When NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton eventually leaves 1 Police Plaza, he will be remembered for the innovative CompStat program and its data-driven approach to fighting crime.
But critics said it was time for new ideas — and he was fresh out of them.
“He realizes there have to be changes and many of those changes he’s not comfortable with,” said Marq Claxton, director of the Black Law Enforcement Alliance, who worked for 20 years in the NYPD.
Claxton, like most observers, gave Bratton points for reducing crime in the city and establishing a model for the rest of the nation to follow. But on the issue of community policing in the wake of police shootings and deaths of black men across the country, Bratton — and his “broken windows” approach — has been part of the problem, he said.
Lawyer Ron Kuby said Bratton, who also was police commissioner from 1994 to 1996 under Mayor Rudy Giuliani before getting the top spot with Mayor de Blasio, was too progressive for Giuliani and not progressive enough for de Blasio.
“His newest legacy will be a man who genuinely tried to adapt to changing times and changing circumstances,” Kuby said. “He understood that you can’t police New York City in 2016 the way you policed it in 1993.”
But Anthonine Pierre, a spokeswoman for Communities United for Police Reform, said she hasn’t seen the change.
“Bratton under de Blasio is no different than under Giuliani,” Pierre said.
“His intolerant ideological devotion to implementing discriminatory broken-windows policing in black and Latino communities and against low-income, homeless, LGBT and other New Yorkers — as well as his failure to hold police officers accountable when they unjustly kill or brutalize New Yorkers — is inconsistent with reform and only perpetuates police abuses.”
Kuby also said the NYPD gifts-for-favors scandal, which has already claimed several high-ranking department leaders, could hurt Bratton’s legacy.