New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton is leaving the nation’s largest police force, after getting credit for keeping crime down but grappling with tension between police and minority communities.
Advertisement
NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, who has overseen the department during the entirety of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s first term, announced his resignation Tuesday.
The NYPD Chief of Department James P. O’Neill will replace Bill Bratton as NYPD commissioner after Bratton resigns from the post in September.
Bratton’s retirement came as a surprise, as Bratton had been expected to stay on through next year’s mayoral election, city officials told ABC News.
Boston police Commissioner William B. Evans said Bratton supervised him early in his career.
Bratton, who started his second stint as police commissioner in 2014, announced today that he would be stepping down to take a job in the private sector.
Bratton also served as commissioner under Mayor Rudy Giuliani from 1994 through 1996, but left amid reports that the mayor resented Bratton’s high media profile.
Officers can be trained to bring “softer skills” to resolving problems, but “they’re not social workers, they’re not camp counselors – they’re law enforcement”, Eugene O’Donnell, a professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said Tuesday.
Bratton also oversaw the Boston and Los Angeles police departments and was briefly considered by then-British Prime Minister David Cameron for the London police chief job in 2011.
Last month, he told The New York Times he wouldn’t stay in his position past 2017, and said, “I have the luxury of going when I want to go”. Officers under his command at the Bronx’s 44th Precinct were evaluated on how successful they were at reducing crime by getting out of their patrol cars and establishing better relations with residents.
O’Neill said he would build on the foundations laid by Bratton, but said protests in 2014, which followed the death of an unarmed black father-of-five in custody, and the murder of two officers in December 2014 “signaled that change was necessary”.
For Bratton, who began as a beat cop in Boston in 1970 and rose to the highest perch in NY policing, the announcement most likely marked the close of his career as a police leader.
“Luckily in Staten Island we have a lot of civic groups, non-profits, organizations precincts that we all work together”, Marino said. After the incident, O’Neill reportedly went to Bratton and asked for advice. He’s been a NY cop since 1983, when he began as a patrolman with the old transit police department.
Appearing to back up Bratton’s assertion that his resignation was not connected to the federal probe of the NYPD, U.S. Atty.
Advertisement
“What that began in this city was the reality that our officers were at increased risk in a way that had not been felt for” decades, Bratton said. He said he hopes to keep “lowering crime, but not at the expense of losing the vital support of the people that we are sworn to protect and serve”.
