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 Bratton, 66, who was police commissioner under New York City Mayor
Rudy Giuliani and has run police departments in Los Angeles and
Boston, will return to the NYPD on January 1, taking over from Ray
Kelly.
Kelly, serving under outgoing Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has overseen
the city's security in the years after the September 11, 2001,
attacks and the historic, a drop in murders and violent crime over
two decades.
Calling Bratton a "progressive visionary" and a "proven
crime-fighter," New York City Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio pledged to
preserve and deepen the city's historic reduction in violent crime
while protecting the civil rights of New Yorkers.
"The fact is that over an extraordinary career, Bill Bratton has
proven that you can fight crime effectively and bring police and
community together," de Blasio said as Bratton stood at his side.
In an August ruling that found the Kelly-era police tactic of
stop-and-frisk amounted to indirect racial profiling, a federal
judge ordered the city to submit to an independent monitor.
Stepping to the podium at the Red Hook Criminal Justice Center in
Brooklyn, Bratton promised to keep crime down and remain on guard
against threats of terror while bridging the growing gap between
police and minority communities.
"I will get it right in this city," Bratton said. "If we get it
right here, this can in many ways be a beacon that lights the rest
of the world."
"CULTURE SHIFT"
With the appointment, Bratton, who served as commissioner from 1994
to 1996, and Kelly, who previously held the job from 1992 to 1994,
are the only two commissioners in NYPD history to serve two tenures
at the helm of the nation's largest police force.
Bratton was first appointed NYPD commissioner by Giuliani in 1994.
In his first two years, the city's murder rate fell nearly 40
percent.
His signature achievement came in 1995, with the introduction of
CompStat, a police performance management system that tracks and
analyzes real-time crime data to hold precinct commanders
accountable. On Thursday, de Blasio described the program as the
game changer in the city's approach to crime.
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CompStat soon spread to major police departments across the country.
But Giuliani and Bratton clashed frequently, and the commissioner
resigned in 1996.
Starting in 2002, as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department,
Bratton worked with both an inspector general and a federal monitor,
instituted in the wake of a bruising late-1990s corruption scandal.
Kelly's tenure began less than four months after the September 11.
attacks, and under his direction the city created a global
counter-terrorism unit and stationed NYPD investigators in 11 world
capitals.
Also under Kelly, the NYPD has built one of the nation's most
sophisticated municipal surveillance networks, which includes
license plate readers, surveillance cameras and innovative
investigative technologies that sift through a growing store of vast
NYPD databases.
While Kelly's tenure has been transformative in many respects, it
has also been marked by controversy in recent years, including the
department's monitoring of Muslim communities and persistent charges
of precinct-level crime data manipulation.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, local district attorneys and an
array of civil liberties and civil rights groups all expressed
support for Bratton's appointment.
"We look forward to working with the new mayor and police
commissioner to ensure that fundamental changes are made to the
NYPD, including a top-to-bottom culture shift that ends racial
profiling and the abuse of stop-and-frisk," said Donna Lieberman,
executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
(Reporting by Chris Francescani; editing by Edith Honan and Jeffrey
Benkoe)
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