Leading Bay State law enforcement officials say Dorchester native William J. Bratton — the New York City top cop who announced his resignation yesterday — was a legendary innovator whose “revolutionary” community policing strategies are now used nationwide.
“He was a kid from Dorchester who came up in a police department that had a completely different vision,” said former Boston police Commissioner Edward F. Davis. “He was an early advocate for community policing and saw the benefit of establishing a very tight relationship with the community. … You don’t understand how revolutionary it was to open the community up and connect. Bill really understood it and recognized the power of it and was doing it long before anyone else.”
Bratton, 68, is resigning next month after his second stint as head of the nation’s largest police department in order to become a security adviser.
He began his career patrolling Hub streets in 1970 before climbing the ranks to lead BPD, before going to New York, then the Los Angeles Police Department before ending his career back in the Big Apple.
Boston police Commissioner William B. Evans said Bratton supervised him early in his career. Evans recalled Bratton utilizing the policing strategy known as CompStat, which uses data and numbers as the basis for dictating policing strategies.
“When I was starting out, as a young cadet, he was my lieutenant and I learned a lot,” Evans said. “I always joked because we did crime-mapping. … I always joked I used to pin the map for him where all the robberies and burglaries were. And I always said he got credit for CompStat when I literally was doing all the work.”
In his first term as NYPD commissioner in the early 1990s, Bratton was credited with driving down crime with the widely-copied CompStat strategy. Under Bratton, the department also drastically scaled back controversial “Stop and Frisk,” but stepped up enforcement against so-called quality-of-life crimes — the “broken windows” theory of cracking down on petty crimes as a deterrent to more serious offenses.
MBTA Police Chief Kenneth Green recalled trying to earn a spot with T police in 1982 when Bratton was chief. He’ll never forget how in an auditorium of potential officers, Bratton announced he’d like to see 10 people whose names he called, and Green was disappointed he wasn’t called, he said.
“If your name wasn’t called, that’s a good thing because all those people had warrants for their arrest,” Green remembered Bratton told the group. He said Bratton explained in the ruse, cops sent out letters to the perpetrators who blended among the other recruits.
Although Green never worked with Bratton at the T, he said he was instrumental in modernizing the department and improving crime strategies such as putting officers in T lots where cars were often being stolen.
“He really legitimized the MBTA Police Department,” Green said.
Herald wire services contributed to this report.
