New York Police Department commissioner Bill Bratton likes the mayor but not the City Council — whose legislative efforts to tweak policing practices he derided Tuesday as “obstructive,” “destructive” and “unnecessary, intrusive and self-serving."
Speaking at a breakfast in Midtown hosted by the Citizens Budget Commission, Bratton blasted the lawmakers collectively as “a novice City Council."
"Most of the City Council members were new to their positions” when the 2013 elections swept Bill de Blasio into City Hall, Bratton said. "Most of them had never worked in the private sector, where people who had worked in various political capacities and had a significant lack of experience on the part of any of them. And they were now governing certainly the world’s most significant city.”
Bratton had much nicer words for de Blasio, who he has called the most supportive mayor for whom he has ever worked. Bratton previously led the NYPD under Rudy Giuliani in the mid-1990s, as well as the Boston and Los Angeles police departments, before returning to New York City in 2014.
Tuesday morning, Bratton said the NYPD is able to meet the challenges the city faces “with the very strong support of the very involved, very interested and very supportive mayor.”
Later, asked about his comments about the City Council, he rejected a reporter's suggestion that his comments were harsh.
“I don’t think those words were particularly harsh,” Bratton said. “I’ve made it quite clear in the budget process and as well as other statements that some of those now — I think it’s 11, 12 or 13 — legislative proposals are not necessary, not needed.” Bratton said that since complaints about police as well as overall crime were both down, the Council's proposed legislation either is unnecessary or could be replaced by changes to department rules.
“So why keep up this pressure on the department? For what purpose? It reaches a limit where it is not necessary," he said. "It engenders extraordinary negative reactions on the part of our cops and on the part of our unions and on the part of police leadership. At some point in time, enough is enough.
“I run a very well-regulated department, very controlled department — a lot of employees. Some of them get out of line, from time to time. But I don’t need a lot of what the Council is proposing, and I’m hopeful that the experience over the last two years, that we’ll be continuing our efforts to have the right amount of oversight, but some of what is being proposed now is not necessary.”
The most contentious legislation that the City Council has put forward includes a bill that would criminalize the use of a police chokehold similar to the kind police used on Eric Garner just before his death on Staten Island last year, a bill that would require police to formally identify themselves when they stop a person but do not arrest or summons them and a bill that would require police to get written proof of consent to search a person when their consent is required.
De Blasio, who rode to office with the support of criminal justice reform advocates, supports Bratton in opposing these and other bills in the Council.
The Council is also considering new reporting requirements for use of force by officers, requirements that various crimes throughout the city be more regularly reported and reduced penalties for certain quality-of-life crimes like riding bikes on the sidewalk and drinking alcohol in public.
A spokesman at Tuesday's event was unable to identify a current City Council bill Bratton supports, and an email to the NYPD asking if there were any legislation the supports was not immediately answered.
At the event, Bratton's spokesman did offhandedly say the commissioner supports hiring more cops.
In fact, when he was first named to the job in December 2013, Bratton flip-flopped on whether he thought the NYPD's 35,000 uniformed member headcount were too small. In 2014, he did not support the Council’s effort to hire more officers, but then, at a Council hearing, he announced he was supporting its push.
His remarks Tuesday sparked retorts from Council members and from police reform activists.
“Democracy and legislative oversight may be inconvenient for Mr. Bratton’s dictatorial wants, but as the appointee of an elected official within that system of government he must respect them," the umbrella group Communities United for Police Reform's spokeswoman Monifa Bandele told reporters in a statement. "His personal and unprofessional attack against the elected representatives of New Yorkers demonstrates an unwillingness to debate on the actual substance of policy reforms.”
A spokesman for City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who pushed for more officers to be hired, fired off a terse statement saying the Council, not the mayor or police commissioner, had led the way on a number of public safety initiatives.
“It was the City Council who led from day one in a two-year effort to expand the police force. It was the City Council who proposed funding for new bullet resistant vests. And it was the City Council who raised alarms on K2 and worked to change the laws to make it easier for PD to crack down on illegal sellers,” Mark-Viverito’s communications director Eric Koch said in the statement. “We look forward to continuing to support Commissioner Bratton and the NYPD while also fighting to create a more fair and just city.”
Councilman Ritchie Torres of the Bronx told POLITICO New York that the police commissioner "behaves more like an elected official than a commissioner" and called his comments about the Council "beyond the pale."
"Can you imagine any other commissioner saying that? He lives in an alternate universe where he can say and do whatever he wants, and he enjoys a level of political impunity that every other commissioner would envy," Torres said. "He has no incentive to change, and I suspect he is going to continue doing whatever he wants without interference from City Hall."
Councilwoman Vanessa Gibson, who chairs the Council's public safety committee, told POLITICO New York she disagreed with Bratton's assessment of the Council's police reform efforts and said she looked forward to working with him on such issues.
Councilman Jumaane Williams of Brooklyn, an outspoken police reform advocate, knocked Bratton for saying he supports the goals of some Council bills while opposing the bills themselves. “It does say something that there are 13 bills and you cannot find one of them to be supportive of, even as you are saying you are working on some of the very same things,” Williams said.
“In the interest of working collaboratively, it would be helpful to tone down the words where we disagree," he told POLITICO New York. "The Council, irrespective of what [Bratton] thinks, has to have a role here."
Watch video of Bratton's remarks here: http://bit.ly/1X55oN9
UPDATE: This story has been updated with comments from members of the City Council and a spokeswoman for Communities United for Police Reform.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated the first name of Communities United for Police Reform spokeswoman Monifa Bandele.