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.
