Thursday’s announcement by Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio that Bill Bratton will return to the city as New York’s 42nd police commissioner is welcome news.
In his previous stint at the Police Department, Bratton was an early contributor to what turned out to be New York’s signature achievement of the past 20 years — transforming a crime-plagued metropolis into America’s safest big city. We thus take Bratton’s appointment by de Blasio as a sign the new mayor is serious about extending these successes into his own term in office.
Bratton succeeds Ray Kelly for the second time in the city’s history. But the challenges he inherits today are different from those of his first handoff two decades ago, when crime was out of control. Then Bratton brought in innovative tools, such as CompStat and “broken windows” policing, that sent murder rates plunging. Departing after two years, Bratton went on to a highly successful career running the Los Angeles Police Department and consulting with other major cities.
In his announcement, de Blasio hailed Bratton as a “progressive visionary” who knows that stop-and-frisk “has to be used with respect and it has to be used properly.” Bratton himself remains unapologetic about the tactic, calling it an “essential” police practice and promising the mayor it will be carried out within the law.
The sole ungracious note was the lack of any reference to Ray Kelly. Whatever the political differences between these men, de Blasio did New York and the NYPD a disservice by ignoring Kelly’s achievements and presenting the city as more opposed to its police force than it really is. For his part, Kelly released a statement congratulating Bratton and expressing his confidence the NYPD’s successes will continue.
We hope so. In the meantime, we take heart from the appointment of a new commissioner who is a serious policeman, who defends stop-and-frisk and who knows full well the high bar against which he will ultimately be measured. We wish him well.