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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, with us now, former New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, who, from what I read, is still influential in New York City law enforcement policy as an advisor to Eric Adams. Commissioner Bratton has a new book called The Profession: A Memoir of Community, Race, and the Arc of Policing in America. Now, for those of you who don't know some of the history, Bill Bratton was first hired by Mayor David Dinkins to be the transit police commissioner when that was a separate force in 1990. The reduction in crime there on his watch led Mayor Rudy Giuliani to hire him as NYPD commissioner in 1994 when he took office, and Mayor Bill de Blasio brought him back again as his first police commissioner during de Blasio's first term, beginning in 2014.

Not many people can say they were Rudy Giuliani and Bill de Blasio's first choice to do anything. The New York Times did report the other day that Bratton is now advising Democratic nominee for mayor Eric Adams, who was actually on the transit police back during Bratton's first stint in New York under Mayor Dinkins. The book is both a memoir of Bratton's various stints on the job in New York and elsewhere and a discussion of the difficult criminal justice issues facing the country today. Commissioner Bratton, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Commissioner Bratton: It's great to be with you and your audience this morning. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Can I start with the breaking news that we were just discussing with Mara Liasson a few minutes ago, Mayor de Blasio announcing this morning that all city workers will now have to get COVID vaccines or produce negative COVID tests once a week to go to work. The NYPD, from what I've read, is less than 50% vaccinated? How do you understand with the contact that they have to have day by day with people not having their best days close contact, why there is so much choice among NYPD officers not to get vaccinated, and how do you think the force will respond to this mandate?

Commissioner Bratton: It will be interesting to see how they respond right now. If I understand it correctly, about 43% of the department is vaccinated. That's its uniform members. It has almost 20,000 civilian members also. I support the idea of mandating to a greater degree as possible that people get these vaccinations as well as the testing for those who don't for a variety of reasons.

The business community, which Mayor de Blasio has been encouraging to bring people back to work, is also wrestling with this issue, my own company, for example, in terms of trying to determine how we're going to go forward when we open full-time on Labor Day. Myself personally, I'm supportive of the effort as to why so many police and firefighters who are in such close proximity to so many people that might be afflicted with this terrible disease don't want this vaccination, I just don't understand it. I don't get it. I couldn't wait to get mine, being quite frank with you. It's the mystery of the ages.

A lot of people claim it's politics at the moment. That might be an influence that cops, I think, tend to be more to the right than to the left on this issue, and that might be a factor, but in any event, I support the Mayor's actions.

Brian Lehrer: Let's talk about what has become your signature approach to policing known as the broken windows theory, which you write about at length in the book. For people who have only heard the term used on the news and maybe loosely or inaccurately, what is broken windows policing, according to you who implemented it?

Commissioner Bratton: First off, Brian, it is one of the strategies that I employ. It is not a singular strategy. I also employ precision policing, created CompStat back in 1994. Sir Robert Peel, in 1829, articulated it best when he defined that the mission of the police is to prevent crime and disorder. '70s and '80s, we focused almost entirely on just dealing with crime and not disorder, and we see where that got us by 1990 in New York. The place was a mess in terms of the quality of life, broken windows issues on the street.

I am a strong advocate of it, but I'm also a strong advocate of precision policing and the two being used together. It's like a doctor dealing with a patient. He just doesn't deal with this most significant issue or illness life-threatening, but also all the other illnesses that might impact on the treatment or that serious illness.

For your audience, broken windows or quality of life issues, if you will, are those things in the neighborhood that don't rise to the level of serious crime. The issue of graffiti, the issue of the gang in the corner drinking all hours of the night, the prostitute, the aggressive begging, the homeless issues that are so prevalent in American cities today in terms of all the issues that come with that.

The idea is that if you don't control that type of environment, it provides an atmosphere that encourages and supports more significant crime. We saw that clearly in New York in the '70s and '80s in the subway system where quality of life, broken windows types of crime, things that people see every day, even in a high crime city where the risk of being a victim of crime is 1 in 10 as it was in New York in 1990, every day in 1990. Indeed today in 2021, every New Yorker is exposed to these broken windows.

I am a strong advocate that like a doctor dealing with a patient, you need to focus on not only crime but disorder. Disorder is another term for broken windows, another term for quality of life crime. Again, what we try to create in New York is, with our various precincts, 77 of them, that each precinct captain works in a community policing atmosphere with their community, focusing on what are the problems the community wants to address, serious crime, broken windows. Working together, they work on identifying those problems and focusing on preventing them from occurring after they're dealt with.

It is the very essence of community policing that everybody wants. Community policing is partnership, problem-solving, and prevention. The idea is that 311 calls, 911 calls to the NYPD, 10 million calls a year, the bulk of those calls aren't about serious crime. They're about quality of life broken windows. The true essence of community policing is dealing with that. If you expect the police to be successful in dealing with serious crime and not address broken windows, then you're going to have a retrench of what we had in the '70s and '80s in this city.

Brian Lehrer: Critics these days, as you know, say that approach to policing contributed to mass incarceration of young Black and brown men these last 30 years. I'll just tell the listeners that, in the book, you acknowledge that there has been broken windows overreach with things like zero-tolerance policies and that broken windows was never intended to be a high arrest program. Can you elaborate on how a police force focusing on not just crime, but the smaller things you call disorder, can do that without it becoming a high arrest program?

Commissioner Bratton: Certainly. It's the idea that you give officers discretion or no reprimand. Get off the [unintelligible 00:07:28] if you will. The idea of moving it up to potential summons, whether it be a civil summons or a criminal summons, with arrest being the last resort. The whole stop-question-and-frisk issue, which is part of the discussion in the equation or equivalency of stop-question-and-frisk to broken windows enforcement. They are two separate issues that they joined in some respects, but they are separate.

The whole issue is the idea of each neighborhood, each city in this country is a different patient. The challenge for the police is in looking at that patient, listening to the patient, what is ailing you? Is it broken windows types of issues? Is it serious crime? What type of broken windows is bothering the community? Is it the barbecue with 400 people on the corner on a Sunday afternoon? Is it the prostitute on your doorstep? Is it the gang dealing drugs in the local park?

These are things that police are asked to respond to, and it is a shared responsibility between police and community is, that how much enforcement will be tolerated by the patient. Does it require an admonition? Does it require a summons? Does it require an arrest? In all instances, what it does require are the three challenges for policing. The police constitutionally doing it within the law, police compassionately dealing with human beings, and you have to deal with them as human beings, and lastly, consistently.

This goes to the issue of disproportionate impact in minority neighborhoods. The idea you cannot police differently in a white neighborhood than you do in a Black neighborhood, on a poor neighborhood versus a rich neighborhood. These are the challenges facing policing. These are the challenges facing police leaders. When you go to a doctor, you want to go to a very good doctor. When you have a police commissioner or a police chief or a police captain of a precinct, you want that person to be very good at what they do in terms of diagnosing the ills of their patient

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take some phone calls for former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, 646-435-7280. He's also a current policy advisor to Eric Adams, and we'll get to that. You can call about issues right now, or things from the past, from his memoir, his new book called The Profession: A Memoir of Community, Race, and the Arc of Policing in America, 646-435-7280, or Tweet your comment or question @BrianLehrer.

Following up on your last answer, Commissioner, the incarceration rate for Black men in the US according to the statistics website Statista, says it more than tripled between 1980 and 2000 from around 1,000 per 100,000 people to around 3,500 per 100,000. Then by 2019, just before the pandemic hit, had come about halfway back down to around 2,200 Black men incarcerated per 100,000. You were police commissioner here and elsewhere as it was going up and as it was going down, and as it came down, crime was coming down too. How much does this indicate over-incarceration to you in that period compared to its impact on violent crime?

Commissioner Bratton: Let's take a look at that. The over-incarceration that is talked about actually began in 1987, '88, laws passed by Congress, supported by the Black caucus at that time in Congress to deal with the impact of crime, largely crime around the crack cocaine epidemic. There's been a lot of criticism of the 1994 Crime Bill that President Clinton proposed and signed into law that Joe Biden was very influential on, it's something that I advocated and supported, but the mass incarceration that is discussed actually began in the '80s in response to crack cocaine.

We have now seen the unintended consequences of some of that legislation where there were more significant penalties for crack cocaine used more extensively by the Black population than the white population, which was using powder cocaine. We've attempted to correct that, but I'd point out that in 1996 after I left as police commissioner, I talked about the bell curve impact, that like a doctor treating a very seriously ill patient, with the crime levels of 1990 in New York City, 5,000 people shot in the streets of New York, 2,243 murder victims, 500,000 serious crimes, the city needed some very serious assertive policing to deal not only with the serious crime but the totally out of control quality of life on the streets and subways of New York.

We predicted that over time, we would reduce crime significantly and thus reduce the need to arrest, the need to summons, the need to incarcerate. Clearly, that in fact happened, my predictions proved true. In 1996, we had an average [unintelligible 00:12:30] population of 22,000 at Rikers, and State Prison was largely populated by New York City arrests. In 2019, 2020, and 2021, Rikers is now down to about 6,000 or 7,000. The State Prison population has been reduced by close to 50%. Why? Because crime and disorder went down dramatically.

Even in today's Daily News, I think, the district attorney for Brooklyn is touting how crime has been going down in New York, in his area in Brooklyn, and he points to the significant decline in crime in 2014 on to the present time. A lot of that was during my time, as second time as commissioner, where we did begin pulling back on enforcement fairly dramatically, stop-question-and-frisk, summonses, arrests. Why? As the city was a lot safer. Who ends up benefiting from that? One, many fewer Blacks, in particular, being sent to prison or jail, and many fewer Black victims of crime. One of the things that's been lost in this discussion is the victims. That's something I'm concerned with, first and foremost, and have been for the 50 years I've been in law enforcement.

The good news is, Brian, we are beginning to reduce overtime the prison population as crime went down in America by almost 40% overall, homicide's down by 90%, overall crime by 80%, arrest down dramatically, summonses down dramatically in New York City, 2014, '15, '16, '17, '18. Why? Because basically, police working with community, embracing community policing, decision policing, and appropriate use of broken windows, quality of life enforcement made New York City the safest large city in America, and who was benefiting significantly? The minority communities, because there were so many fewer now going to either Rikers or going to State Prison.

Brian Lehrer: If I could follow up, what was the broken windows overreach that you refer to in the passage from the book that I cited before?

Commissioner Bratton: The overreach was very specifically where they try to basically match up stop-question-and-frisk with broken windows enforcement. Stop-question-and-frisk is based on the idea of, an officer has reasonable suspicion that a crime is/has been or is about to be committed in his presence and so he stops a person, he questions a person. He may if he feels he's a danger to him or the passer-by, frisk that person. That's the term frisk. That occurs in about 30, maybe 40% of the cases.

The quality of life enforcement issue is separate from that in that it has to do with a lot of other types of minor offenses that don't necessarily vice the level of a crime being committed. The idea is to, effectively, use the appropriate amount of medicine to deal with the problem. The appropriate amount of medicine might again be the appropriate dose, might be just an admonition. It might be a need for a summons, criminal or civil, and the last resort is arrest.

The idea is that in New York City, what we were doing in the 1990s when we had this bell curve where we had to increase arrests, summonses, stops, et cetera, that by 2014, '15, when I came back with Mayor de Blasio, we were able to reduce significantly all those activities, including stop-question-and-frisk, which had risk genetically, particularly during Commissioner Kelly's time up to 2010, when he reversed the policy of pushing for more stops and began to reduce it so that by the time we came in 2014, I think the stops were down to about 100,000 from 700,000. When I left office in 2016, I think we were down about 10,000 to 12,000 stop-question-and-frisk.

Brian Lehrer: Eric Adams campaigned in part on rehabilitating the image of stop-and-frisk when it's used legally. What's your understanding of what that means will change if he's elected mayor compared to what you were doing under de Blasio when you got it down from 700,000 to 10,000 or 12,000, and how you're advising him on this?

Commissioner Bratton: Nothing will actually change. Eric understands that as a former cop, particularly as a transit cop, the need to have officers have the ability to basically enforce the law, and stop-question-and-frisk is enshrined and constitutionally protected by the Supreme Court case. Eric understands that you can't do away with it and have a safe system, the same as Mayor de Blasio understood that. There is a need for it, but there's a need for it in measured terms.

The idea that right now there's 10,000, 12,000, maybe 14,000 stops at that. Also, there's a federal monitor who for the last seven years has been monitoring those stops. You have phenomenal oversight to ensure that it's not being abused. You're not going to see stop-question-and-frisk disappear under Eric Adams. It will probably always stay around, 8,000 10,000, 12,000 in a city. It might go up if crime goes up, as it's reflective of crime going up, it needs more medicine.

Brian Lehrer: You're saying you don't think it's going to increase significantly in numerical terms under Eric Adams, am I hearing that right?

Commissioner Bratton: That's correct and less crime, which will increase dramatically during his time. I think the good news is we are starting to see a corner being turned on crime. We might be in for a tough summer. I think the idea, yes, he comes into office in January, that, hopefully, we'll see the city as it comes back to life and more people coming back to work, that some of the crime issues improve. The police as they get back on their footing again, that we'll continue to try to regain the safety that we had pre-criminal justice reform up in Albany and pre the pandemic when the court system basically shut down on this city, if not this country.

Brian Lehrer: Trey in the Bronx, you're on WNYC with former Police Commissioner Bill Bratton. Hello, Trey.

Trey: Good morning, gentlemen. Mr. Bratton, sir, a Bronx resident, I work two jobs. Many a night these guys are out there blasting music, three, four o'clock in the morning. My walls are vibrating. I'm not the only one who calls 311. The cops don't come. Then when somebody comes outside and says, "Hey, man, could you shut that radio down?" you know what's going to happen next. Then the cops will show up to pick up the bodies and ask who started shooting and blah, blah, blah. If you come when you get the call, we won't have to escalate these situations. What's going on?

They don't ride their motorbikes all up and down 96th Street and Second Avenue, but they get to do it all over the Bronx and all over Brooklyn and that's how that little boy got hit. What are you guys doing?

Commissioner Bratton: If I may speak to that, the two things you are talking about. Broken windows, there are quality of life events that police are expected to respond to whether it's-- You have no obligation to go out and tell those kids to basically turn down the music because of the potential danger. That's where the police must of necessity come in and then be supported by the community in the sense that they are responding to the community's concerns about a broken window that needs to be fixed.

As far as those dirt bikes, those dirt bikes are all over the city. I see them everywhere, Second Avenue in Manhattan, they are not just in the Bronx. Unfortunately, a lot of them come out of the Bronx and Brooklyn and then terrorize the whole city, but you bear the brunt of it because that's basically where the bulk of them are coming from.

What you just described for the guests on this show, the listeners, those are two examples of broken windows, quality of life enforcement. If you look at the 311 calls, where do they come from? They come from all over the city, but they come largely from minority communities who really want the police to come in and work with them on dealing with these problems.

Brian Lehrer: Edwin in East Flatbush, who says he's a lieutenant in the NYPD. Hello, Edwin, you're on WNYC.

Edwin: How are you doing Brian, and good morning, former Commissioner. Former Commissioner, I decided to go into law enforcement primarily because of the way that I was treated as a young Black man growing up in a West Indian neighborhood here in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. Upon entering the NYPD, one of the things that was shoved down our throats was the broken windows policing. Immediately, I replayed many instances in which anti-crime plainclothes officers, street crime officers, uniform officers, embarrassed, mistreated, and over enforced in my community, even myself being a victim. Now I realize this was what was playing in the background. They were trying to meet their broken windows quotas.

Mr. Bratton, I've read the Turnaround, I've read Collaborate or Perish, I haven't read your recent book, but I'm telling you broken windows is not the way to police in Black and brown communities. Broken windows enforcement, you said earlier as Brian asked, you referenced lower arrest numbers. That's because the late Kenneth Thompson, the District Attorney of Brooklyn chose to not prosecute less than 25 grams of marijuana, which you denounced before Mayor de Blasio made it a city-wide initiative and that's why arrests go down because when 60% of the arrests are tied to marijuana and we change how we enforce marijuana, that's how it goes down.

The lower numbers that you keep referencing and that the department leadership likes to reference, is a reflection of the work working, the work of activists, the work of elected officials, the work of community folks, not this department taking self-corrective action. This is what the leadership of the department has never been able to do, take self-corrective action. It always takes monumental lawsuits, embarrassments, and massive protests. We do not need this, sir. I've studied you. I have some respect to you. One thing you said is you can seriously undermine any organization by putting the right person in the wrong position. I quote you often because you're so right, but what you fail to see is how the department that you were in charge of twice is the paragon of that quote. Broken--

Brian Lehrer: Let me get a response.

Edwin: It criminalizes entire zip codes for innocuous infractions that occur at higher rates in white areas.

Brian Lehrer: You know, Commissioner, that this is a pretty widespread perception and if we take Edwin at his word, and it sounds like he is talking honestly, he's a lieutenant in the NYPD.

Commissioner Bratton: No, and in terms of what he's discussing is not just perception, it's a reality and some of his experiences. The challenge going forward is the previous caller. How do you deal with the broken windows complaints that come in from the neighborhood that oftentimes include what he just referenced marijuana in the public housing developments, the smoking of marijuana in the hallways, that we get calls about?

The late deceased district attorney he referenced, who was an extraordinary individual, we had a difference of opinion around the marijuana issue, around the issue of public smoking of marijuana. I have no issues in the sense of use of medical marijuana, no issues in the sense of the increasing use of marijuana in homes, et cetera, but when it's done in a public place, I do have concern for that because this is looking at the calls that come in to 911 to 311 about people who feel that it's being abused, public housing developments, in parks, on city streets.

He makes a lot of valid points, but the idea is that, one, I have said it before, I'll say it on this show, none of the people I work with, Jimmy O'Neill, now Dermot Shea, many of the leadership of the department, basically endorse or support the issue of quotas. That is widely believed to be the case, however, among the rank and file, and indeed supervisors like the lieutenant that they are being pushed for numbers.

Now, what I'm pushing for is basically enforcement activity directed against activities which the public is complaining about whether it's the smoking of marijuana in public. I might point out that so much of the violent crime that we still see around drug trade issues involves marijuana. It's not cocaine, not heroin, not the hallucinogens, it's around marijuana that we still have a phenomenal amount of violence, a phenomenal amount of calls from the public. The challenge for police is how to deal with the multi-faceted aspects of that particular issue, typically, in the city and a country that's increasingly legalizing its use.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC FM, HD and AM New York, WNJT-FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey Public Radio. A few minutes left with former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, now an advisor to Eric Adams, and author of a new book called The Profession. Commissioner, you call the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin a murder, but that's the obvious case at this point. The harder question is how systemic police violence and racism is, and, of course, besides George Floyd, so many people know the names Eric Garner, Daniel Prude, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, and we could go down a list.

I know each one is different and I'm sure you have your opinions on each separately, but even if some of them are unjustified, that's enough to send Black America a message that these things continue to happen with some regularity. Eric Adams who's running as a pro-law enforcement candidate, as you know, talks about being afraid of the criminals and the police growing up and being abused by the police when he was 15. It's not just rabble-rousers making things up. Why has police leadership in America failed so much that these things are still happening?

Commissioner Bratton: I challenge that, they have not failed. The use of force by police has been going down dramatically, New York City is a case in point. Back in the 1970s, we had over 900 incidents a year with New York City police officers discharging their firearms with on average, 50 citizens killed by NYPD. In some years, 12 New York City police officers killed by citizens. In the last several years in the city, we're averaging less than 50 incidents in which gunplay is used by New York City police officers and the number of lives taken is less than a dozen so that the overall use of force by police in this city I'll speak to, but nationally, is down dramatically over time.

What is happening now is that there's no denying that there are tragic losses of life at many of the names that you just referenced, but that the actual number is relatively small compared to the number of incidents in which police are called upon to engage in. The good news is that there is an increased understanding that to deal with reducing those numbers even further is something that the NYPD is committed to is better training, better supervision, better investigation of these events when they in fact do happen.

The idea of fewer people in jail, fewer people injured, fewer people arrested, fewer people shot, even dealing now with the mentally ill, the many new initiatives being tried by the city, we are constantly improving, and this is what we talk about in the book, but we are never going to get, unfortunately, to a point where we have no deaths. It is just not the reality and in a country with 400 million firearms.

Unfortunately, there's still and this is something that Mr. Adams understands and has talked about, there are violent people among us. The police are the ones that have to basically deal with those violent people when the public is not able to, and in the course of dealing with that, sometimes mistakes are made. Good news is that we have been getting better at it, the bad news is that these events will still happen. In the world we live in today with social media, those events have magnified phenomenally in the sense of it happens in a small town anywhere in America, it can be featured that evening repeatedly on national news and on social media.

Let's take a look closely at numbers in a sense of, where have we been, where are we, and where are we going? [unintelligible 00:30:06] talk about this, I think that the good news is as a profession, we have been developing like the medical profession, and the debate right now around the coronavirus, the extraordinary debate around that illness is similar to the debates we're having around criminal justice and criminal justice reform, the other virus, if you will, in the United States.

Brian Lehrer: I'll give you one more example that I would like you to comment on. When Mayor de Blasio was on NY1 for one of his appearances last month, he talked about violent police behavior at some of the protests last summer. He said, "Certainly, some mistakes were made. We learned some valuable lessons." When he was asked about police behavior in Washington Square Park just last month during a Pride event in that same interview, he said, "We had some issues between police and folks who were there in the park. I think some of that could have been handled better. Chief Harrison and I talked about that."

Here we are a full year after the lessons he said the NYPD learned, and he's still having to give that same answer about the NYPD could have handled things better at a crowd this summer. If that's where we still are, how can the public have trust in the police to behave responsibly?

Commissioner Bratton: We are continuing to always try to improve police performance, police response capabilities, but again, the reality of the world we live in, there will always be incidents, and in some of those incidents, police will either misbehave inappropriately or misbehave in a way that seems awful but is in fact lawful, their use of force. This idea that somehow or another that we're going to live in nirvana and that there's going to be no issues involving the police, the police use of force or community force and activity directed against the police, that's not the world that we live in.

The good news is, and, Brian, this is the point I'm making, is that we have been getting better at it than we were when I first came into the business in 1970, within this city 900 shooting incidents and 50 deaths a year versus the last several years, fewer than a dozen deaths a year and fewer than 50 shooting incidents where the police are usually shooting back at people who have shot at them.

Even on the issue of the emotionally disturbed, the tremendous efforts that are being made to deal with that issue, which seems to be the bulk of the lives that are taken by the police dealing with the emotionally ill, it's going to take a lot better training than whatever we give, and a lot more creativity such as the effort that's underway up in Harlem right now with one of the precincts up there where they have special teams going out instead of the police or with the police. That seems to be showing some early signs of a better way of doing things. We're always learning. Like the Glengarry Glen Ross play, the salesmen always be selling, in policing, it's always be learning, always be learning from your mistakes and your successes, and always trying to improve.

Brian Lehrer: I want to touch on one more topic before we run out of time, and that's the chapter in your book on counter terrorism. Here we are about to mark the 20th anniversary of the September 11th, 2001, attacks. How do you think the threat of terrorism, be it foreign terrorism or domestic terrorism, and we were talking earlier in the show about January 6th, has most changed policing in places that would likely be high profile targets like New York and LA and wherever else?

Commissioner Bratton: I speak to that in the book in those two cities, certainly, and I'm very familiar with, that the sheer amount of resources that we've had to commit and continue to commit in New York and LA. New York still has almost 1,000 personnel that work full time on dealing with the terrorism issues, whether it's international ISIS, Al-Qaeda, or the increasing concerns around domestic terrorism from the right and the left. LA had, when I was there, created an anti similar in size to New York's, but 300 offices in a much smaller department. That will continue to be an area of focus while the potential of the disturbances we're seeing around the world, particularly where ISIS and Al-Qaeda seem to thrive, whether it's Pakistan, Afghanistan, and on the home ground fronts, clearly the events of January 6th indicate that we have a phenomenal problem.

As recent reporting about the FBI and potential abuse of their investigative tactics in dealing with issues of Michigan point out that we're going to have to keep a very close eye on what we do in policing, whether at the national level or local level, in dealing with this threat to avoid effectively making mistakes while we try to basically avoid having any terrorist incidents. We've done pretty well on the international terrorism front, maybe not as well on the domestic terrorism front, but it's only the last couple of years we've come to recognize how significant that domestic terrorism issue is, particularly on the far right, and a lot of it that has to do with race and religious issues.

Brian Lehrer: On the international terrorism, in hindsight, is all the local counter-terrorism and surveillance strategy keeping us safer in your opinion? Is it in line with what we want local police departments to be doing? Some say we should leave that to Homeland Security and the federal intelligence community and focus solely on community and neighborhood policing at the NYPD level.

Commissioner Bratton: No, it's just basically the reflection of the multiplicity of responsibilities that police have, local police in the 21st century. Prior to the 21st century was crime and disorder, 21st century, we're now dealing with terrorism for the first time, and in large cities like New York and LA, you have to focus attention there. We're also having to focus on issues of an exploding drug problem once again, opioids and others, we're focusing on cybercrime, we're focusing on all of the issues coming out of the internet and social media, increased human trafficking, increased child abuse.

The policing challenges, and I talk about this in the book of a 21st century phenomenal, and it's not that crime and disorder are lessening, or terrorism for that matter, they will always be here. They're a part of our lives now. It really is the challenge for American policing. How do you apportion the resources that we have? The resources are declining. This is why, in terms of this idea of defund the police, you want to defund the police as the responsibilities and challenges are increasing? I'm sorry, it's the other way, you want to actually refund the police and spend a lot more money on research, a lot more money on training, a lot more money on legislation that effectively controls the activity of the police so that some of the concerns that the public has can be more effectively addressed.

Brian Lehrer: You do write in the book, despite being against the defund the police movement, as you just said, that you would divest the police of such social service responsibilities as dealing with homeless people and mentally ill people and addicted people when excellent programs are designed and in place at agencies in power to fulfill them, that's a quote from the book. How close is New York to having those alternative programs in place in your opinion, and what's your advice to the next mayor, or presumably Eric Adams, who you have his ear, for getting there?

Commissioner Bratton: Those three issues you just raised, all been dumped on the police over the last 50 years. We created the homeless problem when we emptied out the mental institutions in the '70s. Well-intended effort, horrific conditions for those people. We created the drug problem in terms of our failure to adequately deal with that, whether it's crack cocaine, or now the opioid issue created by the pharmaceutical industry. Thirdly, the idea of, in terms of emotionally ill, dealing with the criminal element.

The three challenges, the three things that police tend to get the most criticism for poor handling of, these are things that society has failed for 50 years to handle. In that failure, it ends up going into the safety net that the police provide. We're there 24 hours a day when there are no, basically, doctors, nurses, et cetera, to deal with the mentally ill, when there's nobody there to deal with the opioid epidemic, when there's nobody there to deal with some of the crime activities, you call the police.

Going forward, and no city spends more money on all three of these issues than New York, and we see how successful we've been, or I might point out how much lack of success we've had dealing with the homeless, the emotionally disturbed, despite spending billions of dollars on it. I'm hoping that Mr. Adams will take a fresh look at all of them, and with the limited funds he will have, because he is going to start off with a $5 billion projected deficit. This is going to cost money. We've had a lot of money in the last couple of years, and we've not seen a real improvement in any of those three circumstances.

Going forward, there's tough times ahead, but you can't expect that the police are going to be the constant safety net, because we're just not trained for it, we're not equipped for it, and it has never been the primary responsibility of the police to deal with these issues, is they basically ended up in our lap because government and society have failed to deal with it adequately. Let's hope with new leadership, some new thinking, some of these new initiatives that are underway, that I'm excited about, that we do find a way to get police out of it as the primary responders, which we have become.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe that's a point of common ground between many police officers and leaders and many in many communities. We're just about out of time, let me give you a quick follow up based on tweets that we're getting. There's a good bit of pushback to what you said about marijuana earlier. One listener tweets, "Maybe you could remind your guest Bratton that cannabis is legal now in this city." Another one writes, "Many more crimes revolve around use of alcohol. Please ask for his data supporting his assertions about marijuana." Another pushback related to what you said about prostitution, which people want to know, "The progressive prosecutors are saying decriminalize sex work." Very briefly on that pushback that's coming in.

Commissioner Bratton: Those are all quality of life, broken window issues in the sense of the public's going to have to decide through its politicians as the use of marijuana becomes much more prevalent in public spaces, as prostitution becomes apparently much more prevalent in public spaces at all hours of the day and night, and the figures around violence associated with marijuana. [unintelligible 00:40:54] believes that by legalizing it that the violence is going to go away.

Sorry that the illegal sales are still going to be there because the illegal market doesn't pay taxes. That's where the bulk of people are going to go to buy their drugs and that's where the drug dealers are still going to be fighting for control. The violence issues, and I'm very comfortable, and if you were to check with the police department, looking at violence associated with marijuana issues, it is still very significant.

Again, we all have our differences of opinion. I've expressed mine in my books. I thank you for the opportunity to express it on this show and your comment about finding common ground. We all have our opinions and the idea is to have them and shared, and effectively, then see if we can find common ground where nobody gets everything they're looking for, but hopefully, everybody gets at least something that they're looking for. From my perspective, it is all about the idea of trying to find common ground, where we can have a safe city where everybody, no matter their class, their race, their ethnicity, can effectively have a safe experience in enjoying life.

Brian Lehrer: Bill Bratton, still influential in New York as a former police commissioner, but now advisor to Eric Adams, and author of the new book, The Profession: A Memoir of Community, Race, and the Arc of Policing in America. Thank you so much for your time.

Commissioner Bratton: Thank you for your show. All the best.

 

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