Metro

Bratton: Kelly’s stop-and-frisk caused minorities to fear cops

Police Commissioner Bill Bratton took a shot at his predecessor — blaming ex-top cop Ray Kelly’s signature stop-and-frisk program for the fact that some minorities are scared of the NYPD.

Bratton insisted in a TV interview that the average black man “doesn’t have anything to fear from us.”

“They don’t, but they do feel that, and it’s a result of unfortunately the stop-question-and-frisk controversy that overshadows so much of the success in reducing crime in the city for so many years,” Bratton told the CBS Evening News.

“We’ve reduced that impact significantly, down from 700,000 stops to less than 50,000 this year.”

Bratton also said in the Thursday sitdown that a pending Internal Affairs probe would determine if Officer Daniel Pantaleo used a banned chokehold during the fatal arrest of Eric Garner on Staten Island, as the city Medical Examiner’s Office ruled.

The head of Pantaleo’s union and his defense lawyer have both maintained that Pantaleo actually used a “takedown” maneuver that he learned at the Police Academy.

In the immediate wake of Garner’s July 17 death, Bratton said a smartphone video appeared to show a chokehold.

But he backtracked last week after a grand jury cleared Pantaleo of criminal wrongdoing, telling CNN: “What it appears to be sometimes may not be what it is.”

“Part of the investigation will be to determine what everybody has seen on that video — is that, in fact, within the framework of what we teach our officers in how do you take down a person you’re attempting to arrest,” Bratton saidSunday.

Bratton noted that chokeholds are not illegal, but have been prohibited by the NYPD since 1993, except in cases of “imminent danger” or a “life-threatening situation.”

A spokesman for real estate giant Cushman & Wakefield, where Kelly now works as president of risk management, didn’t return a request for comment from the former commish.