Bratton was a national figure when he returned for his second stint as commissioner in 2014, with enormous personal clout in dealing with City Hall and all the city’s loud interests. He has also been the Los Angeles police chief and the Boston police commissioner.
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There was face painting, fun and food, but the festivities also served as a farewell tour for Bratton and gave O’Neill the chance to address cops and community members in a more informal and personal setting.
Bratton, commissioner of the New York Police Department, will step down next month to take a job in the private sector. During his most recent tenure, crime has been at record lows, and I have been proud to work with Commissioner Bratton to usher in new technologies, such as body-worn cameras and ShotSpotter, to improve criminal justice policy.
During his first stint as New York’s police commissioner from 1994 to 1996 under tough-on-crime Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Bratton put the theory into action by cracking down on petty crimes at a time when the city was a far more unsafe place.
“The overall majority of these officers are here to help us and that’s what I think and that’s why I think it’s a very good thing what they’re doing today”, said one Astoria resident. In this initiative, officers are assigned to certain precincts and ordered to mesh with the community on a personal level.
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. “Our next police commissioner’s decades of experience make him uniquely qualified to continue building on these incredible public safety achievements”.
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.
Some civil liberties activists and others cautioned on Tuesday that the new emphasis on neighborhood policing is little more than repackaging a limited concept.
Calling his accomplishments “literally inestimable and extraordinary”, de Blasio credited Bratton with pushing the city’s crime levels to historic lows and working to fix relations between the department and the communities it protects.
“We will hold you accountable in the exact same way we would for anyone that is in this position”, Blake said. Protesters say they’re not sure how long they’ll be here. He recounted how his 18-year-old son was recently stopped and questioned by police for playing “Pokemon Go” in a Bronx park. “Again American policing is being challenged in revolutionary ways to build trust in communities that have lost trust in us”.
“They could be nicer”, he said.
He praised O’Neill, an East Flatbush native, as a commander who would implement the mayor’s vision for police and community relations.
The 68-year-old is the only person to head the NY and Los Angeles police – the two largest police departments in the country. But like every previous change atop the Police Department, the nation’s largest force, the news raised a host of questions about its direction.
In his first term as NYPD commissioner in the early 1990s, Bratton was credited with driving down crime with the widely-copied CompStat strategy.
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“After I picked him up off the floor and got him on my couch”, he quipped, “we had a two-hour conversation about where I was going and why”.
