Officers applaud NYPD’s Bratton as he moves on

NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton stepped down this afternoon, following the announcement last month that he’d accepted a post as executive chairman of risk management for an global consulting firm.

Shortly after the event, the president briefly greeted Bratton and New York City Police Chief James O’Neill, the city’s next police commissioner.

Commanders lined up in formation outside of New York Police Department headquarters to bid farewell to the 68-year-old Bratton as he left the building for the last time as commissioner.

Bratton made his way down the aisle of officers, holding hands with his wife and shaking those of high-ranking officials.

It was 20 years ago when Bill Bratton first walked away from the NYPD as its commissioner.

Bratton also tweeted a picture Thursday night posing with incoming commissioner James O’Neill as the two went on a final patrol together of the city transit system. Bratton is leaving the nation’s largest police force on Friday Sept 16, 2016, and O’Neill will take his place.

“It’s not an idle boast”, Bratton told an audience of top police brass assembled inside the One Police Plaza auditorium on his last day as boss. A recent inspector general’s report found no correlation between the strategy and crime reduction.

There is no consensus today about what caused New York City’s turnaround in the 1990s, or what caused similar, dramatic improvements in violent crime rates in many other USA cities at the same time.

New York City’s homicide rate had already begun to drop in the two years before he became commissioner in 1994, but during his 27-month tenure it plummeted.

“For the record, I am now the commissioner”, O’Neill told a gaggle of reporters as Bratton’s auto pulled away. He will be taking a job in the private sector with Teneo, a firm that advises CEOs.

A recent inspector general’s report rankled Bratton by finding no correlation between broken windows and dramatic drops in crime in NY. “There’s more to do to make broken windows a better strategy but it’s still the right approach”.

Bratton struck back last week by suggesting the report was the work of “amateurs”.

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