Still, Bratton said, “we are farther along in New York City than most places” in improving relationships between police and minorities, thanks to training and other measures.
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“As the top-ranking uniformed member of the NYPD, Jimmy has spent each day ensuring that New York City remains the safest big city in America”, said de Blasio.
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s swift appointment of Bratton in 2014 was a positive sign to many in the business community, some of whom feared a softer approach to crime from the self-proclaimed progressive. O’Neill was repeatedly called the chief architect of community policing in the NYPD.
Brooklyn-native James O’Neill was officially named the next commissioner during a press conference on Tuesday, 33 years after he first started patrolling subways between 8 p.m. and 4 a.m.in Transit District 1. He served as police commissioner in NY for the first time in the mid-’90s and then took the top job in Los Angeles from 2002 to 2009.
During the press conference, O’Neill credited neighborhood policing with “lowering crime, but not at the expense of losing the vital support of the people we are sworn to protect and serve”.
Mayor Bill de Blasio will make the announcement. “A lot of folks in our community know O’Neill and have lot of confidence in him”, said one real estate source.
O’Neill, who grew up in East Flatbush, said he learned how to “talk to every type of person imaginable”.
Meanwhile, two high-ranking officers and a businessman have been arrested in an ongoing corruption probe.
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that O’Neill was transferred out of a department he had headed in 2008, after it was discovered his officers had handed out drugs to informants, instead of paying them in cash.
“We will hold you accountable in the exact same way we would for anyone that is in this position”, Blake said. “That’s all we have to say about it”.
A federal judge ruled that the tactic was an unconstitutional form of racial profiling in 2013, just months before de Blasio and Bratton took office.
Here are six things to know about the new commissioner. Crime fell dramatically. He left in 1996 and later led the Los Angeles Police Department from 2002 to 2009. “And, as long as I am mayor, I welcome him to continue being police commissioner”.
Bratton, who led the department in the 1990s before returning in 2014, noted that he was leaving at a fraught point for police-community relations but said he felt confident in the department’s future.
“I don’t think he’s gonna do any better”, said Wayne Newton, a 51-year-old barber from the Bronx. Before the ambush attacks on officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge last month, New York City experienced a similar incident, in December 2014, when a man shot and killed two officers as they sat in their squad vehicle.
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Then two officers were killed by a gunman who had announced online his plans to kill police in retaliation for Garner’s death.
