NEW YORK — In the days since two police officers were fatally shot in their patrol car in Brooklyn, Mayor Bill de Blasio has turned to his celebrity police commissioner for help weathering the biggest political test of his first year in office.
William Bratton has been the featured face of de Blasio’s administration since the shooting, emerging not only as a steadying presence in a nervous city but as a respected national voice from the officers’ perspective on race and policing.
He brokered a rare meeting this week to reduce the very public tension between the mayor and police union leaders, some of whom have blamed the mayor’s past comments on police tactics for the tragedy. He also took to national talk shows to support the mayor and defend the police, arguing that rank-and-file officers and chiefs feel under attack even “from the federal government at the highest levels.”
Bratton, 67, alternates rapidly between pronouncements that represent the interests of the officers he leads and statements of support for the mayor at whose pleasure he serves.
Nonetheless, it remains unclear whether he can succeed at repairing relations and, in the process, bolster his reputation as an innovator — one he forged as the city’s top cop under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in the 1990s before heading west to lead the Los Angeles police for seven years.
“He came back to New York with a lot of credibility,” Ed Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, said of Bratton, whom he described as “filling a vacuum in consistent leadership” in the city.
Political scrutiny
In a city on edge after weeks of protests since a grand jury declined to bring criminal charges against officers in the chokehold death of a Staten Island man named Eric Garner, Bratton is now under political scrutiny very different from the kind he endured during his first tenure as chief here, when crack and crime rates dominated the headlines.
Activists across the country — reacting to the death of Garner and the fatal shootings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland and Akai Gurley in a public-housing project stairwell in New York — are demanding greater accountability for police who use force, especially against suspects who are black and unarmed.
Bratton’s challenge comes from inside and outside the police department.
On the one hand, police are preparing for new protests this weekend after the funeral of one of the officers slain last month. On the other, there are signs that the commissioner does not yet have his rank and file in line.
As City Hall announced plans Wednesday to rename two streets in honor of Detectives Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos — killed by a gunman who had declared on Instagram that he would kill police as retribution for Garner’s and Brown’s deaths — new statistics showed a marked drop in the policing of everyday crime, a potentially dangerous act of protest by an angry police force.
The number of summonses for minor offenses and parking and traffic violations plummeted by 90 percent compared with the same week last year, with felony arrests almost 40 percent lower, according to the figures.
The drop in enforcement belied far broader progress here. The statistics showed that the number of murders here in 2014 — 321, in all — was the lowest in 50 years.
High-profile city
“A lot of why he’s been thrust in the spotlight is because this is New York City,” said Deputy Commissioner Stephen Davis, Bratton’s top spokesman. “Where else can you get 25,000 people on half a day’s notice to have a demonstration? The fact that the police are the object of the protests make this very challenging.”
Many officers remain furious about the mayor’s admonition to his biracial son, after the Garner decision, to “take special care” during any police encounters.
Davis acknowledged that Bratton “has to work with the mayor. He has to work with the cops. He’s doing a good job balancing that.”
The challenge for Bratton, who has not backed down from his comment that the Dec. 20 killings were a “direct spinoff” of the street protests that followed the lack of criminal charges in the Garner and Brown killings, is to appease not just an angry police department but a city anxious over aggressive policing.
“He can’t lose the cops, he can’t lose the community and he can’t lose his mayor,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based police research think tank. “It’s a toxic environment.”
