Bill Bratton - the police chief they wanted for the Met

If the study of cities is a science, then Bill Bratton ought to be its Nobel laureate. As it is, the former chief of police of the Los Angeles Police Department, and police commissioner in New York and Boston, has a resumé unrivalled by any cop on the planet – perhaps in history.

When Bratton refers with reverence to Sir Robert Peel’s Nine Principles of Policing – which he does, frequently – one struggles to think of a modern law-enforcement official who has done more to honour his memory. Indeed, two years ago, Bratton, 65, very nearly became commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police Force founded by Peel himself in 1829 – a tale to which we shall return.

Imagine Clint Eastwood running a sociology department – Dirty Harry meets Malcolm Bradbury’s History Man – and you get a flavour of this remarkable public servant. Unashamed toughness mingles with astute social observation, a profound awareness of the context of law-breaking (not as an excuse, please note – “the cause of crime is people”), and the need to forge strong links with the right community leaders. It is no surprise, then, that civic and national leaders the world over – David Cameron and Boris Johnson among them – turn to him with such respect and with such justifiably high expectations; he was made a CBE in 2009.

To what extent, I ask him, is it possible to extract universally applicable lessons from different cities. Do the favelas of Rio really have much relevance to, say, the mean streets of Manchester, or the ganglands of Moscow? “Well, I think there’s a lot of commonality,” he says. “Cities have always fascinated me, going back to my earliest college days [he attended University of Massachusetts Boston]. The course I took back then was called “Urban Geography” and ran for two semesters. I loved that course because, at that time, in the early 1970s in America, cities were being written off, cities were 'over’, everybody was going to move to the suburbs and that was the future. The cities were left to the poor and the minorities. And we have clearly seen that is not the case. We now have these huge cities of 18 million, 24 million people in some of the emerging third world countries… Cities are not behind us, they are the future of the world.”

To emphasise his point about “commonality”, Bratton chooses a surprisingly soft-edged analogy. “It’s like a Christmas tree – it looks the same in Britain as it does in America, but it’s the way you decorate it! You know, local customs and tastes, but it’s still basically years of community policing, democratic policing, Peel’s Nine Principles of Policing. They’re applicable over there and they’re applicable over here.”

There is, he says, a direct and unambiguous link between civic order and national strength. “What applies everywhere is that the safer the city, the safer the environment, the stronger the country. You’re never going to have absolute public safety; there always will be crime, always will be violent crime, but in [Britain and the US], the commonality we have, although we have different constitutions and laws, is that by and large we have public safety; particularly in our cities where there would be the most stress, the most tension between races, between class, economic tensions. One of the great strengths that we’re able to show in cities like London, New York is that every day in [those two cities], eight million people go back and forth to work, are educated together and entertained together and we have a relatively minimal amount of violence in crime.”

But it was not always so. What has assured Bratton’s place in the history of law enforcement – and the history of cities – is that he, along with a number of like-minded police chiefs, senior politicians and audacious public intellectuals, refused to accept the orthodox view of law and order as, essentially, a matter of containment. According to longstanding consensus, crime could be managed and perhaps held in check; but it could not be fought, or significantly reduced. The dystopian futures of science fiction – Blade Runner, Judge Dredd – envisaged anarchy barely kept at bay.

In this context, Bratton recalls Mario Cuomo, governor of New York, and a serious contender for the presidency at the time, being asked in 1989 what he proposed to do about law and order. “He made a comment to the effect of: 'Well, maybe this is as good as it gets.’” The following year was the worst year for crime in the history of the city. It was also the year Bratton first moved from Boston to New York to become chief of the Transit Police Department.

The new boss was acutely conscious that policing worldwide had lost its way. Robert Peel’s first principle – “the basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder” – had been supplanted by a defensive acceptance that response was more important than preemption. What mattered, according to the orthodoxy of the Seventies and Eighties, was how quickly police answered calls. But Bratton thought this set the bar woefully low.

He became passionately interested in the work of James Q Wilson and George Kelling, especially the “broken windows” theory that they had unveiled in The Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1982. According to this thesis - popularised many years later by Malcolm Gladwell in his global best-seller, The Tipping Point - tolerance of petty vandalism sends a profoundly dangerous social signal, a green light to escalating criminality. But the flipside, embraced by Bratton and a handful of others, was that fixing broken windows quickly sends the opposite signal, a warning to criminals that they face opposition.

Bratton returned to his native Boston in 1992 to become Superintendent in Chief and then Police Commissioner. But the gravitational pull of New York was irresistible and in 1994 he was appointed police chief by Mayor Rudy Giuliani: in 27 months, crime fell by 33 per cent, and the murder rate was cut in half. “Zero tolerance” became a reality, the “broken windows” theory was put into practice, 5,000 new officers were deployed, and the city’s policing techniques were updated spectacularly with the CompStat system of crime tracking.

“I do a lot of research before I go into a city in terms of looking [at] who are the leaders, the voice of the press, good and bad. And you deal with all of them, and you eat with all of them, and then you start building your coalitions. You’re able to neutralise the bad by expanding on your collaboration and your coalition… I can’t tell you the number of crises I got through in LA without demonstrations in the street, because before the crises I had built relationships that we could call upon in the crises. It’s hard work, it means a lot of meetings in church basements, it’s a lot of hours, but it’s an investment as a police leader much the same as a politician.”

In New York, he had grown used to pilgrimages by policymakers eager to find out whether the Bratton formula could be exported. “In 1995, Jack Straw, the shadow home secretary, comes to New York [and says]: 'We’re having all our crime problems in London.’ And all of a sudden New York, which was the crime capital of the world in 1990, now it’s churning them [solutions] out.” Straw, and others like him, grasped the value of “the political leadership that Rudy Giuliani brought, the ability to create a belief in the citizens of New York that something must be done about crime, and then the practitioner-leadership I brought.”

His initial purpose in Los Angeles, where he was chief of police from 2002 to 2009, was to prove that he himself could be exported – at least from the East Coast to the other side of America. “I went to Los Angeles to show that New York was not a fluke, it was not a one-time thing. And indeed in LA, I had even more success, although it took me longer because I had a much smaller police department and a much more entrenched hostility between the police and the minority communities in particular.

“But LA, to me, was a more successful venture than New York because not only did we get crime down, not only did we [get] crime down dealing with the issue of gangs – which was the emerging problem in terms of high levels of violence – but we also improved race relations using the police.”

In 2011, Bratton came close to exporting himself on a much more extravagant scale – a scale that would have astonished the rookie Boston cop in 1970. David Cameron, convinced that he had found the man who could shake up British policing, floated the idea of appointing him Met Commissioner. Bratton was up for it. But Theresa May, the Home Secretary, insisted that the new Commissioner had to be British-born – a ruling that tipped the scales away from audacity and back towards the safe option. One wonders whether the police would have had quite such a wretched year in 2012 – crowned by the alleged framing of a Cabinet minister, Andrew Mitchell – if Bratton had been at the helm, keeping a lid on the Police Federation and injecting a sense of excitement into the election of police commissioners. If a Canadian can be Governor of the Bank of England, why can’t a Bostonian take charge of the bobbies?

“I’m somebody that doesn’t dwell on the past,” says Bratton. “I always find a ray of sunshine, if you will. If nothing else, I think I can safely claim I’m the only American who’s ever been considered to head the Met. So that’s an accomplishment in itself, and it’s gratifying to have been thought of by people in another country, in another government, that I would have the capability to take on what I believe is the most significant policing challenge in the world. Because you have the duality of responsibility in the Met, in that the head of the Met currently is responsible not only for the policing of London, but the national counter-terrorism responsibility; so it’s a unique position in a democracy.”

Meanwhile, in New York, a mayoral election is looming, and there is talk of an extraordinary comeback for Bratton – a second shot at the city’s top policing job. “If it were to be offered again, then I would be strongly tempted to take it. I’m flattered that, you know, 16 years later, they’re still comfortable with the idea of my coming back. I think I should have another go in the public sector.” Count on it: we have not heard the last of William Joseph Bratton.

This is an edited version of an interview published in the forthcoming edition of 'TLQ’, the magazine app for thought leaders. www.tlqmedia.com