Bratton’s Time in California May Offer Clues to His Plans for New York Police
By JENNIFER MEDINA
Published: December 6, 2013
... When he was appointed here in 2002, Mr. Bratton took the reins of a department that was mired in scandal and was seen as openly hostile to black and Latino residents. Just a decade before, deadly riots broke out after the acquittal of police officers who beat Rodney G. King, a black driver who had been pulled over for speeding. A few years later, pervasive misconduct and corruption were uncovered in the Rampart Division, with dozens of officers implicated in allegations involving framing suspects and the use of false evidence, as well as stealing and dealing drugs.
And today:
Hail to the Police Chief
William J. Bratton’s Record Bodes Well for New York
By CONNIE RICE
Published: December 10, 2013 Comment
LOS ANGELES — WHEN I first met Bill Bratton, at a Christmas party in Los Angeles in 2002, I told him that it was nothing personal but I would soon be suing him, just as I had sued several Los Angeles police chiefs before him. That was my job as a civil rights lawyer, and at that time, we had a rogue police force that refused civilian control, rejected court orders, abused people of color and acted with terrifying impunity.
It was three months since William J. Bratton had been hired to fix the disgraced Los Angeles Police Department after a disastrous decade that had started with the beating of Rodney G. King, setting off the deadliest race riot in recent American history, and ended with revelations about a gangster-cop ring that had planted evidence, stolen drugs and attempted murder. The L.A.P.D. looked to many more like the Mafia than the police, more stop-and-shoot than stop-and-frisk.
In reality, the central rogue cops in the late 1990s Ramparts scandal were all diversity hires like Rafael Perez (the basis for Oscar winner Denzel Washington's character in Training Day) and Kevin Gaines (the basis for the black cop with $300,000 in his trunk who is shot by the white cop in Oscar winner Crash).
It's a little weird that Hollywood screenwriters have a more careful regard for the truth in this case than the newspapers. It's like a modern Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
So, what's going on? Well, the New York Times basically wants Bratton to kick ass on the streets. They don't want street crime and they don't want the new Democratic mayor to get in trouble over street crime. So, everybody pretends that Bratton is the man who cleaned out all those white racists in the Ramparts Scandal.
New York is special.
The whole scandal with Perez and Gaines started with, and was supposed to be, about the fact that thanks to affirmative action, that black AA LAPD cops and black street gangs were hooked at the hip.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, it got sidetracked into this non-troversy over Rampart CRASH.
There needs to be a name for that liberal trick that magically bleaches malefactors who exemplify modern America's wondrous diversity (George Zimmerman, Rafael Perez, etc.) into the bêtes blanches of liberal imaginations. Zimmermaning? Whitewashing? Great White Defendant'ing?
ReplyDelete>>"New York is special."
ReplyDeleteAnd some folks are more equal than others.
I'm perplexed by the Bratton hiring. Doesn't De Blasio have a lengthy track record, all of it lefty? Why would he change at such a late date?
ReplyDeleteMy own view of blacks was mostly changed by the following: 1) Getting older and less gullible. 2) Personal experiences with blacks. It IS a fact that few whites outside of prison have had more of 2) than De Blasio.
Connie Rice. She used to be almost good looking.
ReplyDeleteaxe cop is FOX's show and the 5 yr old is the show creator's son.
ReplyDeleteAnother interpretation of the Bratton appointment: He was hired to serve as a reassuring "tough-on-crime" figurehead, while his underlings (probably to be selected by DeBlasio) gut the NYPD's effectiveness behind the scenes. When crime is seen to have spiked a year or so from now, DeBlasio's defenders can say: It's not because the cops aren't doing their job - after all, the famous crimefighter Bratton is the police commissioner!
ReplyDeleteI think Steve seriously overestimates the NY Times' concern to keep crime low. That paper has been one of the main assailants of stop-and-frisk.
I think the real allusion is to 'Alice in Wonderland', Steve.
ReplyDeleteYou know, with the Mad Hatter's logic and the Queen who believed athing was 'true' because she said it was 'true'.
Strange how we never here about 'Ramparts' anymore since it became common knoeledge that all of the actors in it were not white.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/12/the-best-movies-of-2013-richard-brody.html
ReplyDeleteThere is currently an attempt to create a Trayvonish auto-da-fe en Español in placid Santa Rosa, Calif. (actually the place has gone downhill since 2008-09, much in contrast to the glittering exurbs adjacent). A big supply of Bay Area professional activists has helped in that effort; yet the dog that doesn't bark in the press coverage is that the lightweight supe from the obligatory vibrant district of Sonoma County has been dogged by pathetic grimy scandals all year, so that this would make a convenient pretext for finally ousting him.
ReplyDeleteMisapplication of the moral from "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" explains a lot of the modern delicateness in the Big Media sphere
ReplyDeleteI think you have Kevin Ganes & Perez mixed up...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/southafrica/10510455/Nelson-Mandela-memorial-interpreter-was-a-fake.html
ReplyDeletehttp://gu.com/p/3y4pn/fb
ReplyDeleteIt really is end of the world.
Bratton's successes are based on the following fundamental management strategy: (1) Establish goals for your area commanders; (2) Develop ways of measuring whether these goals have been met; (3) Monitor measurements and publicly rebuke, reassign, demote, or otherwise punish area commanders who fail to meet goals while finding ways to reward area commanders who meet their goals - without moving them away from a position in which they are performing effectively.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds basic but this is not the way police departments have usually been run. One key point about Bratton's method is that it is an equally effective way of achieving radically different manangement goals, e.g., drastically reducing signs of public disorder in NYC versus improving community perceptions of police operations in LA.
Another really big point: LA polices on the cheap. The number of police per capita in LA is orders of magnitude less than the same number in NYC. This placed severe limits on what Bratton could ultimately achive in LA vis-a-vis crime reduction and decreasing public disorder.
Truly puzzling. Bratton has spoken strongly and with no equivocation that stop and frisk is just good, basic, run of the mill, Supreme Court approved police work. How can the New York Times approve of him? By his recent comments he basically said Blasio was full of it.
ReplyDelete"Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteI'm perplexed by the Bratton hiring. Doesn't De Blasio have a lengthy track record, all of it lefty? Why would he change at such a late date?"
How powerful is the mayor of New York City? Perhaps he is just a figurehead. I suspect the real power in NYC lies with the banks and investment firms, the rich, the famous,......you know, the TPWM - The People Who Matter.
HAHAHAHA, apparently some black guy just trolled the Mandela memorial, he stood there for HOURS making fake sign language symbols.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/nelson-mandela/10510604/Fake-sign-language-interpreter-signs-along-to-tributes-from-Nelson-Mandelas-grandchildren.html
His movements resemble the epileptic seizures many blacks have in their rap videos.
Random nonsense.
@anon 11:08
ReplyDeleteBill Bratton can work anywhere. Do you srsly think he would take a job (a la someone like Bill Parcells or Bill Walsh) where they were hired w/out the ability to hire & fire their own people?
De Blasio wants to be re-elected. Don't watch what I say, watch what I DO. The man ain't no fool.
The GTA: San Andreas game has a corrupt black lieutenant in it. Even video games are more truthful than NYT.
ReplyDeleteBrian O'Connor, the character played by Paul Walker in F&F, was loosely based on LAPD David Mack, who is now serving time for an armed bank robbery he committed in 1997.
ReplyDeleteThe well-to-do want to be protected so whatever's required for that to happen will happen; if a lot of spin is required then they'll spin away. Police chiefs are mostly political careerists and dance to the tune of the mayors who appoint them so in this case we'll be able to wait and see how he works out and how flexible his belief system is. The police chief in this city, Garry McCarthy, came from NY. He looks the part of an old-time, streetwise cop, grizzled and pickled. Yet some time back he got up in front of a black audience and actually stated (get ready for it) that the blame for all the shootings and killings (a mostly black activity) is attributable to the "Pilgrims" and to Sarah Palin. Yup, it's the fault of the Pilgrims and that bad Palin woman. The average police officer may know what the actual situation is but is under the control of politicians and their frontman police chiefs.
ReplyDeleteJust a decade before...
ReplyDeleteA decade seems like a long long time to me
William Bratton will have one job for the conceivable future - force every NYPD precinct to post ample photos of Dante De Blasio everywhere so that they're not the first to cause the surefire sh*tstorm that will brew when poor Dante is stopped and frisked for the first time.
ReplyDeleteNY is not special.
ReplyDeleteManhattan is special. Brooklyn has recently become special.
Queens and the Bronx are not special. And Staten Island is totally unspecial.
Stop and Frisk had to be popular with NYC libs all along due to the lack of criticism. I suspect the same DWL's types who liked Giuliani have resorted to using code in an effort to influence De Blasio from instituting policies that could bring crime back to levels of the Dinkin's era.
ReplyDeleteCould De Blasio have a trick up his sleeve that involves the export of large numbers of NYC's dependency class to greener pastures to cities in the quad-state area as a long term tactic to keep crime down and assist with continued gentrification? There are expectations that NYC will remain an urban playground for the Cosmopolitans regardless of the rhetoric.
ReplyDelete"black AA LAPD cops and black street gangs were hooked at the hip."
http://www.suntimes.com/23203709-761/2-dozen-busts-no-problem-for-110000-a-year-illinois-prison-official.html
Yeah, the future's gonna be good.
totally agree with figurehead theory--Bratton will be undermined from within---think lefty HHS bureaucrats gutting welfare reforms thru tweaks/interps. Hope I wrong, since I have relatives there.
ReplyDeleteNothing to do with the article, but just to report that in the last few days whenever I check out this site I get a malware warning from Avast. Probably a false positive, but the warning claims to be blocking a page (a popup?) with an 'au' (Australian) domain name.
ReplyDelete"Stop and Frisk had to be popular with NYC libs all along due to the lack of criticism."
ReplyDeleteIt was never popular but yes, there was a lack of criticism because no one knew about it as a result of publicity, and that was because of the mayoral race.
Ignorance is bliss.
" I suspect the same DWL's types who liked Giuliani have resorted to using code in an effort to influence De Blasio from instituting policies that could bring crime back to levels of the Dinkin's era."
Comments like this show how clueless some people are.
DWL's never liked Giuliani or voted for him.
"Could De Blasio have a trick up his sleeve that involves the export of large numbers of NYC's dependency class to greener pastures..."
No, he couldn't and you are a paranoid maniac if you think he does.
What will happen is that the real estate realities will march on and eventually NYC will be emptied of its poor, except in the large housing projects that still take up a huge amount of space in Manhattan, the Emerald City.
AT some point these will have to be dealt with and the war will be very fierce.
Steve, why do you pluralize Rampart?
ReplyDeleteThe more New York get away with the more the New York media have to point and splutter at people elsewhere to deflect attention - which means the more New York want to get away with the more people like Zimmerman they will throw to the wolves.
ReplyDelete"2) Personal experiences with blacks. It IS a fact that few whites outside of prison have had more of 2) than De Blasio."
ReplyDeleteI doubt he's spent much time with gangsta types.
I get the police division confused with David Horowitz's old New Left magazine.
ReplyDelete"Bratton's successes are based on the following fundamental management strategy..."
ReplyDeleteCrime is a *direct* function of
-race/ethnicity
-class
-age
-gender
The police *used* to operate on that basis i.e. on their direct experience of what race / class / gender / age type of person committed what type of crimes, until mass immigration and PC.
What Bratton did was create a scientific and statistical tool that mimiced police officer's direct personal experience which could then be used to allow the police to do exactly what they used to do.
But only in places where the media will give them cover.
"What will happen is that the real estate realities will march on and eventually NYC will be emptied of its poor"
ReplyDeleteThat is the absolute last thing that will happen.
*Manhattan* will be cleansed of the poor but the people behind it will still want a whole city full of poor people to clean their shirts cheap.
What they want is different poor people.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/nypd-black-box-problem-article-1.1543951
ReplyDelete