Showing posts with label Bill Bratton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill Bratton. Show all posts

Monday, August 10, 2015

Bratton is done with this amateur administration

Bratton is done with this amateur administration
Is Bill Bratton eyeing an exit? If so, who can blame him.
Forty-five years a cop, a motive force in Rudy Giuliani’s reclamation of New York City’s streets 20 years ago and a public-safety intellectual with a stellar international reputation, Bratton has been swimming with the minnows for 18 months now — and the exasperation is peeking through.
“I will not be commissioner for [another] six-and-a-half years — that’s the reality,” announced Bratton last month. Clearly, departure is on his mind.
“You can’t arrest your way out of this problem. It requires coordinated effort,” the commissioner said a week ago of disruptive street vagrancy — an obvious fact that seems only recently to have dawned on the folks who inhabit City Hall.
“There are people in our society — criminals . . . bad people. We need to work very hard to put them in jail and keep them there for a long time,” he declared on Thursday — delivering an explicit rebuke to an administration that came to office preaching an unadorned anti-police gospel.
Frustrated much? So it would seem.
After all, murder is up, some city police precincts have become virtual free-fire zones for gang-bangers, aggressive vagrants plague city streets and parks — all of it combining to tarnish the reputation of one of America’s leading public-safety professionals.
Certainly none of Bratton’s thoughts can be endearing him to the Lilliputians now running government in New York City — most notably First Frequent Flier Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito.
They may not be saying much — but they wouldn’t be human if they weren’t seething inside.
But never mind them. It’s Bratton who matters.
What’s obvious — and critical — is that the past 18 months has frayed his tolerance for fools. And his exasperation at having to revisit a debate that he — and most New Yorkers — thought had been settled two-plus decades ago is palpable.
It’s all about the social contract.
Outside the administration, hardly anybody disputes that your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose.
So, why is it so hard to understand that your right to an empty bladder gives you no claim on my front stoop?
Or that there is no proper space on public sidewalks and in the parks for the disruptive mentally ill — to say nothing of snake-bite-nasty panhandlers in the game only for the easy cash?
And that, yes indeed, criminals belong behind bars. Period.
So why must New York City even have this discussion? Because some people never learn.
It may be lost on de Blasio, Mark-Viverito and her clown-council colleagues, but New York City solved street disorder a generation ago — and Bratton was present at the creation.
“[We] involved the Health Department, the police, the [public] hospitals and a bunch of others. [We] had a plan to maintain [order],” says a ranking veteran of the era.
Or, again in Bratton’s words: “You can’t arrest your way out of this problem. It requires coordinated effort.”
De Blasio & Co. seem only recently to have tumbled to this, hyperbolically announcing on Thursday a $22 million plan to coordinate mental health services for street people.
“What we are talking about is unprecedented, a culture shift in the way we think about and treat people who suffer from serious mental illness, who are also violent,” said first lady Chirlane McCray — the poet, artist and former speech writer who has pretty much been put in charge of the administration’s mental-health policy.
Maybe that’ll work. Maybe it won’t.
But coordination of services definitely isn’t unprecedented — and success will demand attention to detail and perseverance of a sort that so far has eluded the de Blasio administration.
Amazingly, Mark-Viverito is pulling in the opposite direction, pushing to decriminalize the so-called quality-of-life offenses — public urination, aggressive panhandling, fare-beating — that gives cops the tenuous hold they now have on the streets.
The fact is that de Blasio paid no heed whatsoever to the reemergence of street disorder in the city until this newspaper rubbed his nose in it. And, even now, there is no reason to believe he can or will do anything about it.
But ordinary New Yorkers have noticed — and they have no confidence in the mayor. That much is evidenced by an extraordinary Quinnipiac University poll that last week awarded de Blasio the lowest approval numbers of his mayoralty.
The mayor’s numbers, to put it bluntly, recall the fall from electoral grace of David Dinkins — a one-term mayor who was damned by his perceived indifference to crime and street chaos.
Nobody’s suggesting that things are that bad, not by a long shot.
But New Yorkers are hypersensitive to the issue — and, clearly, they have no appetite for another oblivious mayor.
So far, Bratton’s reputation is more or less intact. Certainly he got a strong thumbs-up in that Q-poll.
But he never has been much of a team player — his departure from the Giuliani administration followed a titanic clash of egos — and there is no reason to believe he’ll willingly take the rap for a feckless Bill de Blasio. Nor should he be expected to.
Who knows whether the mayor understands any of this. But if Bratton does take a hike, nobody who’s been paying attention will be surprised.

Sunday, July 12, 2015

New York City: DeBlasio presiding over rapid decline in NY city quality of life

New York City has never been a paradise, but for 20 years previous to the election of Mayor Bill de Blasio, quality of life had risen dramatically as a result of what's known as "broken windows" policing - enforcing minor crimes to take people off the streets and prevent them from committing major offenses.

But now, with the far left wing mayor leading the charge, more and more minor crimes are not being enforced. Predictably, this has led to a surge in violent crime and an invasion by vagrants and homeless people that hasn't been seen since the pre-Guiliana days.



This urinating vagrant turned a busy stretch of Broadway into his own private bathroom yesterday – an offense that would result in a mere summons if Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and her pals get their way. 
Wrapped in rags and a Mets blanket the hobo wandered into traffic at around 10:30 a.m. and relieved himself as cabs, cars and buses whizzed by between West 83rd and 84th streets on the Upper West Side. 
He finished his business at a nearby garbage bin, then strolled back to the front of a Victoria’s Secret store at Broadway and 85th Street, where he camped out for the rest of the day. 
Mark-Viverito in April announced plans to decriminalize public urination along with five other low-level offenses: biking on the sidewalk, public consumption of alcohol, being in a park after dark, failure to obey a park sign and jumping subway turnstiles. 
Police Commissioner Bill Bratton — who in the early ’90s implemented a “broken windows” approach to policing to dramatically cut crime — is against the new plan, saying such offenses lead to more serious crimes. 
Bill Caprese, 38, who lives on 82nd Street with his 6-year-old daughter, was appalled by the street urinator. 
“It’s absolutely a failure of government. It’s a total abject failure,” he said. “The mayor could fix it. The governor could fix it. We need asylums.”

Friday, July 3, 2015

NYC Cop Throws Fists To Protect Female Partner From Knife-Wielding Suspect

NYC Cop Throws Fists To Protect Female Partner From Knife-Wielding Suspect (screenshots: Live Leak)
A video surfaced Thursday of an NYPD officer using force to protect his female partner from a hostile-suspect resisting arrest.
Police officers had stopped Saykou George whom, according to the New York Post, they had seen carrying a blade in plain-sight. After having his ID checked by the officers, George — who had two outstanding warrants and a history of violence — began to grow increasingly belligerent, eventually lashing out at the female officer when she tried to place him in handcuffs.
According to police commissioner Bill Bratton, Internal Affairs is currently reviewing the video of the Wednesday arrest, but in his, “preliminary review of [the video], [he] saw nothing inappropriate with the officers’ behavior.”
George was slapped with a variety of charges, including resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer and criminal possession of a weapon.



Wednesday, June 10, 2015

NYPD Commish: Hard to Hire Black Cops Because ‘So Many Have Spent Time in Jail’

brattonAccording to New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, the reason black males are underrepresented by the city’s police force is because so many would-be recruits have served jail time.
In an interview with The Guardian, Bratton addressed the gap by saying: “We have a significant population gap among African American males because so many of them have spent time in jail and, as such, we can’t hire them.”
Indeed, data updated by the New York Times earlier this year shows that the New York Police Department is 21 percentage points more white than its residents. Only 16% of the NYPD is black, while the city’s population is 23% black, suggesting a slight racial gap in the force. That being said, the NYPD is actually quite diverse compared to many other police departments, partially due to court-ordered mandates.
A complicating factor is what Bratton calls the “unfortunate consequences” of an explosion in “stop, question and frisk” stops in the last decade that caught many young men of color in a summons net.
Those summonses are not automatic disqualifications. However, after passing the exam, a candidate moves to the more subjective background investigation, which includes criminal records. A pot arrest without indications of gang activity might not disqualify a candidate, but a series of summonses could. As a result, Bratton is concerned that the “population pool is much smaller than it might ordinarily have been”.
One of the most common arguments against the drug war — especially in urban areas — is that by disproportionately arresting and punishing young men (mosty black males) for nonviolent drug-related crimes, local governments create a cycle of poverty, sealing off potential opportunities. It appears as though Bratton acknowledges that some of those opportunities could be… joining law enforcement.

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