Bill Bratton officially retires Friday as New York City Police Commissioner

Bratton will walk out of police headquarters as commissioner for the last time Friday afternoon. He also served as commissioner of the Boston Police Department and the Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department in a career that began in Boston in 1970.

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He left after a demotion to run what is now the MBTA Transit Police, though he would eventually return as Boston police commissioner in 1993. The 68-year-old will be replaced by the current Chief of Department James O’Neill.

He told de Blasio he was resigning on July 8 but announced it publicly in August.

De Blasio, a Democrat, campaigned in 2013 on ending the New York Police Department’s aggressive “stop-and-frisk” tactic, which was used extensively under his predecessor, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

But it also gave protesters one last chance to make their opinions of the at-times-controversial commissioner known.

He was reappointed NY police chief in 2013 by Mayor Bill de Blasio and steps down as the United States is roiled by controversy over deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police and high-profile killings of officers. Some yelled “I can’t breathe!” Bratton was an early champion of the theory that you can deter serious crimes by cracking down on minor offenses.

A recent inspector general’s report found no correlation between the strategy and crime reduction.

“In leading six different police departments across the country in the past 35 years, I have never been better resourced or more fully supported by any mayor”, Bratton’s letter, posted on the NYPD website, said.

During a conference in August, Bratton called de Blasio a friend, leader and a partner and de Blasio joked that Bratton can now “buy him dinner”. “We are also changing the police culture by orienting the daily work of officers toward service and communications”.