Connie Rice Hails Bratton as Best Choice for NYPD Police Chief
By Connie Rice
Op Ed for New York Times
Full Article
WhenI first met Bill Bratton, at a Christmas party in Los Angeles in 2002, I told him that it was nothing personal but I would soon be suing him, just as I had sued several Los Angeles police chiefs before him. That was my job as a civil rights lawyer, and at that time, we had a rogue police force that refused civilian control, rejected court orders, abused people of color and acted with terrifying impunity.
It was three months since William J. Bratton had been hired to fix the disgraced Los Angeles Police Department after a disastrous decade that had started with the beating of Rodney G. King, setting off the deadliest race riot in recent American history, and ended with revelations about a gangster-cop ring that had planted evidence, stolen drugs and attempted murder. The L.A.P.D. looked to many more like the Mafia than the police, more stop-and-shoot than stop-and-frisk.
Mr. Bratton laughed at my opening salvo and said that I should shelve my complaint and come help him at the L.A.P.D. That, I soon realized, was typical of how Bill Bratton works.
Last week, New York City’s mayor-elect, Bill de Blasio, announced that Mr. Bratton would be its new police commissioner, replacing Raymond W. Kelly. Mr. Kelly and the departing mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, had staunchly defended the New York Police Department’s controversial stop-and-frisk tactic, crediting it with reducing crime in the city. This led to doom-laden predictions from some quarters that the de Blasio administration would herald a return to the rampant crime of the 1970s and ’80s.
The mayor-elect’s choice of Mr. Bratton, who has championed the “broken windows” approach of concentrating police resources on problem neighborhoods, is widely seen as an attempt to calm New Yorkers’ nerves about crime. But Mr. Bratton has also pledged to reform stop-and-frisk and improve relations between the Police Department and minority residents. Can he do both?
Back in 2002, minority Los Angeles did not want Mr. Bratton — a chief who had advocated more police officers in minority areas. To my mind, too, the L.A.P.D. was too hostile to outsiders for the new commissioner to succeed. I doubted whether Moses with his tablets could pull it off, never mind a cop with a thick Boston accent and quick temper. But I had underestimated his will and ability.