Nonprofits, Advocates assess Bratton’s legacy and O’Neill’s hire

Nonprofits and criminal justice reform advocates shared a mixed reaction to Tuesday’s announcement that New York City Police Commissioner William J. Bratton will retire next month. While his tenure was marked by a sharp reduction in stop-and-frisks, some groups remained critical of his embrace of “broken windows” policing - a practice based on the theory that enforcing smaller, “quality-of-life” violations will reduce more serious crimes.

Bratton’s tenure also overlapped with a national focus on policing, as protests erupted after a string of high-profile police shootings of unarmed black men, and after Eric Garner of Staten Island died after an officer brought him to the ground in a chokehold. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s relationship with the NYPD rank-and-file deteriorated two years ago after two officers - Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu - were killed by a man who claimed to be avenging Garner’s death.

In a statement to New York Nonprofit Media, George McDonald, founder and president of The Doe Fund, called Bratton an “extraordinary police commissioner” for reducing crime while respecting residents’ constitutional rights.

“The relationship between the police and the communities they serve has improved dramatically with the essential cessation of stop-question-and-frisk,” he said. “Heretofore, the futures of hundreds of thousands of young men of color were blocked by destructive stop-question-and-frisk policies. They were up against the wall. Bratton tore down that wall.”

Bratton’s successor, James O’Neill, a cop since 1983, has emphasized a neighborhood-policing model, which encourages officers to establish relationships in the areas they patrol. De Blasio said this week that the strategy, which will be adopted at 51 percent of precincts by the fall, would create a “truly deep and consistent bond between police and community.”

McDonald said O’Neill was the “perfect choice” to expand and improve the community policing implemented by Bratton and de Blasio. 

Following a 2013 federal ruling that found the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy to be racially biased, the stops declined from 685,724 in 2011 to 24,468 last year, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, even as crime continued to drop citywide. 

“We commend Commissioner Bratton for putting in place the department’s first use of force policy and implementing important trainings to keep New Yorkers safer in their interactions with police,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU. But, she said, Bratton had been “stubbornly committed” to broken windows-based policing and resisted calls for transparency and the use of “invasive” surveillance technology. “We need a new era of policing in New York,” she said. “The new commissioner should embrace de-escalation tactics and community-based policing.”

Benjamin Ndugga-Kabuye, an organizer with the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, who was involved in the protests at City Hall Park that immediately preceded Bratton’s resignation, said he considered Bratton’s departure a victory. While one of the protestors’ goals was to see Bratton fired, he said the coalition also wants to end broken windows policing that adversely affects people of color, make the NYPD financially responsible after lawsuits and other claims, and reallocate city money away from policing toward housing and employment programs. 

“If Bratton is the architect and the visionary for broken windows, O’Neill was one of the mechanics and the drivers of the policy,” Ndugga-Kabuye said. 

He considers the neighborhood-based policing model a deflection, pointing to the fact that residents of color are disproportionately arrested for fare-beating. “Our members of our community come from neighborhoods where people do know police officers’ names, their badge numbers, because those are the people who arrest them frequently, those are the people who ticket them frequently,” he said.

Richard Aborn, president of the Citizens Crime Commission, a nonprofit think tank, lauded Bratton as the “father of modern policing and an architect of the greatest decline in crime in the history of our country.”

“Perhaps no other appointed official has had the positive impact on our city that Bill Bratton has,” he said in a statement. “He will be missed, but his work will live on in the safer streets of the cities he policed, improving police-community relations and in the better lives of the residents he protected.”

JoAnne Page, president and CEO of the Fortune Society, which backs prison reentry programs, told NYN Media through a spokesperson that she hoped the department would evolve to develop better relationships with residents of at-risk neighborhoods. 

“Commissioner O'Neill now has the opportunity to make substantive changes in the way that police interactions take place, and ultimately cultivate a stronger relationship with the NYPD where young people can trust and turn to the police for safety, and the police can encourage a willingness from the community to offer their support," she said.