Ray Kelly fixed stop-and-frisk. That’s the word from his successor, Bill Bratton, our new police commissioner.
In remarks at a conference at the Ford Foundation on Wednesday, Bratton said “the problem has more or less been solved.” What he meant was that in the last few years of Kelly’s term, stops dropped dramatically, from a peak of 694,000 in 2011 to 194,00 by the end of 2013 — even as murders would fall to a record low of 334 last year.
Bratton didn’t credit Kelly, even as he acknowledged this drop came on Kelly’s watch. Still, Bratton’s statement that the problem is “solved,” and his defense of stop-and-frisk as a necessary police tactic, are effectively rebukes of his boss.
During his campaign for mayor, de Blasio denounced stop-and-frisk, implied the cops were racist for using it and painted a picture of a polarized city where the public did not trust the cops. In his inaugural, he called stop-and-frisk a “broken” policy.
Plainly, his police commissioner doesn’t see it that way.
As if to underscore the point, at the same time Bratton was declaring victory on stop-and-frisk, we learned he was hiring well-respected criminologist George Kelling as a special consultant.
In the 1980s, Kelling and sociologist James Q. Wilson introduced the “broken windows” theory of policing. “Broken windows” argues that cracking down on “quality of life” offenses has a dual impact. First, it sends a message that no crime is too small to be addressed. Second, people who break one law frequently break others. So when cops arrest and fingerprint, say, a turnstile-jumper, that may later turn into a lead on a more serious crime.
Bratton took the broken-windows theory to the NYPD in 1994 — and took his own share of unfair abuse when these reforms started. And he knows he will rightly be held to account if the crime numbers now go south.
But some people never learn. Following Kelling’s hire, Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union wondered if it would “dial back failed strategies of the past that have a devastating impact on New York’s communities of color, or if this is a public relations move.”
That gets it precisely backward. Broken windows and stop-and-frisk weren’t “devastating” to “communities of color” — they saved countless lives in those communities.