Bratton’s exit plans echo the Giuliani era

New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton issued his second declaration of independence from Mayor Bill de Blasio Monday.

A year ago, he announced he wouldn’t be sticking around much after the 2017 election. He said about the same thing on Monday to The New York Times, which headlined its story: “Police Commissioner Bratton Won’t Stay on the Job past 2017.”

Such declarations are nothing less than extraordinary in the police world. They reflect Bratton’s towering ego as well as his stature both nationally and inside the de Blasio administration. It’s the mayor who announces his police commissioner’s departure. Police commissioners don’t announce their retirements until they actually leave. Usually they give 30 days. Bratton is giving what appears to be 16 months.

Bratton did something similar in his first term as police commissioner under Rudy Giuliani two decades ago. He announced he would depart for the private sector when he received a $1 million job offer. Unfortunately for Bratton, Giuliani – who was feuding with him over who deserved credit for the city’s dramatic crime declines – fired him first.

It was a different time then and Bratton was a different police commissioner. Following Giuliani’s election in 1993, the two came in like gangbusters. Trying to stem a seemingly intractable homicide rate – over 2,000 killings a year under Mayor David Dinkins – Giuliani and Bratton reflected the public’s fears and made fighting crime the department’s sole priority. Echoing Winston Churchill’s wartime cadences, Bratton declared: “We will fight for every house in this city. We will fight for every street. We will fight for every borough. We will win.”

Bratton dumped the old guard at Police Plaza, brought in his own team, installed a system of accountability known as CompStat and changed an NYPD culture in which officers had all but given up fighting crime. After two years, homicides dropped to under 1,000 a year, a decline that continues today. Bratton himself achieved national stature, appearing on the cover of the Jan. 15, 1996, issue of Time magazine, credited with turning around both the NYPD and New York City.

In retrospect, that job seemed simple. Back then, there was no ISIS, no fear of terrorism, no burgeoning corruption scandal that has led to the retirements, modifications or transfers of a dozen top brass – the scandal’s full dimensions as yet unknown. Most importantly, back then the media and the public appeared to support the police.

Today, for the first time in 20 years, the city has a Democratic mayor and fighting crime is no longer the department’s first priority. Instead, in his two and a half years in office under Mayor Bill de Blasio, Bratton’s first priority has been to ease tensions with black New Yorkers.

Indeed, a tidal wave of anti-police sentiment has swept across the city and the nation. In New York, this resulted in part from a decade of stop-and-frisk under Bratton’s predecessor and arch-enemy Ray Kelly, and in part from the police “chokehold” death of Eric Garner in Staten Island. Amid police killings of black men across the country, there appears to be an unbridgeable racial gap.

Even Bratton’s signature “broken windows” philosophy of policing is under question. While reducing crime, broken windows is now seen as having led to the arrests of thousands young black New Yorkers for minor crimes.

While de Blasio mouths support for “broken windows,” he and Bratton appear to disagree on healing the racial divide. The mayor initially appeared to side with black New Yorkers, encouraging marches by anti-police protesters and wrapping himself around the department’s longtime antagonist, the Rev. Al Sharpton. Many in the NYPD felt the mayor created the climate that led a deranged Baltimore man to travel to New York and assassinate police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu. As a result, a small but visible group of officers turned their backs on the mayor at the cops’ funerals.

This has placed Bratton in a new and unexpected role – as a buffer between the mayor and the police – as well as between the mayor and the city’s middle- and upper-class white residents and the business community.

At the same time, Bratton began to separate himself from the mayor. In July 2015, he drew headlines when he announced he would not stay on for the mayor’s second term. He also began to criticize the mayor’s policies, something unheard of in law enforcement circles.

As homeless people became more visible, Bratton criticized the mayor’s homeless policy. Amid the assassinations of police officers in Dallas and in Baton Rouge, he also criticized the protest group, Black Lives Matter, which the mayor and his wife, Chirlane McCray, have called “a force for good.”

The group, Bratton said earlier this month, “has focused its energy entirely on police,” with “yelling and screaming (that) doesn’t resolve anything.” He also noted that 38 percent of shooting victims – virtually all of whom are black – refuse to cooperate with the police.

Twenty years ago, Giuliani fired Bratton three months after the Time magazine article appeared with no credible public explanation. Politically vulnerable, de Blasio lacks that option. For better or worse, he’s stuck with Bratton.

When Bratton announced he would soon leave for the private sector, he recommended First Deputy John Timoney as his successor. His recommendation proved to be Timoney’s kiss of death. Instead, Giuliani defied Bratton and appointed an outsider, Howard Safir, and forced Timoney out of the department.

In his interview on Monday with the Times, Bratton implied that his successor might be current Chief of Department James O’Neill, with whom the mayor appears to get along. Whether de Blasio follows that course or, like Giuliani, defies Bratton, remains an open question.

Len Levitt is the author of "NYPD Confidential: Power and Corruption in the Country's Greatest Police Force" and the founder of the website, NYPD Confidential. His weekly column appears in AM NY.