William J. Bratton

• Born: October 6, 1947

• William J. Bratton was the Chief of the New York City Transit Police, the New York City Police Commissioner, the Los Angeles Police Commissioner, and a security consultant who was responsible for the implementation and proliferation of broken windows policing in the twentieth century. As Chief of the NYC Transit Police, Bratton was responsible for turning a theory promoted by criminologists George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson into an actual police strategy. Broken windows policing was the single-most important development in crime prevention in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Bratton also developed data-driven policing using CompStat, a computer program that used arrest reports and crime statistics to identify geographic areas that were in need of police presence. Bratton’s techniques and methods spread across the country after the 1990s. The two largest police departments, the NYPD and LAPD, both under his leadership, adopted this model.

William J. Bratton was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 6, 1947. Boston at mid-century was a working-class town, home to factory and industrial workers. By the 1970s, the city was experiencing economic decline due to deindustrialization. Bratton started his career as an officer in 1970 as a beat cop, walking neighborhoods and interacting with criminals and citizens alike. Over the next fifteen years, Bratton climbed the ranks in the Boston Police Department before moving to New York City. In 1975, Bratton made sergeant and a few years later made lieutenant, where he created a program in the Fenway neighborhood that was an early attempt at both community and broken windows policing.

In 1990, Bratton became the Chief of the New York City Transit Police and rolled out the first serious attempt at broken windows policing on the subway system. Due to decades of economic decline and recession, New York City was experiencing social and economic decline and growing crime rates, especially in the subways. Bratton attempted to fix this through his new approach.

Broken windows policing was a strategy first articulated by criminologists George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson in an article titled “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety” in the March 1982 issue of The Atlantic. Kelling and Wilson argued that petty crimes (broken windows, graffiti, loitering) led to more serious crimes because in communities where lesser crimes took place, citizens felt less engaged or connected to their neighborhood. In communities plagued with petty crimes, individuals went out less and failed to claim informal social control over their neighborhoods, which were given over to criminals who, then emboldened, moved to bigger crimes. If officers intervened early on, they could stop this process.

Kelling and Wilson cited a small program in New Jersey where police changed their approach. The department ordered officers away from car-based patrolling and emphasized foot patrols through neighborhoods. Although the cops could not respond to as many calls as they would be able to if they were in cars, citizens felt safer because of their presence. “What foot-patrol officers did was to elevate, to the extent they could, the level of public order in these neighborhoods,” they reasoned.

Building off that study, Kelling and Wilson then added that, “at the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.).” For Kelling and Wilson, if small crimes like broken windows were dealt with early and promptly, then more serious or violent crimes could be avoided—hence the name of the approach.

Even in 1982, the two criminologists indicated some of the future problems of the approach. The first was the difficulty in identifying the neighborhoods that were at the tipping point of what they called “order” and “disorder.” The police lacked the information and the ability to systematically acquire and sort the information (like broken windows, petty crimes, etc.) in order to best deploy their resources. The second problem with broken windows policing was the role that police played in enforcing neighborhood or societal norms about “order” and “disorder.” Foot cops were effective because they knew who did and did not belong in the neighborhood and they could identify what was considered unusual behavior in those areas. But many cops were not from the neighborhoods they patrolled and did not participate in the local moral economy.

In 1990, Bratton, as the new Chief of the NYC Transit Police, tried to turn a theory of policing with some problematic issues into a real-life policing policy. The NYC subway system was a perfect site to roll out the new strategy. Bratton increased the police presence in the carts and in the stations. They dealt with loitering, small thefts, disruptive passengers, graffiti, the homeless, and, overall, helped change the perception of the subway in New York City. People were less afraid to ride the subway. Bratton was so successful that the new mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, who was elected in 1993 after running on a platform of reducing crime, chose him to lead the New York Police Department. Bratton became the New York Police Commissioner in 1994 and served for twenty-eight months.

New York was the largest and most prominent city to adopt broken windows policing. In 1990, New York had 2,200 homicides. In 1993, six people a day were being murdered and fifteen to twenty people were shot each day, not counting the hundreds of petty crimes occurring across the city. Bratton was tasked with establishing order in the unruly city. He quickly replicated his transit strategy across the New York City, but in 1994 gained a new tool. That year, Bratton developed a management tool called CompStat (computerized comparison crime statistics). He ordered that all precincts compile and send their daily crime statistics and locations to headquarters. Those statistics were then uploaded to CompStat and it provided a picture of day-to-day crime patterns. Later, the data was overlaid on maps of the city and the police now had precinct-by-precinct pictures of where and what type of crimes were happening. If small crimes bred larger crimes, captains knew where to deploy officers. Cops stopped more people in those neighborhoods where crime occurred and arrested more individuals for smaller crimes. Within a year, it seemed that Bratton’s broken windows policing was working. Crime rates and murder rates were decreasing. Between 1993 and 1999, crime in New York dropped by 50 percent. New Yorkers believed that broken windows policing was so successful at reducing crime that Giuliani, who claimed credit for the policy, was re-elected in 1997.

By then Bratton had left his position as New York City Police Commissioner. In 2002, he took a position as the Los Angeles Police Commissioner. For much of its history, the Los Angeles Police Department had a reputation for corruption and excessive force. With the economic recession of the 1970s and the crack epidemic of the 1980s, the LAPD’s reputation only grew worse. The department was at the forefront of police militarization. They had actively sought larger guns and armored vehicles in order to fight crime and drugs. Their standing with poor minority communities was especially low. Bratton was tasked with changing this image.

In Los Angeles, Bratton brought broken windows policing, but he also further developed the computer programs that helped pinpoint certain neighborhoods. It was a twenty-first century, data-driven broken windows policing. Bratton held the position of LA Police Commissioner until 2009. Over his seven-year tenure, violent crime in the city declined by 50 percent. After leaving the LAPD, he took a job at a New York-based security consulting firm where he headed an investigation into the University of California Davis Police Department. The police department was caught responding to non-violent student protestors with pepper spray. Bratton also developed security plans for Dodger Stadium.

In late 2013, Bratton returned to the position of New York City Police Commissioner, hired by the new mayor Bill de Blasio. He stepped down in 2016. In those two and a half years, Bratton expanded the NYPD more than any point in two decades, adding 1,300 additional officers to the force.

Bratton and his broken windows policing were widely lauded and other major departments across the nation adopted similar approaches. But, the connection between broken windows policing and decreases in crime rates have been questioned. Crime rates across the country were going down by the mid-1990s, not just in New York. In fact, as broken windows rolled out in the city, the number of complaints of police misconduct started growing as well. The brunt of broken windows policing fell on poor communities of color. In an approach that was concerned with “disorder,” black and brown bodies increasingly became stand-ins for disorder and synonymous with crime, even if they had not committed one. By 2008, in New York, police made almost 250,000 stops and only 1.5 percent of those turned up a gun or something violent. Increasingly, broken windows policing morphed into “stop-and-frisk,” or stopping and detaining all individuals who police perceived to be criminal. In 2011, New York police stopped and frisked 685,000 people. The vast majority of those stops were young men of color. Finally, in 2013, stop-and-frisk was declared unconstitutional by a federal district court judge because it unfairly targeted minorities.

William J. Bratton, more than any other police administrator, was responsible for developing and implementing a new strategy for policing that had a national reach and unintended consequences. Bratton took a 1982 theory of policing and turned it into a real policy. Without Bratton, broken windows policing would have most likely remained a theory, but he applied the approach to the two largest cities in the nation. He pioneered data-driven policing and how departments should allocate their resources. In the process, crime rates fell, but many communities became more wary of police. The efforts at stomping out criminal disorder at its roots meant realistically criminalizing black and brown bodies. Young men of color were seen by police as both the signs of criminal disorder and the criminals themselves—they were both the “broken windows” and the window breakers. New evidence has shown that broken windows policing was not necessarily responsible for the decline in crime rates in the late twentieth century. It seems that improved economic opportunities and reforms in government housing have had as much of an effect as policing. Nonetheless, the impact of Bratton’s broken windows policy is undeniable, even if remains controversial.

Bratton published two books, both with Peter Knobler. The first, The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (1998) was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The second, The Profession: A Memoir of Community, Race, and the Arc of Policing in America (2021) was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice.

Bratton, Bill, and Scott Glick. "Police Can Defeat Crime: I've Proved It as Top Cop of LA and NY." The Telegraph, 11 Sept. 2023, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/11/police-crime-bill-bratton-new-york-london-los-angeles/. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

Dowd, Maureen. "Ex-Commish With the Dish." The New York Times, 29 May 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/05/29/opinion/bill-bratton-police-reform.html. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.

Sparrow, Malcolm K. "Moving Beyond Bratton." The New York Times, 8 Apr. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/opinion/moving-beyond-bratton.html. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.