William Bratton talks to Antonio Mora

Antonio Mora: A day after you took over the department, you said that it was unfortunate that the relationship between police and the community were marked by disconnect and alienation. You spoke specifically about New York City saying that you want to identify why it is that in this city people do not feel good about a department that has made them so safe. What have you been able to do since you took over to bridge that?

William Bratton: New York being New York, when things happen here they have national and international ramifications. So the controversy over the last several years around the issue ... first the alienation of the minority community, particularly the black community toward the department, alienation of some parts of the Muslim community and our concerns about terrorism issue and activities of the NYPD that may have been directed toward that community.

We seized a lot of attention. But ironically as we began to come out of 2014 we saw that those issues, particularly the issues involving blacks, were not just unique to New York, that they were actually exploding elsewhere in America. As we exited 2014, it reminded me very much of the controversies of 1968 in the midst of the civil rights battles. That we're in a new paradigm. And as we go into 2015, that's going to be the challenge to address those issues.

Let's start with racism. In the early '90s, the police department was seen as the enemy by so many in Los Angeles. You were police commissioner in Los Angeles. What did you do there that managed to change things because certainly things are seen as much better in Los Angeles today than they were ten years ago. What specifically did you do that made that difference?

We addressed training. We addressed the leadership. We addressed the recruiting. We addressed making the department much more demographically viable in the sense it looked a lot more like the population of Los Angeles, same thing we're doing here in New York.

Do you think that can work elsewhere in places like Ferguson and in New York and other places?

Referencing Ferguson, I think one of the issues that was pointed out in a predominantly black city, the police force had three minorities out of a total of 90 officers, I think. So that quite clearly was a source of discontent and bred distrust both of the cops of the minority community and the minority community of the cops. It is ironic that in cities that do have large numbers of minority police officers, Philadelphia, Detroit, in some instances majority minority police forces, the issues of community mistrust of the police still exist but it still doesn't mean that the goal of a racially diverse department is still not worth achieving.

You have a racially diverse department here and you saw what happened in the aftermath of Eric Garner's death and you saw nightly protests in New York. Again, how do you stop it?

You stop it by, one, recognizing that whether it's a reality or a perception, it has to be addressed. So the minority community's belief that this department ... was not treating minorities fairly.

And particularly in this city, the fact that crime was down so dramatically, but it seemed like police were even more ever-present in minority neighborhoods, ever more intrusive in the day-to-day lives of people in those neighborhoods, particularly young males, young black males.

Crime in New York City now is down almost 80 percent from what it was back in the bad old days. And I liken that to talking about medicine. You go to a doctor. He discovers a cancer. He treats you with radiation, chemo. And early on he has to treat you with heavy doses but as you get better he reduces the dose. Well, as the patient, New York City's minority population got better, a lot less crime, the doctor, the police department kept administering larger and larger doses. And the patient was getting sicker not from the original cancer but now sicker from the new disease. And the disease in New York was unnecessary levels of enforcement.

Was racism behind that?

The federal court found that. I don't believe that. I'm sorry, I'm very proud of my profession. This is not a racist police department despite what the federal courts say.

You don't think it's systemic? You think it's just a few bad apples?

I do not think it's systemic in any stretch of the imagination. That doesn't deter me from implementing the decrees of the court. But this department is not a racist police department. Almost 50 percent of my department is minority, uniformed officers. Over 50 percent, almost 70 percent, of my civilian workforce is minority.

Over 50 percent of the cops in this city live in this city. So I'm sorry, people can think what they want. I don't believe it is. But I have to deal with the perception or the reality. And the way we're dealing with that is through seeking to constantly increase our minority representation, constantly seeking to reach out to the minority community. I used an expression during the funerals for our two murdered detectives, detectives Liu and Ramos, about the idea that we see past each other.  

Part of that disconnect, aside from people who have accused the police of being racist, is also police arrogance. And you saw this recent case of the police officer addressing an Uber driver who was minority with a level of arrogance that was really alarming. Is that something you need to address?

That behavior of that officer is contrary to everything that this department is about. We are in the process right now of conducting one of the largest training initiatives in the history of this department and indeed in the country. We will, over these next couple of months, have retrained 20,000 police officers for three days on all the issues that showed up in that video: the arrogance, the disrespect, the discourtesy, the abusive language, the threats that were made. There was nothing in that video that I saw that I liked. But that behavior is not the overriding type of behavior our officers exhibit.  

The flip side of what's happened over the past year was demonstrated most tragically with the murder of the two officers you mentioned. Are police less safe as a result of the tensions that have arisen?

Well, I think clearly the tensions in that instance were the direct causal factor in their murder. There is, from my perspective, no denying that; the marches, the rhetoric. When you have people demonstrating in the streets chanting, "What do I want? Dead cops." I'm sorry. And we have gone a bridge too far, if you will. And based on our investigation of the suspect in that murder situation, he was greatly influenced, quite obviously, by his own ranting on the web by the events of those several weeks and indeed several months.

At the funeral of one of the police officers, hundreds of your officers turned their backs on the mayor because they think that Mayor de Blasio is anti-police. Have you managed to bridge that divide between your officers and City Hall?

I think that there have been a lot more planks laid on that bridge, where the bridge had basically been destroyed for a period of time. I'd point out that at those funerals we had in excess of 20,000 officers; 27,000 at one, 23,000 at another. And the idea that several hundred showed a profound lack of respect for the reason they were supposed to be there to pay respects to the deceased officers and instead made it personal in the sense of whatever anger or frustration they felt toward the mayor, that should not have occurred. They disrespected themselves. They disrespected the deceased officers. And they disrespected this department. I spoke out quite loud and clear about my disdain for their behavior. 

New York becoming such a safe place, it has been greatly credited to you and Mayor Giuliani following the broken windows theory that small crimes that disorder leads to greater crimes. Stop-and-frisk, which was instituted more specifically after you left and you mentioned earlier went to certain extremes. A court order said it had to be limited under certain circumstances. Was stop-and-frisk, which I know you believe is an essential part of policing, used inappropriately?

I think so and I've said that repeatedly. There was too much of it. It was unnecessary. And that's been borne out by the fact that we have reduced it very significantly during my 15 months as police commissioner.  But my predecessor Ray Kelly had also reduced it dramatically during his time with no negative impact on the continuing reduction in crime in the City.

So how should it be used?

It should be used appropriately, you have to have reasonable suspicion that a crime has, is, or is about to be committed. If a crime has not been, is not, or is not about to be committed, you can't have the officer fabricate it. And the community felt that too many officers were inappropriately stopping them. The federal court found that. I think that my own belief is that too many personnel in this department were engaged inappropriately, were being pushed to engage inappropriately.

And the situation was compounded by an initiative that was so well-intended here, and in fact, did have some positive consequence. And that's an initiative called “Operation Impact.” It was intended to help deal with the fact this department was losing 6,000 officers over the last 12 years. So to make up for it, a concept of taking graduating recruit classes and immediately putting those brand new recruits into the highest crime neighborhoods in large numbers to, like Gen. Petraeus did in Iraq, surge. We kept surging twice a year. The problem is, it's as if the U.S. Army took basic recruits right out of basic training and put them right into combat with no experience. So if those thousands and over time, tens of thousands of young officers were engaging in inappropriate stops, who was there to supervise and correct them because there was one sergeant for every 12 young officers.

So it's my belief that while their program was well-intended to deal with the loss of so many officers, 6,000 officers, and did in fact have an ability to reduce crime in those neighborhoods where they were assigned, the effect however (apart from the reduced crime numbers that the community didn't recognize) all the community felt was all these cops constantly stopping their young men. And unfortunately, the powers that be didn't fully recognize the alienation that this was creating over time, an alienation, a legacy, if you will, that I'm now dealing with myself and my leadership team.  

What do you say to critics who argue that broken-windows and stop-and-frisk are not what are responsible for the decline in crime in New York City and elsewhere where it's been instituted. That it was going to happen anyway, that the crack epidemic had gone away and that crime would have been on the decline anyway.

They’re entitled to their opinion. But I was here. I know what happened. Most of them were not. Most of them are theorizing based on their own beliefs. Broken-windows policing, hot-spot policing, CompStat, all of that played a role. No one thing was entirely responsible.

We also benefited from the fact in this city that we had a lot more cops to work with.  We had a lot of coordinated activities with district attorneys, federal government.  There is no one thing. In other words you can't point to broken-windows and say that was the cause of crime decline in New York City. It was an essential component. But it's like a doctor dealing with you with a major illness. And this city was a very sick city in 1990. It was going down for the count. And it came back. It came back because like a patient being brought into the emergency room after a massive accident, all those doctors all surged ... And so we didn't just treat the patient with broken-windows policing. That was an element. We treated it with CompStat-style policing, very focused identification where the problem was. We were treating it with enough medicine because they had so many cops to work with. So it was a perfect storm in the sense that we had everything we needed all at the same time to address the illnesses that we were facing.

You mention CompStat, which is a technology that identifies where crime is occurring and helps you deploy your resources based on that. You are now looking at technology that focuses on shots that are fired around the city. How important is technology to making our city safe?

The CompStat system we referenced, ... was one of the most phenomenal management, public management changes in the 1990s, particularly in policing. It's based on the use of information in an intelligible-fact fashion that also ensures accountability. And it has four elements to it: timely, accurate intelligence to gather up your crime information very quickly, 2) you identify hot spots and patterns as they begin to emerge. You rapidly respond to that. Effective tactics, what's going to work, plain-clothed, uniform task forces. And then relentless follow-up like a doctor treating a cancer patient.  

Is terrorism the big difference between when you were commissioner the first time and being a commissioner now?

It was almost nonexistent in 1994, even after the first World Trade Center bombing.

How big a target is New York City?

New York, we believe, still remains the No. 1 terrorist target in the world. I've seen nothing to refute that. And that's how we basically police New York City, that with the belief that it remains and will remain for some time into the foreseeable future the No. 1 terrorist target in the world for a variety of reasons.

How big a part of your department now is counter-terrorism?

We have over a thousand officers who are focused entirely on that gathering of information, analyzing it, and attempting to detect plots and threats against this city or against the country for that matter.

How safe is the city?

The city is very safe. There is no city in America that's as safe as New York in the sense of all the capabilities we have, the commitment of manpower and resources. There is no city in America that takes this threat as seriously as us, with the possible exception of Washington D.C. and Los Angeles runs a close second.  

Did the police department go too far though in fighting terrorism in the way it tried to infiltrate the Muslim community? Where does that stand because certainly many in the Muslim community felt alienated from the police department because of the efforts this department made?

Well, that's the subject of a number of suits and litigation at the moment. I was not here during that time. Since my appointment, shortly after my appointment as we were reviewing all of the various operations throughout the department, not just the terrorism unit. One of the units that was the subject of a great deal of concern on the part of the Muslim community, or at least some factions of the Muslim community was an entity that's had a number of names. But the Demographic Unit, I think, was the one that was most widely used. And its responsibility, among some of its responsibilities, was the idea of trying to identify in this very large city where the Muslim population was located.

And it's something that police attempt to do routinely, and we want to know where the Jewish population is located in the city ... for a variety of purposes, number one being to protect those communities. Because the reality is that much as the Jewish community in this city feels constantly under threat as a result of bias attacks, hate attacks or the potential terrorist attacks, with some of the tenseness around the world largely focused on issues involving the Muslim community, the Muslim religion, the issues of terrorism that are emanating so significantly from that part of the world, that religion, that there is the potential also for hatred, bias and retaliation against that community. So you want to be able to, if there is an incident in which there might be a retaliatory action on the part of somebody in this country, you want to know where to assign your police cars to help protect those centers.

But do you think the police department's tactics were too heavy-handed and unfairly targeted the Muslim community?

I can't speak to what occurred before I got here. But when I did get here, that Demographic Unit, I think, was down to two officers, maybe three. So it effectively had ceased to function. So that was an action taken by my predecessor Ray Kelly. Quite obviously whatever the reason was for the creation of that unit in the first place, it was deemed by 2013 to no longer be needed. In terms of how I identify the various communities in the city, we do it in a way that is probably much less intrusive than the concerns that some members of the Muslim community had about some of the activities of and prior to 2014.

And that's where our community service officers, our precinct commanders, they know the communities in their precincts. They know who lives there, where places of worship are, where schools are. That's what they're supposed to know. They're police officers and they're supposed to know the communities they're interacting with.

Looking toward the future, you said that in addition to race, you believe that tensions related to poverty, unemployment, inequality in housing, educational systems, that they were escalating. And you said specifically that, "Many issues of the 1970s are now revisiting us once again. And once again at the forefront of dealing with those will be America's police forces." Do you think that we're going to see crime worsening?

Not in this city. And we're not seeing it in America either, for that matter. The crime in America overall is still down. What we are seeing worsening, or maybe it's more visible, that it was beneath the surface and events in Ferguson, events here in New York and elsewhere have exacerbated it and brought it much more into the forefront, is that there is still a tension in this country around the issue of race. It's the historical legacy of slavery. And we're still feeling its impact almost 200 years after it was done away with in this country. And police [are] right dead center in the bullseye on that issue because we are probably the entity that is most impactful into minority lives, particularly distressed minority lives. And since so many minority lives are distressed because of poverty, because of lack of educational opportunity, because of poor housing, because of unemployment, because of high incarceration rates, all of those issues compound the minority community's belief that they're getting ahead or they're being treated fairly, that they're in many instances in desperate circumstances. And in this city, New York City, I can speak most intimately or in a most informed way, that where we see our highest crime rates, they are invariably in minority communities.  

What do you hope your legacy will be?

Oh, I'm very comfortable with what my legacy will be because in some respects it's already there. The profession I chose to be a part of has had a profound effect, largely positive on this country, in this city and Los Angeles and Boston where I worked before.

But what is clearly evident, there is more that needs to be done. And in the years I have left to me in the profession, I intend to move the profession even farther forward, to move in this case, the NYPD even farther forward so that when I step away I can look back and say quite proudly have had a life of significance, a life that matters.  

Is that why you're back, because you were successful in Boston. You were successful in New York. You were successful in LA and you were doing awfully well in the private sector. So why come back?

I'm back for several reasons. I think I can make a difference. I'm here because I'm having a lot of fun. I enjoy what I do. And we have our good days. We have our bad days. But by and large most days are good days. And if you're not going to have fun at what you're doing, if you're not going to enjoy it, get out because you're not going to be effective. This is a very special time in policing. It's a time of great opportunity, a time of great challenge. I oftentimes use the expression that if you don't have a crisis, create one because out of crises comes opportunity and challenge. And crises also allows you the opportunity to speed up the change, the process of change. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.