Bill Bratton named next New York police commissioner

By Chris Francescani

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bill Bratton, a veteran police chief who has led departments across the country, was named on Thursday as New York City's next police commissioner, taking over a force credited with a sharp drop in violent crime but criticized for its tactics.

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.

Along with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Kelly has overseen the city's security in the years after the September 11, 2001, attacks and the historic, two-decade-long drop in murders and violent crime.

"Bill Bratton is a proven crime-fighter," New York City Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio said in a statement announcing the appointment. "Together, we are going to preserve and deepen the historic gains we've made in public safety - gains Bill Bratton helped make possible."

"And we will do it by rejecting the false choice between keeping New Yorkers safe and protecting their civil rights," de Blasio said.

With the appointment, Bratton, who served as NYPD 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 will assume the job when de Blasio takes office on January 1.

Bratton's appointment also comes at a time of extraordinary transition for the department. 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.

Bratton was first appointed NYPD commissioner by Mayor Rudy 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.

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.

(Reporting by Chris Francescani; Editing by Edith Honan and Jeffrey Benkoe)

Crime & JusticeSociety & CultureBill BrattonNew York CityNYPD commissionerNYPDRay KellyMayor Michael Bloomberg
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