The mayor’s office won’t say exactly how Giuliani privately reacted when he was handed the magazine and saw that the face on the cover was not his own but that of a rival he had appointed: Police Commissioner William Bratton. But it wasn’t long before the nasty leaks began. New Yorkers learned about Bratton’s freebie trips to the Caribbean and his $350,000 book advance. The outcome was inevitable to anyone who had ever read a Greek tragedy or a New York tabloid. Last week Bratton, who had become an international poster boy for crime-fighting, quit his post, ending one of the most flamboyant New York cop-and-pol stories since Theodore Roosevelt was New York police commissioner in the 1890s.
Bratton, who used Roosevelt’s huge mahogany desk in his office at One Police Plaza, rose and fell in part by being presumptuous. For decades, it had been widely assumed that police could do little to reduce crime. Experts held that crime rates were determined by larger social forces like poverty and racism. Nonsense, insisted Bratton, a former Boston police chief who worked his way up from the street. He decided to make New York’s police commanders accountable, an astonishing innovation in a sometimes corrupt bureaucracy. On taking over in January 1994, Bratton summarily dismissed supervisors who believed they could cut crime only by 2 or 8 percent. The rest were subjected to grillings in Bratton’s “war room” at headquarters. Gone were cops who worked bankers’ hours and kept track of crime by putting little pins in maps. Using daily computer surveys, Bratton’s men were ordered to pour their troops into high-crime areas.
Bratton subscribed to “community policing,” which requires officers to get out of their cruisers and walk the beat. Community policing–sometimes publicized by photos of policemen jump-roping or shooting hoops with kids–can appear touchy-feely. The Bratton style was more in-your-face. Bratton is a believer in the so-called “broken-window theory,” which holds that small crimes like vandalism create a climate that leads to bigger crimes. Looking for weapons and drugs, New York’s Finest busted squeegee men and turnstile jumpers, stopped and frisked loiterers caught drinking beer or urinating in public.
The results were remarkable. True, crime rates around the country have generally drifted downward, probably because of demographics (a temporary dip in the high-crime population of 18-to-24-year-olds) and a lull in the crack epidemic. But in New York crime plummeted to its lowest levels in 25 years. Not coincidentally, complaints of police brutality in high-crime neighborhoods increased by 50 percent. Civil libertarians began squawking about Bratton’s intrusive tactics. But many New Yorkers saw the commissioner as a hero. Certainly he saw himself that way, quoting Winston Churchill and likening his crusade to World War II. He began living the high life, appearing courtside at Knicks games and dining so often with the glitterati at Elaine’s that some of the mayor’s aides began calling the Upper East Side restaurant Two Police Plaza.
Giuliani could barely conceal his resentment. Last year the mayor ordered his commissioner to fire half his PR staff and cancel a police parade Bratton had scheduled on his own birthday. After the Time cover, Giuliani’s aides hinted that Bratton would face an ethics probe for accepting a free vacation from billionaire Henry Kravis last month.
Giuliani’s aides denied that Bratton was forced out. Randy Mastro, Giuliani’s chief of staff, insisted that Bratton has intended for months to “cash in” on a million-dollar job in the private sector. Bratton, who will run a division of a private security firm, told NEWSWEEK that the “basic tension” with Giuliani was over press coverage–“the desire to control the message.” For his part, the mayor appointed a low-key loyalist, Howard Safir, as the new police commissioner. It’s a gamble. If Giuliani had stuck with Bratton, at election time the mayor would have at least shared the credit for cutting crime. Now, if crime ticks back up, Giuliani will take all the blame.
Bratton gave cops more latitude on the street, swept up more suspects-and crime fell. Will the reforms stick?
1993 1995 PERCENT DECREASE Autothefts 112,842 71,899 -36% Murders 1,951 1,182 -39% Robberies 86,001 59,341 -31%
