William Bratton promises to restructure department.
Martin Kasindorf, USA Today
LOS ANGELES -- Six years after Mayor Rudy Giuliani forced him out as New York City’s top cop for stealing too many headlines, William Bratton is back behind a badge -- this time in a city where it’s no crime to star on camera. “I can’t describe how happy I am to be back into the game,” Bratton, 55, said last month at his swearing-in as chief of the troubled Los Angeles Police Department.
During his first week on the job, the imported Easterner with the supercop reputation swept around town with Mayor James Hahn to meet constituents. Hahn beamed last week as reporters pushed past him to swarm Bratton.
In his working-class Boston accent, Bratton is promising that “this depaatment will work in paatnership with the community.” It’s a strange sound to Angelenos’ ears. Their homegrown image of the LAPD remains Sgt. Joe Friday, played by Jack Webb on the TV classic Dragnet, crisply saying “just the facts, ma’am.” The LAPD’s fourth chief in 10 years, Bratton is using his broad vowels to bring top-to-bottom change to a once-vaunted police force that has been demoralized by repeated blows. The 1991 Rodney King beating was followed by the deadly 1992 riots, then by the 1999 Rampart scandal of anti-gang officers unjustifiably shooting suspects. A federal judge is supervising the department’s civil rights practices under an agreement with the Justice Department.
Bratton succeeds Bernard Parks, an African-American, who in April was denied a second five-year term in a dispute with Hahn over the pace of police reform. The treatment of Parks angered many local African-American leaders.
In the blunt-talking Bratton, Hahn made a bold and generally well-received choice. Bratton picked up the Manhattan nickname “Broadway Bill” for socializing with Henry Kissinger and other celebrities, but he literally wrote the book on how to cut big-city crime. His 1998 autobiography, Turnaround, described his managerial innovations as Giuliani’s police commissioner in 1994-96.
He tracked crime patterns street-by-street with computers. He held precinct commanders accountable for their neighborhoods. These changes helped reduce major crime by 39% and homicide by 50% over the 27 months of his tenure in New York.
Now, vowing to restructure the LAPD to fight an upsurge in crime, Bratton is moving to adapt his “Compstat” software and his preventive, decentralized approach to a city with “many fewer resources than New York had,” he says.
Patrolling an area twice as large as New York City, the LAPD has 9,000 officers -- 1,000 below its budgeted strength -- compared with New York’s 38,000. New York, with a population of 8 million, has one cop for every 209 residents. Los Angeles, the USA’s second most populous city at 3.8 million, has one cop for every 409 residents.
Bratton’s nastiest problem: gang warfare. Gangs are largely responsible for a murder rate that’s up 14% this year. “In New York, they were one of many cancers,” he says. “Here in Los Angeles, they are the cancer that’s causing the narcotics problem, the gun violence, so much violence among the young.” Bratton is making a start by cracking down on gang-scrawled graffiti. “I hate it with a passion,” he says.
Bratton subscribes to the “broken windows” theory of policing: Stopping small crimes -- such as graffiti, or jumping New York subway turnstiles to avoid fares -- stops larger ones.
He first showed a penchant for police work as an 18-month-old toddler in Boston’s Dorchester section; his mother yanked him away from directing traffic in the street. After military police duty in the Vietnam War, he joined the Boston Police Department in 1970. He headed that department and the New York City transit police before Giuliani named him commissioner.
But Bratton alienated Giuliani by brashly publicizing his accomplishments. Time magazine put Bratton, not the mayor, on its cover in January 1996 to praise New York’s “miracle” drop in crime. A profile in The New Yorker lauded Bratton as “the CEO Cop.” When Bratton signed a $ 300,000 contract for his book, Giuliani launched a probe of whether Bratton had violated city ethics rules against profiting from public service. Clearly fated to be denied a second term, Bratton quit and the probe was dropped.
In the private sector, the dapper Bratton was earning more than $ 500,000 a year as a security consultant, lecturer and director on three corporate boards. When the Los Angeles chief’s job opened, he took a pay cut to $ 239,000 a year to sign the five-year contract.
One reason he came back: “The frustration of 9/11, being in New York but not being in a position to do anything,” he says. “I missed policing in the last six years, but particularly the last year. I really wanted to get back into it. I had a lot more to contribute -- most important, to cement the idea that police count. Police, when properly funded and properly led and properly partnered with the community, can make a difference.”
Some observers of Bratton’s career question his claims of resounding success in New York. Patrick Murphy, New York police commissioner in the 1970s, calls him “a bright, talented fellow” but says that Bratton lost sight of problems with overly aggressive or racially biased cops while focusing on crime statistics. “Bill Bratton is probably the best J. Edgar Hoover chief in the country,” Murphy says. “It means image is everything, get a good press.”
As in New York, a Los Angeles police chief is catnip to the news media, which is already calling Bratton “Hollywood Bill.” The job requires Bratton to be “comfortable with the press,” but he’s no self-promoter, he says.
“Do I seek the attention? You better believe it. Am I good at it? You better believe it. But what do I do with it? I advance the issues of the department. I build confidence in the public through the media. And by subjecting myself to media exposure, I subject myself to failure as well as success.”
Local politicians are willing to put up with Bratton’s ego. “He’s going to take the credit, and we’re going to share in the limelight,” City Council member Dennis Zine says.
Bratton’s wife, Court TV anchor Rikki Klieman, hopes for her share of the limelight. Giving up her New York job, she says she wants to land a TV talk show or an acting role in a Hollywood TV series about policing. She’s his fourth wife. He’s her third husband. A book she’s writing about “our love story” will appear in May, she says.
Living in a downtown hotel while the couple house-hunts, Bratton says he wants to change the LAPD’s “Jack Webb mentality” of measuring success by the number of arrests. “Community policing is all about the prevention of crime in the first place. You measure the success of a police department by how much crime is down, how many fewer victims there are.”
Rank-and-file Los Angeles cops, wary of outsiders, cautiously endorse what they’re seeing. “So far, the response is overwhelmingly positive,” says Zine, a former head of the police union. “I’m not hearing any squawks from anyone -- except the command staff. They’re using words like ‘bloodbath.’ He says no, though he says there’ll be a shakeup. His agenda is clearly to mandate major change in the LAPD.”
Reform may not come easily. At Bratton’s installation, rows of uniformed cops saved their loudest applause for former chief Daryl Gates, who was ousted after the riots in 1992. Gates was “the last chief who was free of independent oversight,” Bratton says, and the applause reinforces the need to root out an insular core culture of “officers who loved the good old days when they were answerable only to the chief.”
“The world has changed,” Bratton says. “These days you answer to the police commission, you answer to the federal government, and why? Because they (the old-guard cops) screwed it up so badly.”