N.Y. TIMES
William J. Bratton was named police commissioner of New York City for the second time on Thursday. But it is a different place than the crime-ravaged city he came to in 1994. And he said he was going to be a different kind of commissioner, overseeing a different kind of policing.
In this city, I want every New Yorker to talk about ‘their police’, ‘my police,’ ” Mr. Bratton said after his appointment was announced by Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio, before reading from a children’s book about police work he said he had cherished since he was 9.
In 1994, the message was different: “We will fight for every house in the city; we will fight for every street; we will fight for every borough,” he said at the time. “And we will win.”
JIM DWYER N.Y. TIMES
Standing next to the next police commissioner on Thursday morning, Bill de Blasio promised that he would bring an end to “stop-and-frisk as we knew it.”
That was easy for him to say. It has already happened.
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At its peak in 2011, nearly 700,000 people were stopped, most of them black and Latino men; almost none of them had done anything wrong. About half were searched. A federal judge found rampant violations of the Constitution. And Mr. de Blasio — an early, eloquent and loud critic of the practice — was catapulted into the mayor’s office, in part on the force of his opposition to it.
Yet by the time Mr. de Blasio announced that he was running for mayor, the number of stops and frisks had already started a drastic decline that has continued for most of the last two years.
In October, about 3,000 people were stopped, which would be an annual rate of 36,000 — about a twentieth of what it was in 2011. Still, the mayor-elect, and his police-commissioner-designate, remained passionate about ending a practice that is pretty much over with. Mr. Bratton promised he would make quick work of it.
In fact, both he and Mr. de Blasio acknowledged that stop-and-frisk tactics, used legally and appropriately, were an essential tool for the police. They could wind up having a hard time bringing the stop-and-frisk rate below where it now stands.
You would not have heard the slightest hint of that at the news conference.
The man he is replacing as police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, was twice in charge of the New York police when crime went down — once in the early 1990s, and now for more than a decade. In 2001, there were 714 murders in New York City (excluding those who were killed in the attack on Sept. 11). The following year, 2002, Mr. Kelly became the commissioner. In 2012, there were 419 murders. During the 11 years in which murders declined, the city grew by 287,000 people — as if everyone from Cincinnati had moved to the five boroughs. The murder rate declined to 5.1 per 100,000 people, from 8.9.