows one way or the other.” He added, “The evidence I rely on is what my eyes show me,” and he pointed to “the reduction of fear” that he sees in rejuvenated neighborhoods like Times Square. Ekow N. Yankah, a legal scholar at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, notes that Times Square benefitted from several changes, including the city’s willingness to invest in the area and to change zoning laws that shut down the sex industry. “I’m not saying policing was not a part of it, but if I have a view it has to be tested. I have no doubt that Bratton has the best interests of New York at heart. But I think he sees what he wants to see.”
One day recently in a courtroom at Manhattan’s Criminal Court Building, at 100 Centre Street, thirty-one defendants who had been arrested for misdemeanors appeared before the judge. Only one was white—a homeless man. Two of the defendants had been apprehended the day before as trespassers for using a Port Authority bathroom that the police said required that they show a bus ticket. “They threw me against the wall, completely searched me, patted and frisked me in front of all these people, and threw cuffs on me,” Wendell Moore, a thirty-two-year-old man and a father of seven children, told me. The police found a cell phone on him that they claimed was not his. He spent the night in jail, and the next day was charged and released. “Other people going to that bathroom they didn’t stop,” Moore said. “They only stopped two black kids. They didn’t know who had tickets.”
Ed McCarthy, a longtime Legal Aid attorney, told me that broken-windows arrests have a way of steering people into the criminal-justice system. Clients who are younger than Moore often plead guilty, he said, because the alternative is worse: “You have a kid who’s nineteen, twenty years of age. He’s no longer eligible for youthful-offender status. He’s now jumped a turnstile for the third or fourth time, and the D.A.’s policy is ‘No, he’s had his chance. He’s going to be arrested or stay in jail because he’s had a couple of warrants.’ And, of course, if you’re nineteen and the choice is plead guilty, get a record, and go home, or risk going into Rikers for four or five days or even longer, what would you do? You obviously are going to plead guilty.” A criminal record of any kind can prevent a person from getting a job. And, because broken-windows singles out “recidivists,” convictions can quickly accumulate.
Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York branch of the A.C.L.U., said of Bratton’s defense of broken-windows, “There is insufficient concern that a generation of young people, particularly young men of color, have grown up thinking that their legal rights aren’t worth anything, that their dignity isn’t worth anything, that their freedom isn’t worth anything.” She went on, “That’s a huge omission. It doesn’t speak of racial animus. It speaks of a race-bound kind of tunnel vision about how we look at social policy and at policing policy in particular.”
In April, de Blasio again expressed support for the broken-windows approach. “I want to emphasize, my vision of quality-of-life policing and my vision related to the broken-windows strategy is the same as Commissioner Bratton’s,” he said. But many left-leaning activists struggle to understand his reasoning. “De Blasio can’t credibly present himself as a progressive dedicated to equality when broken-windows is both a violation of human rights and a ‘Tale of Two Cities’ writ large,” Robert Gangi, the director of the Police Reform Organizing Project, and a longtime critic of broken-windows, told me. Melissa Mark-Viverito, the City Council speaker, has called for low-level offenses such as public urination and turnstile-jumping to be decriminalized. Bratton has opposed such efforts. However, last November, the police department reduced the penalty for the possession of small amounts of marijuana from an arrest to a summons.
In August of last year, Bratton publicly conceded that the video showing the choke hold that led to the death of Eric Garner was “certainly disturbing.” And although Bratton maintains that community policing has always been central to his work, his closest advisers have acknowledged the need to adjust the department’s policing strategies. “The police environment has changed,” Robert Wasserman says. In 1994, when Bratton began his first tenure as N.Y.P.D. commissioner, crime was rampant, and the issues that he addressed revolved around what Wasserman called “policing solutions,” and consulting the community was not the highest priority. Today, Wasserman added, Bratton has to overcome the community’s “sense that cops only want to arrest people.” Jeffrey Fagan, of Columbia, told me, “When people aren’t in love with the police, they don’t help the police, they don’t coöperate with the police. Communities are the experts on crime, not the police; they know who the bad guys are.”
“One of the biggest challenges facing me now,” Bratton said, “is to continue to advocate for, and continue to implement, broken-windows, quality-of-life policing, because I think it’s essential to how the city feels about itself, and it has an impact on over-all crime. We should not make the mistake of my predecessor on the stop-question-and-frisk issue. We have to insure that the amount of it is appropriate to the issues that we’re facing, and be sure that it’s being done constitutionally, and that it’s being done compassionately, and by that I mean respectfully.”
Bratton often says that the police are “sales reps” and citizens are “customers.” At a buffet breakfast at the Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Jamaica, Queens, last February, he told the audience that the N.Y.P.D. “needs to face the hard truth that in our most vulnerable neighborhoods we have a problem with citizen satisfaction. We are often abrupt, sometimes rude, and that’s unacceptable.” Subsequently, Bratton told me, “We want cops to be able to see the people they’re policing. In this department, and maybe in a lot of American policing today, unfortunately, too many members don’t treat people appropriately.”
In late June, in an effort to improve customer service, Bratton unveiled a new neighborhood-policing plan called “One City: Safe and Fair—Everywhere,” which assigns the same officers to the same areas (rather than shifting them around) and has them spend a third of their shifts on foot, talking with residents, merchants, and community leaders. Since January, all officers are required to take a three-day training course each year, one day of which has been devoted to “Smart Policing,” which aims to improve how the police interact with citizens.
At 7 A.M. on a Wednesday in June, I joined a hundred or so officers from the South Bronx’s Forty-fourth Precinct in a classroom at the Police Academy, in College Point, Queens, for a daylong tutorial on empathy and discretion. Detective Ricky Taggart, a thirty-year veteran of the N.Y.P.D.—jacketless, gun on hip, rose-colored suspenders over a midnight-blue shirt—paced back and forth at the front of the room. In a booming voice, Taggart told the assembled officers that the N.Y.P.D. does “a great job,” but “we can do better.” The day’s lesson was meant to be a “skill enhancer,” focussing on improving the officers’ interpersonal skills. In the course of the day, they were cautioned to listen, be patient, and control their emotions and anger. “If an irate citizen starts yelling at you, don’t take it as a personal attack,” he said.
After lunch in the cafeteria, the officers reassembled for a presentation by Moise Tingué, a sergeant who has been on the force for twenty-three years. Tingué dimmed the lights, and on a large screen behind him the words “What Is Winning?” appeared, introducing a PowerPoint presentation. Tingué said, “Winning is gaining voluntary compliance”—an officer can stop to listen to a suspect’s explanation or ask him to comply, rather than immediately issuing a summons or reaching for his handcuffs. He showed videos of officers using excessive force—bashing young protesters on the Lower East Side, trying to control a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge. Then he highlighted an officer who’d been punched but, instead of lashing out at other, nonviolent demonstrators, and provoking a melee, calmly stayed in position.
The officers in the room, who ranged in age from early twenties to late fifties and in rank from rookie to precinct commander, were serious and attentive. The mood brightened when Taggart returned and displayed the opening screen of another PowerPoint presentation: “Controlling Language: Do We Have to Curse?” He played a clip of Dustin Hoffman, in “Midnight Cowboy,” cursing, and of Robert De Niro, in “Taxi Driver,” swearing constantly. As a counterpoint, Taggart then played an audio clip of Captain Chesley Sullenberger III, the U.S. Airways pilot who, in 2009, landed his Airbus A320 in the Hudson River after a flock of geese flew into the engines and disabled them. Not once did Sullenberger curse or raise his voice, Taggart noted. He offered some suggestions. Instead of shouting “Fuck you!” or “Shut the fuck up!,” the officers could try alternatives, like “Stop mucking around!” or “Move the car, my friend.” The officers burst into laughter. “Remember, ladies and gentlemen, we’re the professionals,” Taggart said. “The people out there are our customers.”
Bratton has no illusions that a three-day-a-year class is an antidote for insensitivity or for the biases that afflict some officers in New York and other cities. Still, he noted, most of the complaints that citizens have about the police “are about language: ‘An officer swore at me.’ ‘He treated me disrespectfully.’ ” Bratton went on, “A lot of the training that we’re doing with our officers” is centered “on an officer’s approach to people and treating them respectfully. To see if we can get rid of the F-word. We joke that if we got rid of three, four words from a cop’s vocabulary we’d solve half the problem.”
There are deep fissures within the N.Y.P.D. During the past decade, the department has failed to raise the number of black cops above sixteen per cent, in a city where blacks make up twenty-three per cent of the population. In June, black trainees were just ten per cent of the Police Academy’s graduating class. First Deputy Commissioner Ben B. Tucker places the blame for the problem, in part, on the fact that black candidates have a higher percentage of quality-of-life violations on their record, so they don’t get a second look. (The N.Y.P.D. says it is changing this process.) A bigger reason, he believes, is that many young blacks don’t aspire to be cops “because of how they were treated” by them. “We’re not user-friendly.”
In his office late one afternoon, Bratton told me, “You’ve got the historical issue of the tension between the black population and the police.” In Los Angeles, he commissioned a study to determine why the L.A.P.D. was having a hard time recruiting black officers. The main factor, he said, was “mothers, sisters, girlfriends, who for years had seen their men being disrespected by the police. And in L.A. there was a practice of putting people down, kneeling on the sidewalk, hands behind their head. ‘Why do you want to join an organization that’s been so disrespectful of you?’ So the profession was not one that was honored in the black community.” Bratton added, “Here, right now, we’ve got several factors at work,” including, “in recent times, the Trayvon Martin and the Garner incidents, and the incident in Missouri.”
Creating a force of more empathetic cops requires more than diversifying its composition. It’s also a matter of changing the way officers view their jobs. Stephen P. Davis, a retired police captain who worked with Bratton in New York in the nineties, and who now works for him as deputy commissioner of public information, said, “We never looked at ourselves as a social agency.” Doing so, he added, would mean that “we are not really law-enforcement officers. It means we are public-safety officers. Cops don’t like that. They feel it makes them like social workers.” Ekow Yankah, of Cardozo, says that changing the police culture requires a more dramatic approach, starting with “whom we recruit to be police officers.” He approves of Bratton’s efforts to train cops “to have a different attitude,” but says that it’s also essential to “find the person who enjoys wielding power and weed him out.”
Whatever Bratton does, he’ll have to contend with the P.B.A. president, Patrick Lynch, who staunchly defends individual officers even when they are accused of abuse. Lynch and his staff of a hundred occupy the eleventh floor of 125 Broad Street, at the tip of Manhattan. Lynch, who is fifty-one, was first elected president of the twenty-three-thousand-member union at the age of thirty-five. He told me that he supports Bratton’s initiative to subject all cops to three extra days of training annually and conceded that officers “need training on how to bring someone to the ground who is resisting arrest.”
Lynch can sound reasonable, but he can quickly turn bellicose. Before he was reëlected, in June, the P.B.A. Web site attacked his critics within the organization as “traitors to the union” who “played right into the hands of our liberal, cop-hating Mayor.” This spring, Lynch told me that cops have “the worst relations” with City Hall in three decades, because they lack de Blasio’s support. “We feel we get it from the police commissioner’s office. But when it comes from City Hall it feels like a throwaway line, like he really doesn’t believe what he’s saying.” I asked Lynch about his “blood on the hands” remark regarding de Blasio. “Those were the words and feelings of members,” he said. The demonstrations and the Mayor’s words created an environment that “led to the assassination of two police officers.” Of the gunman who killed the two officers in December, he said, “Why did he travel to New York? The answer is that the atmosphere here was fertile.”
Bratton believes that Lynch has failed to credit de Blasio for giving the department things that support police officers, including bulletproof vests that are more protective and thirty per cent lighter, as well as a smartphone for every officer and tablets for sixty-five hundred patrol cars, giving officers quick access to data and reducing the amount of paperwork. Still, the P.B.A. has gone without a new contract since 2010. This past spring, Melissa Mark-Viverito, the City Council speaker, and Letitia James, the city’s public advocate, among others, called for the Mayor to add a thousand cops, a request that fell short of Lynch’s request for an increase of seven thousand. De Blasio opposed adding more officers, but Bratton, without specifying a number, publicly declared that the department needed them.
The Polo Bar, Ralph Lauren’s new restaurant, off Fifth Avenue, is a difficult reservation to secure, but, on a week night in late March, Bratton and his wife, Rikki Klieman, a legal analyst for CBS News and a former criminal-defense attorney, were sitting in a choice banquette along the wall. “This is the new ‘in’ spot for the one-per-centers,” Bratton said, with a chuckle. They greeted Dylan Lauren, Ralph’s daughter, and the WNBC-TV anchor Chuck Scarborough and his wife, Ellen, who are friends of the couple in the Hamptons. Then Bratton pointed out his two favorite items on the menu: the rib-eye steak from Ralph Lauren’s Colorado ranch and the corned-beef sandwich.
While running for mayor, de Blasio exhorted rich New Yorkers to cede more of their income to “the other New York.” As a result, Bratton said, “one-per-centers have a significant dislike” of de Blasio, but he added that “they have a hard time pointing to anything negative he’s done since he’s been elected.” He praised de Blasio’s introduction of universal pre-K education, his support for affordable housing, and his maintenance of a vibrant economy. As for policing, he said, “There’s nothing we’ve disagreed on in the months I’ve worked for him. He’s done more for the police than any mayor I’ve served in thirty years.”
Bratton has a two-hour meeting with the Mayor every week, and they talk regularly. “His temperament is very much like mine,” he said. “I’m like this”—he held two steady hands horizontally over his charred rib eye. “Even in the midst of all the demonstrations and craziness in December and January, there was no screaming, no demanding. He’s a very collaborative individual.” John Miller, the deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, and Bratton’s confidant, told me that, in contrast to Giuliani, “Mayor de Blasio is very comfortable conducting an orchestra. Giuliani was a soloist. He didn’t like any instruments to play too loud.” De Blasio declined to be interviewed, but Anthony E. Shorris, the first deputy mayor, told me, “I’ve never seen anybody have a bad moment face to face, even on a staff level.”
So far, de Blasio’s need to appear pro-police seems to work in Bratton’s favor. On June 22nd, the Mayor announced that he had agreed to add thirteen hundred cops to the force—three hundred more than the number sought by Mark-Viverito. The next day, Bratton invited minority ministers from around the city to an Urban Ministers Symposium, in the gymnasium-like auditorium of Police Headquarters, where they were briefed on what the department is doing to improve community relations, and were asked for their help in preventing crime and in recruiting more black cops. De Blasio wasn’t scheduled to appear, but he came, he said, because “the commissioner told me of this extraordinary gathering.” He extolled New York as “the safest big city in America” and praised the “profound reforms under way” in the N.Y.P.D. For months, he had flatly insisted that no new cops would be added to the department; now he suggested that he had always been in favor of enlarging the force to support Bratton’s efforts to improve neighborhood policing.
At a press conference afterward, a reporter asked Bratton what role he had played in securing the added cops. He conceded that the over-all total, thirteen hundred, was “not a number that was just pulled out of the sky—this was a very specific, detailed number,” and one that his staff had privately recommended to the Mayor after a careful analysis.
Another reporter asked how, if crime is so low, Bratton convinced the Mayor that the city needs more officers. Bratton replied that there are more 911 and 311 calls, more danger from terrorists, a million more residents than in the nineteen-nineties, and more tourists. The city was growing, “and the police department had not been.” He said that the workforce increase would bolster the experimental community-policing program. Shorris told me that “there was no rationale” for adding more officers in order to fight crime, since New York “is the safest major city in the U.S. But the argument that found a sympathetic ear with the Mayor was a much more profound question about how to change policing.”
During the press conference, however, when I asked Bratton about his commitment to broken-windows, he said, “Quality-of-life policing is not going away. Not so long as I’m commissioner, and I don’t think so long as Mayor de Blasio is mayor. He understands it. He believes in it. We are committed to it. But we are committed to doing it in a way that, unlike unfortunately what happened with stop-question-and-frisk—we will continue to try and do it in a way that is not alienating but, rather, gaining support for what we do.”
Ekow Yankah told me, “I actually think this is sad, in a way. Bratton is a complicated guy. He strikes me in some ways as deeply caring that police do better both for police officers and for citizens. So I don’t think he’s some awful bogeyman.” But, he said, “no matter how much good he does, I think the legacy of broken-windows will be a huge scar. Because otherwise he’d have a chance of having a tremendous legacy.”
At the Polo Bar, I asked Bratton if he had given any thought to his legacy. He had, of course: “That I will once again accomplish what I set out to do many years ago and become the most significant person in policing in the country. I think I achieved that in the nineties.” Klieman exclaimed, “And the boys are back.” She meant his longtime colleagues and advisers, including John Miller, Stephen Davis, Robert Wasserman, and the sociologist George Kelling.
“If you look at the characters around me, the only one missing is Jack,” Bratton said, referring to Maple. “Everybody wanted to get back on the stage one last time, because we all miss it. We all want to be part of a great thing. We had it in ’94. We have it now.” ♦
