Police Threatened by ‘Low Work Ethic and Curdled Cynicism’: Bratton
"A complacent, unproductive department is one in which abusive and violent individual officers can thrive," Bratton warned in a candid essay for The Atlantic.
Landwebs
Police agencies can be corrupted from within by “a low work ethic and a curdled cynicism,” warns William Bratton, who served as chief of the Los Angeles and New York City police departments. Writing in the Atlantic, Bratton said police need to guard against shutting down in response to angry criticism from the outside.
“A complacent, unproductive department is one in which abusive and violent individual officers can thrive.,” wrote Bratton, often cited by police chiefs, academics and reformers alike for leading a major effort to transform U.S. policing in the 21st century.
Bratton called for what he called “smart reform”–which he said was achieved by winning trust from both local communities as well as rank and file. “You don’t want to over-police and foster a sense of officers as an occupying army. At the NYPD, starting in 2014, I and my deputies sent a clear message to the rank and file to use intelligent discretion. We were looking for quality of arrests, not quantity. ”
Bratton claimed that as a result, the NYHPD’s “enforcement footprint shrank—especially in the city’s communities of color.”
Bratton joined other reform critics in claiming the bail reforms passed by progressive work had increased public safety threats. Of the nearly 100,000 people charged but released pretrial in 2020 under New York’s reformed policy, about one-fifth were rearrested while their first case was pending. Two percent were rearrested for a violent felony, though originally released state data inflated both numbers.
And last year, according to the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, more than 90 percent of the 60,000 felony arrests resulted in no jail or prison time or even probation; 3 percent of arrests ended in prison sentences—compared with 8 percent in 2017, and 7 percent in 2018 and 2019.
Bratton says recent attempts in New York to reimpose bail don’t go far enough. But in responding to critics, Barton argues that policing technologies from databases to automatic license-plate readers are far from Orwellian.
For example, Barton says the gang databases let the department track over 500 violent criminal organizations and, in 2019, accounted for half of the city’s shootings. How the department adds and tracks gang activity in the database has been criticized previously.
