When William J. Bratton was appointed to his second stint as New York police commissioner by Mayor Bill de Blasio in late 2013, he said he wanted every New Yorker to think of the force as their police. Now, a year later, some of Bratton’s officers are turning their backs on the mayor of a city where many residents are furious at the cops.
The spirit of police-community partnership has been badly damaged in New York and across the country. But the best model for how to heal the racial and political divide is Bratton’s own experience fixing broken police departments in New York and Los Angeles.
The strands of New York’s police crisis are tangled with local and national politics, and with America’s racial problems. But Bratton doesn’t have to perform miracles now, any more than he did when he became commissioner in a frightened and polarized New York in 1994, or when he became commissioner in 2002 in a Los Angeles still grappling with the tensions that exploded in the Rodney King beating a decade before.
Bratton has not been shy about explaining his methods, and they’re a good deal more complicated than the “broken windows” and “stop and frisk” concepts that have become a shorthand for his approach. In the current mess, he could do worse than study his own record.
A starting point for Bratton’s re-reinvention might be “What We’ve Learned About Policing,” an article he wrote in City Journal in 1999 with William Andrews, his former special assistant, about the first NYPD stint. Bratton described his challenge then as motivating a disoriented, ill-managed department: “Like the corporate CEOs of that era, we began with a large, unfocused, inward-looking, bureaucratic organization, poor at internal communication or cooperation and chronically unresponsive to intelligence from the outer world.” Critics would say that description applies similarly to today’s NYPD.
Bratton began in 1994 by framing a plan of action that pulled 400 recommendations from dispirited precinct and unit commanders, lieutenants and sergeants, as well as the police union — then as now a power that had to be reckoned with. The proposals included new uniforms, improved training, better discipline and a serious internal-affairs department. Perhaps most important, power was devolved to the precinct commanders.
Bratton’s culture of accountability was also driven by technology. New computerized crime statistics, gathered and mapped in a database known as CompStat, allowed Bratton and his commanders to see precisely where crime was in the city and go after it. By stopping and frisking suspects of even minor crimes, Bratton made it much more risky for people to carry guns — with the result that gun homicides fell sharply, by 30 percent or more. This aggressive policing may have been carried too far, but at the time it was empowering for New Yorkers from every community. For a city where it had seemed that criminal gangs and drug dealers had the upper hand, the balance had been switched. Good policing is, almost by definition, community policing. As Bratton said last month at the funeral of slain officer Rafael Ramos, the police represent “the blue thread that holds our city together when disorder might pull it apart.”
Bratton’s challenge when he became commissioner in Los Angeles was, if anything, even harder. The story is recounted in another City Journal article, “The LAPD Remade,” written by John Buntin in 2013. Many black and Latino residents had come to see the LAPD as an occupying army. The brutality that surfaced in the video of the Rodney King beating was part of the culture that Bratton had to change.
Bratton reformed some of the tough-guy procedures of the LAPD and began working with the city’s African-American leadership. He reached out to the sharpest critics, such as John Mack of the Urban League, who later joined an official oversight body called the Board of Police Commissioners. And he began changing the racial composition of the force, so that it looked more like urban Los Angeles.
This management approach worked for Bratton in Los Angeles, as it had in New York. By 2007, his final year, violent crime had declined 54 percent from where it was in 2002. Buntin cites a 2009 survey reporting that 83 percent of Los Angeles residents rated the LAPD as good or excellent.
Perhaps the clearest example of the new culture of community policing was a case recounted by Jennifer Medina in The New York Times last August. It noted the difference in how the new LAPD handled the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man, Ezell Ford, shortly after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Where Ferguson responded with paramilitary tactics, the new LAPD flooded the city with officers who reached out to local activists and community leaders. Los Angeles remained calm, where Ferguson had exploded. There was now a “bank of trust” in the community, Earl Paysinger, an LAPD assistant chief, explained to Medina.
“The secret to the success of a community-policing program is the capabilities of patrol officers,” noted a 2005 article in Police magazine. That’s the part that Bratton understands. The police chief who can be said to have reinvented policing will have to do it once more.
David Ignatius’ email address is davidignatius@washpost.com.
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