Change Management ( Kaisen, CAT and NYPD)

Weekend Confidential

William Bratton on Being New York's

Policeman

New York's police commissioner on the challenges of his job

and a racially tinged controversy

By

Alexandra Wolfe

Aug. 1, 2014 5:38 p.m. ET

William Bratton David Yellen for The Wall Street Journal

In mid-July, two New York City police officers put Eric Garner, a heavyset African-American man,

into a chokehold—a maneuver banned by the New York Police Department. The man, they say, was

resisting arrest for selling single untaxed cigarettes. Mr. Garner died, leading to an eruption of racial

tension and enmity against the NYPD. On Friday, the city medical examiner determined the

chokehold was a main factor in his death.

It is the first big test for the city's new mayor, Bill de Blasio, and his star police commissioner,

William Bratton, who recently returned to a city he famously helped to make safer in the 1990s.

After running the Los Angeles Police Department for seven years, followed by a foray into the

private sector, Mr. Bratton is seven months into his second stint in New York.

The department is facing several challenges to its policing strategy. Mr. de Blasio has called for a

reduction in the stop-and-frisk policy—under which police can stop and search someone who strikes

them as suspicious.

"We have tried to develop less than lethal, non-lethal types of equipment that allow officers to

not have to resort to the gun as quickly. I try to train them if you use a club how to use it

humanely, so you can't hit someone in the head. The Taser has been very controversial because

you don't shoot somebody, but if you get somebody with a weak heart…and if you overdose him

with too much of it you can kill him. Similarly, in this instance, in Staten Island if the officers

had resorted to use of pepper spray with his asthmatic condition they might have killed him with

that, so the officers have an incredible dilemma in terms of what is the appropriate level of force.

There's an expression in the law community: It's lawful but it looks awful. It never looks pretty."

George Kelling, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who first conceptualized the broken

windows theory with James Q. Wilson in a 1982 article, on Mr. Bratton:

"What Bill did more than anyone else did in the last decade of 20th century was put police back

into neighborhoods and restore the original model of policing. The issue is how much do you

want a real police presence in the community, and once you have that police presence, what do

you want them to do?"

As for Mr. Bratton, he has long been associated with another controversial idea in policing: the

"broken windows" theory, which holds that keeping minor crimes under control ultimately reduces

overall criminal activity, including major offenses. Coined by the criminologists George Kelling and

James Q. Wilson in 1982, the idea has since been adopted around the world. Mr. Bratton became an

early proponent—starting in the 1970s, he says—and still swears by it today.

Six days after the fatal incident on Staten Island, Mr. Bratton, 66, is sitting in his office on the 14th

floor of police headquarters. He's just come from a meeting in a conference room that looks

strikingly different, he says, from the way it did when he held meetings there 20 years ago. Screens

around the room feature video feeds from cameras fixed on high-profile public spaces, part of a

monitoring system throughout Manhattan.

New York's use of the stop-and-frisk policy, which critics say is racially discriminatory, has been in

decline since 2013. In the wake of the Staten Island tragedy, many of the same critics are charging

Mr. Bratton's broken windows quality-of-life policing with the same sort of racial bias. Meanwhile,

supporters of stop-and-frisk are citing its curtailment as a reason for a recent rise in shootings.

"Mayor de Blasio wanted policing that would try to heal some of the racial divisiveness that New

York and Los Angeles are known for," says Mr. Bratton. "So the irony of this current issue we're

now dealing with, [which] has so many racial overtones to it, is that it's really the first test of him as

mayor and his new administration on an issue he campaigned on…and it's the first test for me and

our relationship."

Mr. Bratton objects to the charge that Mr. Garner's death is evidence that "broken windows" policing

should be scaled back. "A lot of people are saying police enforcement is racist because it seems like

it's focusing on blacks and Latinos," Mr. Bratton says. He says that officers are trained to react to

behavior, not to race or class. "If the behavior engaged in is against the law, what are we expected to

do? You can't turn a blind eye to it, because then it looks like we're giving racial preference," he

adds.

Born in Boston in 1947, Mr. Bratton served in the military police during the Vietnam War after high

school. He later became a beat cop in the Boston Police Department. In 1976, he won a medal of

valor (now on the shelf in his current office) for defusing a racially charged situation at a time when

Boston's public schools were being desegregated. After arriving on the scene of a bank robbery in a

mostly white area of South Boston, Mr. Bratton fought through a hostile crowd surrounding a tall

African-American man who was holding a gun to the head of a white woman. He approached the

man with his own gun out, and while they circled each other, Mr. Bratton lowered his gun and talked

the suspect into lowering his, at which point other officers apprehended him.

Good training is instrumental to handling such situations, he says. He knew that he had to lower the

tension and took the risk of putting his weapon down first.

Mr. Bratton is now counting on training to "deflate some of the pressure" from the Staten Island

crisis. He has sent a group of NYPD personnel to meet with their counterparts in the LAPD to talk

about training issues and procedures. Eventually, he hopes to retrain the entire NYPD on takedown

procedures and the use of force.

Mr. Bratton's career hasn't always gone smoothly. In 1996, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani pushed him out

two years into his tenure as police commissioner. Mr. Bratton says that he butted heads with Mr.

Giuliani over how to run the department. "Mayor Giuliani was a micromanager because so much of

his professional career had been in law enforcement. He had not only knowledge but he had interest,

so he was very engaged in the police department, too much so from my perspective," he says. "That

led to great tension and ultimately me moving on."

Mr. Giuliani says that his previous positions, including as U.S. associate attorney general under

President Ronald Reagan, gave him experience in fighting crime. "If I was getting involved in

economic issues, that would be different," the former mayor says with a laugh. Plus, Mr. Giuliani

says that he had never planned on keeping one commissioner for the length of his administration. "It

is true that I spent a great deal of time involved in police matters," he says. "There's a reason for that.

I was elected solely to reduce crime." He still credits Mr. Bratton for getting crime reduction "off to a

tremendous start," and he thinks he's Mayor de Blasio's best appointment. "If anybody can do it, he

can do it."

Mr. Bratton says he decided to come back to New York because he was concerned about the growing

racial tension over stop-and-frisk, as well as the threat of terrorism. "A lot of people in this town

were concerned the mayor was progressive in his policies—a lot of one-percenters, if you will," he

says. Some people were worried the change in administration might mean New York would be going

back to the "bad old days" when crime was high. Mr. Bratton says he wanted to make sure that didn't

happen.

Going forward, through "predictive policing"—data systems like CompStat, which he first oversaw

with Mr. Giuliani and their late colleague Jack Maple, that predict where crime is likely to occur—

Mr. Bratton thinks crime will continue to go down. "I've been very fortunate in my career," he says.

"I may have failed in terms of managing up in instances, but by and large, I didn't come into New

York to fail this time."

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