When Bill Bratton took over the NYPD the first time around in 1994, an average of five people were murdered each day.
Violent offenses — rapes, robberies, assaults — plagued city streets even in broad daylight. The crack-cocaine epidemic was peaking. Petty crime, too, such as fare-beating, was out of control.
“There were days when I counted an 8-to-1 ratio of people jumping turnstiles to those paying,” recalled Eugene O’Donnell, a former cop, now John Jay College professor of police studies.
By the time Bratton left town two years later, crime had plunged in each of the NYPD’s 76 precincts, and the murder rate had been cut in half.
“In short, it was CompStat and ‘Broken Windows,’” said Thomas Repetto, former president of the Citizens Crime Commission.
CompStat — for “computer statistics” — was an innovative, data-driven attack on crime. Twice a week, precinct commanders, squad commanders and others were called into a morning meeting at One Police Plaza and confronted with maps that showed the patterns of crimes on their turf.
And there was zero tolerance for those who were failing.
“It was pretty rough,” Repetto recalled. “People went straight to the pension office from those meetings. They said, ‘I can’t handle this.’ ”
Bratton explained his philosophy was to thrust the power to fight crime to the commanders.
“We gave precinct commanders — typically people with 15 years’ experience, a college education and a sophisticated knowledge of the city and the department — the authority to run what amounted to miniature police departments,” he said in a 1999 interview.
The second half of the equation, “broken windows,” is an academic theory that says if anti-social behavior — such as vandals breaking windows — is ignored, it may foster progressively more dangerous conduct.
Bratton put the theory into practice as head of the city’s former Transit Police Department, at a time when nearly 200,000 people were jumping turnstiles each day.
“Many people can write good papers,” Repetto said. “Bratton had the ability to take a good idea out of a place like Harvard and make it work at the operational level.”
Or, as Bratton put it, “It’s not too strong a statement to say that we reinvented police strategy in 1994.”
Broken windows nevertheless had its critics.
“This idea of arresting as many black and Latino youth as you can for minor offenses so you can stop them doing major offenses is racist,” said City Councilman Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn).
More than 100 cities — including Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and New Orleans — adopted Compstat and other Bratton innovations.
But in the end, he may have been too successful.
Bratton’s tenure was doomed when his photo appeared on the cover of the Jan. 15, 1996, Time magazine, with the headline, “Finally, We’re Winning the War Against Crime. Here’s Why.”
The “Why” gave a lot of credit to Bratton, and not to his boss, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
When he resigned, Bratton went into private security here and in Los Angeles, where he was named police commissioner in 2002 and won across-the-board praise as the city’s top cop. There were 654 murders the year he took office. When he left in 2009, there were 314.
“He helped transform the LAPD’s relationship with the community it serves while bringing crime down to historic lows,” said LA ex-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Bratton’s boss for his last four years there.
Bratton first learned policing in Boston, his hometown, and at age 32 became the youngest-ever executive superintendent of the BPD and, eventually, police commissioner.
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