New York Police Commissioner William Bratton Essay Example

of the NYPD in a way that had never been done before. In addition, he was praised by many in the press for proving that crime was not an intractable fact of modern life but rather a problem that could be solved.

But the ensuing years also revealed some risks associated with the Bratton reforms. The push to bring down crime rates had the unintended consequence of encouraging unscrupulous officers to fabricate statistics. The Compstat meetings sometimes became so demanding that morale was harmed. The department also faced charges that it had encouraged overly aggressive policing. The cases of Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo in the late 1990s raised questions of whether Bratton’s methods had cut crime at the cost of increasing abuse.

Policing in the 20th Century: Corruption and Reform When Bratton came to the NYPD, he was part of a long tradition of police reform movements. The police have always been charged with the mission of preserving civil order while respecting civil rights, but early on a tension developed between these two objectives. When the police focused on preventing crime, they were tempted to become either too abusive or too involved with the criminals they were trying to prosecute. But if they focused on cleaning up their own corruption, they became timid in fighting crime.

The history of policing shows recurring problems with abuse, corruption, and unresponsiveness, followed by concerted cleanup efforts. In New York City, in particular, the history of policing is also a history of reform. Founded in 1844, the NYPD quickly became entangled with the city’s vice industries and gangs. Officers were notorious for taking payoffs from

gambling establishments and brothels, extorting legitimate businesses, and harassing immigrants. Every 20 years or so a corruption scandal would arise, and the city would respond by appointing a commission to investigate the charges.

Beginning in the 1890s, six commissions were appointed over the years, but in spite of repeated investigations, there was little sustained change. Two Reform Movements In the century before Rudolph Giuliani became mayor, two main reform movements took place in response to corruption scandals. First, between 1890 and 1930, the management of the police force was centralized. Virtually every decision had to go to the top for approval, with the goal of limiting the low-level officer’s exposure to temptation. To reinforce the hierarchy, specialized units were created to deal with such problems as drugs, youth, guns, and gangs.

As Bratton described it, [The department] was divided into little fiefdoms, and some bureau chiefs didn’t even talk to each other…. Each bureau was like a silo: Information entered at the bottom and had to be delivered up the chain of command from one level to another until it reached the chief’s office. But centralization did not solve the problem of corruption, and it added the problem of inefficiency, because the bureaucracy was not capable of responding to the individual needs of different neighborhoods.

The reflexive solution to every police problem was more centralization and stronger controls, according to criminologist George Kelling. But as the years went on, centralization became an end in itself, and even chiefs who wanted to make changes could not, for fear that they would be labeled soft on corruption. Then, between 1930 and 1970, a second

reform movement applied a scientific management model to the NYPD. The goal was to reduce policing to standard rules and routines. In essence, patrol officers became factory workers who performed simple, repetitive tasks that required no discretion.

The officers’ role was law enforcement, not crime prevention: that is, they would investigate a crime and arrest a perpetrator after the crime was committed, but they would not work on preventing crime from happening in the first place. Success was measured only by the number of arrests an officer made, not by a decrease in the number of crimes committed. Compounding the lassitude caused by centralization and automation was a new set of beliefs th about crime adopted during the mid-20 century.

On the liberal side, President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice declared that crime was caused by poverty and racism and could not be prevented without eliminating these “root causes. ” It was also argued that to suppress such “victimless” crimes as begging, graffiti, littering, public drunkenness, and noise was to impose bourgeois values on a legitimate subculture. On the 2 william bratton and the nypd conservative side, it was asserted that crime was caused by the decline of the family and the rise in the number of fatherless children.

Both sides implied that the police could do little to prevent crime but could only arrest criminals after the fact. De-Policing New York By the 1970s and ‘80s, the NYPD had become defensive and inefficient. The patrol officer was sequestered inside a squad car with a radio. His geographic territory was expanded so as to limit his

contact with the community and thereby prevent corruption. He drove a random patrol in order to give the feeling of police presence in a community, but there was little attempt to focus patrols on problem areas.

He was not allowed to make low-level drug arrests; instead, he had to let the drug trade take place and report the information to detectives at headquarters. His performance was judged by the number of arrests and the response time to 911 calls, not the crime rate. As Kelling and Bratton put it in a co-authored article, the business of the NYPD had become staying out of trouble: “…it was the worst of all possible scenarios: too much abuse and corruption, too much corruption control, and not enough quality policing. ” At the same time, during the 1970s the NYPD was forced to lay off thousands of police because of a city budget crisis.

These three influences — a social climate that said that crime could not be prevented by the police, a police force driven by fear of controversy, and a decrease in the number of officers—combined to produce an increasingly unsafe environment. As Bratton described it, in the 25 years before his arrival at the department, the city of New York “de-policed” its streets: “Police officers were walking by disorderly conditions and letting them fester. They were openly giving freedom of the streets to the drug dealers, the gangs, the prostitutes, the drinkers, and the radio blasters. A sense of fear and anarchy pervaded many neighborhoods".

The rate of violent crime in New York City increased seven-fold between 1960 and 1990. And in spite

of the resolute efforts of the department to repress corruption, corruption continued, with rogue officers selling drugs and guns and taking payoffs for protecting drug dealers. These problems were not unique to New York. Cities all over the country were plagued by violence, crime, and disorder. Families who could afford it fled to the suburbs, and some sociologists feared that the American city was dying. Broken Windows and Zero Tolerance At the same time as New York was struggling with crime and urban decay, political scientists James Q.

Wilson and George L. Kelling wrote an influential article that would eventually be credited with helping to revive America’s cities. The article, published in the March 1982 issue of Atlantic Monthly magazine, was entitled “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety. ” Wilson and Kelling developed a theory based on the research of Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist who showed through experiments in Palo Alto and the Bronx that a single broken window in a neighborhood leads to further destruction of property. The broken window is “a signal that no one cares,” and it leads to an overall breakdown of community controls.

By extension, proposed Wilson and Kelling, all minor “quality-of-life” offenses have serious consequences. A community that allows panhandlers, addicts, gangs, and prostitutes free rein creates an atmosphere of intimidation and sets the scene for more serious crimes. Conversely, if a community polices minor offenses, it can prevent violent crimes. “According to this model,” said Kelling and Bratton in a later discussion, “waiting until serious crimes occur to intervene is too late: dealing with disorderly behavior early, [as] successful communities have in the past,

prevent[s] the cycle from accelerating and perpetuating itself.

The proposals of Wilson and Kelling were further developed and tested by sociologists Wesley Skogan, Mary Ann Wycoff, and william bratton and the nypd others, who demonstrated that disorder creates a high level of fear, which then leads law-abiding citizens to abandon the community. The broken windows theory, also known as the “zero-tolerance” approach, emphasized respect for property and for community norms of behavior. But implementing this theory required a th different type of policing than the method that developed during the first half of the 20 century.

The new approach encouraged proactive, involved officers who would be an integral part of the community rather than impersonal, scientific, reactive policing. But a widespread change from the old model to the new came slowly: it would take nearly 15 years before the new method of policing would become standard practice in America. 10 Bratton’s Early Experiments Policing Small Offenses in Boston Even before he became acquainted with Wilson and Kelling’s theory, William Bratton embarked on his own reform programs as a police officer in the 1970s and 80s.

Born and bred in Boston, Bratton began his law enforcement career in 1970 as an officer in the Boston Police Department. He rose quickly to managerial positions, and in the late 1970s, he took over a community policing program in the Fenway Park district, which had deteriorated into a dangerous condition. One of Bratton’s first strategies was to set up community meetings at which residents could share their perspective on the neighborhood’s problems. To his surprise, he said, it turned out that the police had one perception

of the largest problem in an area and the neighborhoods had another one altogether. Ours was usually serious crime.

Theirs was usually a lot more mundane. Even in the most dangerous neighborhoods, residents complained not about rape and murder but about noise, filth, and antisocial behavior. For example, at one community meeting, the police were trying to solve a string of burglaries, while the public was more concerned because the streets were dirty and the police were not giving parking tickets so that cars could be towed and the streets cleaned. At first Bratton found it difficult to focus on these small offenses: “It wasn’t the easiest lesson in the world to absorb. I was still a young cop. We all wanted to make the good pinch, the gun pinch.

We wanted to disarm felons; we didn’t want to be wrestling with drunks. But policing the small violations started to pay off: in the case of the neighborhood with the dirty streets, as officers started writing parking tickets, they soon met people who had seen the burglar, and it was not long before the criminal was apprehended. It was a win-win situation: the citizens got their neighborhood cleaned up, and the cops caught the burglar. Tracking Crime in Boston During the Fenway Park assignment, Bratton also began a rudimentary data-gathering scheme. In the station house, he covered the walls with large maps of the district.

Each day an employee would stick dots on the map showing where crimes had been committed, with red for burglaries and blue for robberies. Bratton recalled that at first the officers were uninterested in the maps, but

soon they started to compare their sectors with others and to work to bring down the number of dots in their own sector. I got the cops interested by giving them timely, accurate, easy-to-digest information, Bratton said. I didn’t order them in and show them, I made it available, and the cops bought in. They went about solving some crimes and preventing others. Bratton was beginning to go “beyond 911,” that is, beyond getting the cop to the crime scene quickly, to actually preventing crimes from happening in the first place.

William bratton and the nypd After his success in the Boston-Fenway program, Bratton further developed his approach to police force management during the 1980s as chief first of the Metropolitan Boston Transit Authority Police and then of Boston’s Metropolitan District Commission Police. In these assignments Bratton both gave more to officers and demanded more from them. He purchased new police radios and new uniforms.

He fought for funding to replace dented motorcycles with spacious new police cruisers. He publicly recognized officers with exemplary performance and publicly reprimanded those who abused privileges. And he installed large maps to track crime on a daily basis. Both in the way that he managed the police force and in the way that he directed the police to patrol the community, Bratton focused on the details. He improved the small things, and higher morale and lower crime followed. Busting Fare Beaters at the New York Transit Police Bratton began to gain national prominence when he was hired to head the New York Transit Police in 1990.

It was during this assignment that he consciously and explicitly

applied the “broken window” principles of Wilson and Kelling. In fact, Bratton hired George Kelling as a consultant to the transit authority to propose solutions to the problems of crime and disorder on the subway system. The system was plagued by fare beaters, muggers, panhandlers, vandals, and vagrants camping out in the stations. Some 170,000 riders dodged the $1 fare each day, costing the transit authority over 70 million dollars a year. Law-abiding citizens feared the underground chaos.

With declining ridership and declining revenues, the system was a shambles. The police force was demoralized by the obvious failures, yet it was also resistant to change. As Bratton recalled, They didn’t want to deal with fare beating because they had no interest in protecting the Transit Authority’s property; they didn’t want to collar turnstile jumpers because that had nothing to do with real police work; and they didn’t want to deal with the panhandlers and underground population because they didn’t want to put their hands on people who might have AIDS.

They were happy, however, to go after serious crime. The broken-windows approach at first struck employees as demeaning: trained police officers who were accustomed to investigating major crimes like murder and robbery were now being asked to pay attention to minor housekeeping tasks. But Bratton overcame their reluctance by allowing them to work in business clothes, a desirable assignment for the uniformed cop.

Bratton developed a “fare-evasion mini-sweep,” in which plainclothes officers would go to problematic subway stations, arrest 10 or 20 turnstile jumpers at a time, handcuff them together in a long line, and then take them outside the station to

a “bust bus” mobile arrest processing center. Bratton enlisted the marketing department to publicize his efforts, and he made sure that the “daisy chain” of handcuffed offenders was paraded to the bus in full public view. The strategy produced multiple benefits: not only was the fare evasion problem solved, but crime was also attacked.

Many petty offenders turned out to be not decent citizens having a bad day but rather hardened criminals: one out of every seven people arrested for fare evasion was wanted on an outstanding warrant for a previous crime, and one out of 21 was carrying a weapon. Under Bratton’s tenure, robberies in the system fell 40 percent, and felonies overall declined by 22 percent over two years. Moreover, department morale rose: although officers had at first been reluctant to deal with small offenses, they soon became energized by their success.

Without spending any additional money, Bratton achieved the disparate goals of controlling disorder, cutting crime, improving internal morale, and winning public approval. Bratton’s career went from strength to strength: he william bratton and the nypd achieved his long-awaited goal of becoming chief of the Boston Police and not long afterward was tapped for the position of NYPD commissioner. New York on the Brink of Change The changes in policing philosophy that Bratton would implement at the NYPD were already in preparation well before he arrived.

Around 1970 the department began to adopt a model called “community policing,” in which officers cultivated closer relationships with the neighborhood by getting out of their cars and going on foot patrols. In 1980 a report by the Fund for the City of

New York essentially recommended a broken-windows approach when it noted that loitering and street solicitation created an atmosphere of intimidation that potentially led to more serious crime. Then in the early 1990s, 7,000 new patrol officers were hired, and they met regularly with community leaders to discuss problems.

Mayor David Dinkins’ police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, engaged George Kelling as a consultant to study ways of dealing with quality of life violations in New York. Under the Dinkins administration, crime rates started to decline, first by 03 percent in 1990, then 4. 4 percent in 1991 and 7. 8 percent in 1992. But in spite of these gains, the city was still experiencing substantial problems. Crime had reached a 30-year high in 1990, and New York continued to be harassed by low-level nuisance crime, what Rudolph Giuliani would call “the street tax paid to drunk and drug-ridden panhandlers.

A 1993 poll showed that nearly 60 percent of New Yorkers believed that crime had gotten worse during the previous four years, and 45 percent of respondents said the quality of life had gotten so bad that they would move out the next day if they could. Equally as problematic as actual crime was the high level of public fear and pessimism. “There is no will to fight crime anymore,” a local Catholic priest told a reporter in late 1993. “No municipal will. No community will. People are too frightened. It permeates the whole system".

Giuliani’s Mayoral Campaign Rudolph Giuliani said that he did have the will to fight crime, and he cited as evidence his reputation as a tough prosecutor. In his campaign for

mayor, he would tell audiences that he had imprisoned so many criminals that his friends felt uncomfortable meeting him in a restaurant, lest a thug mete out revenge over dessert. In other speeches he would boast that he had met a convict just released from prison who sneered that he would be voting for the other guy. His law-andorder appeal struck a chord, and in November 1993 he defeated David Dinkins and was elected mayor of New York.

Mayor Giuliani committed to several crime-fighting strategies: begin arresting small-time drug dealers and buyers; increase the number of patrol officers on the streets; arrest aggressive panhandlers and “squeegee men” who forced motorists to pay for having their windshields cleaned; improve school safety by putting police in charge of school security; and fine 10,000 illegal vendors crowding the streets. In order to streamline operations among intersecting law enforcement agencies, he also proposed consolidating the NYPD with the housing police and transit police.

He promoted his strategies as means by which New Yorkers could "regain control of everyday life". The only thing that Giuliani needed was a police chief who could realize his vision. Re-engineering the NYPD Giuliani turned to Bratton, who had the experience and ideas that he required. Bratton arrived in New York promoting the broken windows theory explicitly. He promised to attack the largest crimes by focusing on the smallest, beginning with squeegee men.

“Squeegees are of great 6 william bratton and the nypd ignificance,” argued Bratton shortly after his appointment, “because like fare evasion and like disorder on the subways, it's that type of activity that is generating fear". Bratton could have

simply directed officers to begin arresting squeegee men, panhandlers, drunks, drug pushers, and prostitutes. But he was more ambitious. In his job interviews with Giuliani, he committed to fast, dramatic results: a 40 percent reduction in crime in three years and a measurable reduction in public fear within four years.