Bratton Exhibits Results --and a Taste for Limelight

The day after former New York Police Commissioner William Bratton announced that he wanted to be chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, he sent Los Angeles city leaders a copy of his autobiography and a packet of press clippings as thick as the Westside phonebook.

The stack included a profile from the New Yorker declaring him the “CEO Cop,” and a New York Times editorial lauding Bratton as an energetic leader who made a difference.

Through the strength of his resume--and his own forceful public relations campaign--Bratton was determined to make the cut for the LAPD job. As a result, few at Los Angeles City Hall expressed surprise last week when the Police Commission named Bratton one of three finalists for the job, along with Oxnard Police Chief Art Lopez and John Timoney, former commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department and a onetime deputy to Bratton in New York.

During his NYPD tenure from 1994 through 1996, Bratton’s management reorganizations and crime-fighting tactics helped force a national reexamination of the role of police in combating crime.

But Bratton, 54, also is a man who keeps his own clippings. His determination to tout his accomplishments was deeply resented by his boss, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. Eventually, the mayor had enough and forced the commissioner through a public ethics examination that eventually persuaded Bratton to resign.

Today, Bratton brings the same blend of self-promotion and accomplishment to the final round of the debate over who is best suited to run the LAPD.

“I’m extremely aware of what the problems are in the LAPD,” Bratton said in an interview. “I can go in there very quickly and turn it around. I really do believe I’m the right person at the right time for the LAPD and for Los Angeles.”

Bratton is a veteran of three major police agencies, having led the New York City Transit Police and the Boston Police Department before taking over the NYPD in 1994. But it is his two years at the helm of the NYPD that form the basis of his candidacy today.

While Bratton served as commissioner of the NYPD, crime in New York City declined so sharply that the trend helped refocus the study of crime and punishment. To this day, experts argue over what was responsible, but the numbers were stark and the effect on life in New York palpable.

Starting just before Bratton took over and accelerating during his tenure, crimes of all sorts fell. Serious felonies--murder, rape, robbery and the like--dropped 33%. The murder rate was cut in half. Other cities, including Los Angeles, saw declines as well, but none on the order of New York’s.

Up to that point, many academic experts on crime tended to attribute to police little influence on criminal behavior. They preferred instead to examine factors such as economic conditions, demographics, drug use and incarceration rates. After New York’s experience, many had difficulty excluding policing strategies as at least one significant contributor.

For Bratton, there were other benefits. He was, for instance, featured on the cover of Time magazine.

“He is a strategic thinker with a proven track record,” said longtime New York City journalist Richard Esposito. “If he gets the job, he will be very, very good for Los Angeles ... But you have to realize that publicity is Bill Bratton’s Viagra.”

Giuliani strongly urged Bratton to take a lower profile. Civil rights advocates complained that the NYPD had become too aggressive. Even some law enforcement experts who were convinced that police deserved some credit for the radical reduction in dangerous activity warned that Bratton tended to claim too much credit--that there were larger national forces at work beyond the New York experience. Others gave the department credit for knocking down crime rates, but warned that the progress had come with other social costs.

“Bill Bratton is a showboat,” said Stephen Yagman, a lawyer who frequently has sued the LAPD and who lived in New York when Bratton was police commissioner. “And there is no question in my mind that the crackdown on crime was based on a racial profiling component. They were targeting minorities in poor communities.” Twenty-seven months after pinning on the NYPD badge, Bratton was out the door. He immediately went to work as a consultant, earning more than a half-million dollars a year, traveling the globe, giving advice to police agencies on how to cut crime.

One of those agencies was the LAPD, where Bratton served as part of the monitoring team overseeing the department’s compliance with a consent decree under the supervision of a federal judge. When it became clear that Mayor James K. Hahn was inclined to deny LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks a second five-year term, Bratton dropped his position on that team in favor of seeking to become the department’s next chief.

Never lacking in confidence, Bratton had barely submitted his application before he and his wife, Court TV anchor Rikki Klieman, began searching for a house--in Brentwood. (Klieman is Bratton’s fourth wife.)

“I’ve been successful everywhere I’ve worked in policing,” Bratton said. “I’ve traveled all over the world. But I realize, as a consultant, you can only cajole. You cannot create change.”

City officials have greeted Bratton’s candidacy with mixed views. While pleased that the post has attracted such an undeniably national figure as Bratton, some of Hahn’s aides are concerned about the former commissioner’s track record in New York. The mayor’s advisors say Hahn might accept Bratton’s penchant for publicity, as long as he can reform the department and make Los Angeles the safest big city in the United States.

“Jim Hahn has made it clear that he wants a chief who is going to be a partner and who is going to understand that he works for the mayor,” said a longtime Los Angeles political consultant, Rick Taylor. “The stronger you are as an independent law enforcement leader, the less likely you are to get the job.”

Bratton, who is scheduled to meet with Hahn today, has pledged to be part of a team, with the mayor and his staff. He insists that he knows that Hahn is the boss--and goes so far as to say that he agrees with Hahn about everything.

“There isn’t a thing the mayor has said that I haven’t agreed with,” Bratton said. “I’m a team player, and I always have been.”

Bratton grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Boston, and set out early to become a cop. He volunteered to serve as a military officer in Vietnam, and when he returned from the war in 1970, he joined the Boston Police Department.

As a young officer there, he won a medal of valor for an incident that highlighted his developing gift for gab: He persuaded a bank robber to surrender a hostage being held at gunpoint. Bratton worked his way up in Boston, and in 1990 he was offered the job as head of the transit police in New York City. Those were troubled times in New York, a city haunted by the case of a young woman jogger attacked and left for dead in Central Park by a gang of men.

“Their ‘wilding’ attacks came to epitomize how unsafe New York had become,” Bratton said.

In charge of policing New York’s vast subway system--where crimes from cheating the token system to attacking riders were frighteningly common--Bratton equipped his officers with better gear and directed them to ignore nothing. He would go out with them on patrol, even in the middle of the night, and he launched a campaign to focus on low-level offenses. Token-jumpers, he argued, were committing a small offense, but they established a tone of lawlessness for the subway system and went on to commit bigger crimes.

Stop the small offenses, he said, and bigger crimes will decline as well. Within months, those efforts appeared to pay off, as assaults dropped nearly to nothing on the New York subway.

His success was noticed in New York and in his hometown of Boston, where he was offered the job as head of Boston’s police department. Bratton accepted the Boston offer and left New York.

He was back in his hometown only a few months before Giuliani called, asking him to return back to New York as head of the NYPD.

From Day 1, Bratton framed his job in military terms. In a swearing-in speech that consciously borrowed the wartime rhetoric of Winston Churchill, he vowed: “We will fight for every house in the city. We will fight for every street. We will fight for every borough. And we will win.”

Later, Bratton wrote in his book:

“The turnaround had begun. Like Babe Ruth pointing his bat to the bleacher indicating where his next home run would land, I was confidently predicting the future.”

The rhetoric may have played well with New Yorkers, but it concerned Giuliani and his aides, who were worried that Bratton, from the outset, was claiming too high a profile.

They were also concerned about Bratton’s frequent appearances on the evening news, whether he was publicly dressing down officers accused of corruption or explaining the logic behind COMPSTAT, the new, computerized crime-fighting system that he helped devise, which made local police commanders accountable for identifying and reducing crime in their precincts.

Using computerized maps to pinpoint crimes by type, hour and frequency of occurrence, Bratton and his staff were able to identify patterns and direct police efforts. Bratton would also meet weekly with area captains to review crime statistics and devise strategies to combat hot spots. Those meetings, to which reporters occasionally were invited, came to symbolize the NYPD’s new determination and accountability.

As Bratton trumpeted his efforts, he ran afoul of a mayor whose reputation also depended on credit for fighting crime. Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor elected in part on a platform to combat New York street crime, generally forbade his department heads to speak to the media unless it had been cleared through the mayor’s press office.

There was a steady stream of directives from Giuliani’s office to Bratton, requesting that he tone down or eliminate his extended meetings with reporters. But the warnings were rarely heeded. The situation worsened in January 1996, when he--not Giuliani--made the cover of Time magazine for a story on New York’s “miracle” reduction in crime.

Making matters worse, Bratton offered to revive an old tradition of having police parades in the city. The date he floated for a possible event happened to be his birthday, and the mayor’s office killed the plan, saying it would be too costly.

With tensions already high, Giuliani then raised public concerns when Random House announced that it was giving the police chief a $300,000 advance to write “Turnaround.”

The mayor was not happy with this news, especially because Bratton had not cleared the book deal with him beforehand. Throwing down the gauntlet, he asked the city’s corporation counsel to investigate whether the book deal represented a conflict of interest. By this time, Bratton’s term as police commissioner was up for mayoral renewal, and Giuliani said he would not even consider the matter until the investigation was concluded. Bratton, reading the writing on the wall, resigned his post.

The two men never buried the hatchet. Giuliani almost never comments on his former police commissioner, but aides have privately questioned Bratton’s behavior in office.

“The problem is that Bill Bratton couldn’t live within any limits,” said a source familiar with the personalities and inner workings of the Giuliani administration. “He had to have everything his way. He loved media attention.”

For his part, Bratton openly criticized the NYPD and Giuliani’s leadership when tensions between police and minorities erupted after Bratton had left. In 1999, when four officers shot and killed Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African street peddler, Bratton said New York police needed to improve their relations with various minority communities.

He did continue to praise Giuliani for spearheading the city’s crusade against crime, saying in a 2000 interview: “The mayor deserves credit, because if the crime rate had gone up, he’d be taking the heat.”

Yet Bratton also compared Giuliani with Richard Nixon and added of the New York mayor: “The problem with his personality is excess. He kicks you while you’re down, and it’s worked by and large, because he’s intimidated the hell out of this town.”

In interviews now, Bratton says he’d like to put his differences with Giuliani behind him and move West.

After more than a year of working with the independent monitoring team tracking the LAPD’s compliance with its consent decree, Bratton knows whom to call. He has spent weeks networking behind the scenes with Los Angeles leaders and law enforcement experts.

Bratton believes the LAPD is in the same state in which he found the NYPD in 1994: Officers, fearful of controversy, are trying to find ways to stay out of trouble instead of policing the city; Bratton says they need leadership.

“I’m somebody who likes dealing with crisis,” he said. “I’m like a player who likes four or five batting machines pitching balls at me at the same time.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

In-Depth Looks at the Short List for Next Chief

On Thursday, the Los Angeles Police Commission concluded a five-month search for the next chief of the LAPD by sending Mayor James K. Hahn the names of three finalists: William Bratton, former commissioner of the New York Police Department; John Timoney, former commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department; and Art Lopez, a veteran of the LAPD who serves as chief of the Oxnard Police Department.

The Times began a series of profiles on those three men Sunday. Today’s installment looks at Bratton. Timoney was profiled Sunday and Lopez on Monday. To see the articles on the Internet, go to www.latimes.com/lapd.

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WILLIAM J. BRATTON

Age: 54

Career: Former police commissioner of the New York and Boston police departments. He is widely credited with dramatically cutting the crime rate in New York City. Currently president of the Bratton Group LLC, a New York City-based consulting firm.

Education: Bachelor’s degree, Boston State College; graduate, FBI National Executive Institute.

Personal: Married to Court TV anchor Rikki Klieman.

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Times staff writer Josh Getlin contributed to this report.