Bratton Interview

WILLIAM BRATTON

Interview by Joe Diamond

As Police Commissioner of New York City from 1994 to 1996, William Bratton significantly lowered crime by using new police strategies that focused on "quality of life" problems as well as major crimes and put 6,000 more police officers on the city's streets. The result was the stunning announcement that in Bratton's first year in office, murders fell 19 percent and robberies and auto theft fell 15 percent; Crime fell in each of the city's 76 precincts and decreased the most in poorer neighborhoods plagued by crime. At the same time, 73 percent of New Yorkers reported that they felt positively about their police department-32 percent higher than the national average. Bratton recently resigned from his position to start his own security business.

OnPatrol was lucky enough to catch William Bratton during one of his few free moments to ask him about his tricks of the trade.

Q: When did you first become an adherent of the "Broken Windows" theory?

A: As a sergeant, then a lieutenant, I ran a neighborhood policing program in one of the busiest police districts in Boston. I saw firsthand in one of the city's most crime-ridden areas that my perception as a police officer of what was on people's minds-rape, murder, burglary-was very different than what the public was really thinking about: the prostitute that was in the hallway of the apartment building, or the kids drinking on the corner, or the noisy parties, or the graffiti. It was an eye opener for me. What the public wanted us to deal with were things that affected their quality of life.

That was 1977, '78, '79. The "Broken Windows" article came out in 1982. A couple of skilled writers and respected criminologists wrote about an experiment in which they parked a new, undamaged car in an area. For days it sat there and nobody bothered it. But then they parked a car there with some damage, a broken window, with the hood up, and in a couple of days it was stripped. The idea was that the first broken window led to other things. When I read it, I thought, "Wow, this is what I've been espousing."

The idea really is that simple. The first person that painted the first piece of graffiti on a train in New York encouraged the next person, who thought, "Well Johnny's got his name there. I'm gonna put my name there." The first person who was allowed to sell dope on the street without the cops stopping him emboldened someone else. You can see how it builds from there.

Q: When you became New York City's Police Commissioner, you said something to the effect of: "We will fight for every house, we will fight for every block, we will fight for every neighborhood, and we will win!" Immediately the press started comparing you to Churchill.

A: Churchill is somebody that, as a kid growing up, I read a lot about. Something that I'm both complimented on and criticized about is my awareness of the press, of how to work with them, of being very mindful of their importance to any police manager.

Successful police executives today have to be good at many things and one of them is the sound bite. In dealing with the media, you have to seize the moment. That particular comment [about fighting for every street] said it all. That sound bite gave made it clear that no issue would be too small for us to focus on, that we would not give up any part of the city. Two years later, I think we'd delivered on that promise. The areas of the city that had the greatest decline in crime were the most troubled areas. Just before I left, plans that we'd worked on for several years for major anti-drug initiatives were underway. Using the war analogy again, I likened it to as if we'd "seized the beaches of Normandy" and were now moving into hedgerow country. We literally pushed the drug dealers off the streets in most neighborhoods. Many of them were now entrenched in buildings. And now it was going to be like hedgerow combat-you have to work very differently and much harder to get in and get them out of those buildings.

By seizing the streets, you do several things. One, you show success, rather than the abject failure of drug dealers on every corner. So it reinforces in the public's mind that the police are doing something, and it reinforces in the cop's mind that you can succeed. And it sends a clear message to the drug dealers that we're in this for real, that we are not going to give up. We are not just going to ride by and pay no attention to what they're doing, giving the impression that the streets belong to criminals.

Q: Do you think it also sends a message to younger people, especially from inner-city neighborhoods, who have not yet made a decision about dealing drugs but might look up to drug dealers who are often status symbols in their communities?

A: That's a very important question, and it's exactly what I've been about. During the two years I was commissioner, with the bully pulpit it provides, I tried to convince not only those in our profession, but those who study us-the criminologists, the academics, the media, the public-that, one, police can return to the role for which we were invented: preventing crime. It's a role we had moved away from and had been "excused" from having to perform most of the time I was in the business. And two, that police can control behavior with crime prevention.

Regarding your question about young people, let's take the average street, say, in East New York [a crime-ridden community in Brooklyn]. Drug gangs run those streets. Or did. Behavior is learned. If you're a young kid, what you're seeing every day is not police in charge, not society in charge, but streets where your family does not feel safe to sit outside, where they pretty much have to stay in their homes because drug dealers are in control of the streets. And they're flaunting their power, acting up, drinking, using dope, using gunplay to fight for control of the corner. So the kids' local heroes are drug dealers.

When I was a kid growing up in a poor neighborhood, there weren't a lot of playgrounds, so we hung on the corner. But you didn't drink on the corner, you didn't urinate on the corner, you didn't raise hell on the corner. Because if you did, your parents wouldn't stand for it or the cops would kick you off the corner. And they wouldn't have to be called. If they saw it, they acted on it.

Q: Can you define Compstat for me, and its contribution in bringing down crime in New York?

A: Compstat is technology, but it's also commonsense-a way of looking at how we police.
Compstat comes down to four basic principles which I would argue need to be the core principles of any police organization. You need, one, timely accurate intelligence to give you an idea of what's happening now. In the NYPD they were gathering intelligence three to four months after the fact.

The second principal is rapid response to what that intelligence is indicating. With the concern over terrorism right now, how do you defeat terrorists? Rapid response calls for "site hardening." If you know they're going to blow up a site, you literally don't give them the chance to do it. You harden the site to prevent it.
The third aspect is effective tactics. What are the best tactics to defeat drug dealers? Focus on an area where there's been a spate of shootings all of the sudden.

Lastly, what's needed is relentless follow-up. So often in policing, we announce a program and it runs great for a couple of months and then everyone forgets about it. What we've done at the NYPD is we stay with it. All the strategies are reviewed a couple of times a year and updated. None of them are sitting on the shelf.

Q: Some criminologists say New York's crime drop is mainly due to other factors besides policing. What's your take on that?

A: They're trying to show that the declines in crime were fueled by changes in the drug market, demographics, etc. We were pretty much able to shoot down every one of those arguments because in New York there were several factors at work that were not as clearly delineated in other areas or in the country as a whole.

There were dramatic, double-digit declines here, much more so than other areas of the country. And the fact that it happened so quickly when in the preceding three to four years crime had been going down one, two, three percent. Why all of a sudden? Demographics can't account for it. All the 12-year-olds didn't all of a sudden become 24-year-olds. The prison population all of a sudden didn't double and triple, so that there were no longer people out there committing crimes. It wasn't the economy. The economy had been improving, although slowly in New York City. The only thing you could point to is the start of 1994-you had a new mayor, new police commissioner, new strategies, more police.

More police definitely helps in New York. But it's how those police are utilized. And it's not just the police alone who have been responsible, although we've been a principal catalyst. There is now a comprehensive approach to crime. Other city agencies pay attention to the quality of life, so they clean up graffiti, they clean up litter. They enforce their rules and regulations. The police are never going to deal with this issue alone. It needs to be the police with the rest of the criminal justice system-the courts and district attorneys who have come to realize that little things count-and other city agencies who contribute to the sense that something is different.

Q: How can police around the country apply what you've done, and use what you've learned?

A: The beauty of it is that it's simple. Yes, you still have to chase 911 calls. We're still wrestling with the monster of 911. But there's not a police force in America that can't spend more time on quality of life issues.

Q: When you started as a cop on the beat in 1970, did you have any inkling of what was to come in your career?

A: No, not at all in those early days. I think the idea back then in my formative years moving up was, I'll make sergeant, maybe make detective. And to be quite frank, becoming a detective was, unlike so many other police, not something that ever really was a goal for me. I really believe the best detectives have a sixth sense about things and I didn't have that particular sixth sense. It was a limitation I recognized in terms of great detectives I knew. I enjoyed the uniformed side of the business and very early began to gravitate toward the management side. And that's one of the nice things about policing. There are a number of career paths to follow.

Q: How is the transition to the private sector going?

A: Actually it's going quite well. Throughout my career I knew at some point in time that I would exit the public sector to go into the private sector. That's always been a goal, a desire for a variety of reasons-new challenges; financially, there are more opportunities there.
I'm finding, as has been the case throughout my career, where I've had so many job changes-as chief of police, commissioner, superintendent-that I have an ability not to look back and just look forward.

In the looking back, it's not with regrets, it's that you miss the people, you miss the excitement, but I always understood that it was going to end. Going into the NYPD, there was the understanding that it would be a three to four year opportunity, but that at some point in time I would have to leave. I think I left at just the right time, with a high degree of popularity and acknowledgment for the success of what we accomplished.

I think in New York, my legacy-if there's a legacy-will have been for the intense focus on the importance of quality of life, coupled with strategic direction for police-the proposition that the police can prevent crime and bring neighborhoods under control.