(AP Photo/Mary Altaffer). New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton is joined by Mayor Bill de Blasio during a news conference, Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2016, in New York’s City Hall.
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Bratton also had to contend with antipathy toward de Blasio from rank-and-file officers angered by the mayor’s comments about police brutality.
The Tiffany gold and platinum commissioner shield that O’Neill inherits comes with the same mandate that Bratton had: Keep crime rates at historic lows while helping Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio fulfill a campaign pledge to heal the NYPD’s rift with minorities who have long complained of unfair treatment.
New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton will step down in September, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced during a Tuesday news conference.
“Policing is never done; it’s always an unfinished business”, Bratton said in his remarks. After the incident, O’Neill reportedly went to Bratton and asked for advice.
“He’s a cop’s cop”, one high-ranking officer said of longtime NYPD veteran and soon-to-be Police Commissioner James “Jimmy” O’Neill.
Bratton, 68, began his career as a patrolman in Boston in 1970 and built a resume unmatched in local law enforcement, heading police departments in Boston, Los Angeles and NY.
Chief O’Neill said he knows the department still needs work to improve relations especially in the city’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods. He said Bratton explained in the ruse, cops sent out letters to the perpetrators who blended among the other recruits.
The report also found that the policy was costly to the city “in police time, in an increase of the number of people brought into the criminal justice system and, at times, in a fraying of the relationship between the police and the communities they serve”. He has been chief of department, the department’s highest uniformed position, since November 2014.
So what will the NYPD look like under James O’Neill?
De Blasio hailed Bratton’s contributions as “inestimable” and said he had “tremendous faith” in O’Neill’s neighborhood policing initiative.
Mr de Blasio was elected as a sharp critic of the stop-and-frisk tactic, which involved stopping and searching huge numbers of young black men. Under Bratton, the department also drastically scaled back controversial “Stop and Frisk”, but stepped up enforcement against so-called quality-of-life crimes – the “broken windows” theory of cracking down on petty crimes as a deterrent to more serious offenses.
Minutes later, de Blasio said Bratton had been doing an outstanding job and has “made clear he is not prepared to stay into a second term – I absolutely respect that – especially after all he has given the city over the years”.
Then Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were ambushed and shot dead by a gunman who had announced online he planned to kill police in retaliation for Garner’s death. According to the Los Angeles Times, Bratton is leaving his post “with reluctance”, but he and his wife were given another opportunity he called “extraordinarily exciting”. In an extraordinary display of scorn, officers turned their back on the mayor at a hospital on the night of the December 2012 killings and again at the officers’ funerals.
“It’s a crisis in America at this moment; the national election is revolving around it. I would argue that we are farther along in New York City than most places to meet it”.
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He was no longer proactively policing because of all of the new protocols, the cameras, the overseers, and the City Council standing on his throat.
