Chief Bratton Insists He’ll Complete His 5-Year Contract

Quashing persistent rumors that he would leave before his term ends in 2007, Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton told his command staff this week that he’s not going anywhere for the next four years.

“I just talked to the command staff and said, ‘Let’s get real here in the sense that I’m not going anywhere,’ ” Bratton said in an interview Wednesday at Parker Center. “I just bought a million-and-a-half-dollar home. I get a pension out of this place after five years that’s worth a fortune. My wife has just changed jobs. We happen to like living in Los Angeles. Why would I want to leave?”

Bratton said the LAPD would be his last big-city chief’s job when he was named by the Police Commission last October. But since his appointment, there has been talk that the outspoken easterner known for quick turnarounds and brief tenures as head of five other police agencies would be a short-timer in Los Angeles.

Chatter that Bratton was in a New York state of mind increased after the City Council refused last month to fund his plans to reorganize the LAPD and delayed for at least eight months funding to add 320 police officers to the 9,200-member force.

A second defeat came earlier this week when the Police Commission -- after heavy lobbying by Mayor James K. Hahn and the City Council -- reversed course on a Bratton-backed plan to stop responding to false burglar alarms.

Since the beginning, some LAPD and political officials have been quietly betting that Bratton would tire of the chief’s job and exit to pursue elective office.

A New York Newsday columnist even speculated that the chief would be fired from Los Angeles and return to the Big Apple to advise the next Democratic challenger for mayor.

Bratton’s wife, Court TV correspondent Rikki Klieman, said she was asked by two LAPD patrolmen recently if the couple would be moving again soon.

But in now familiar bravado, Bratton dubbed himself the “Kevlar man” and said he was in the job for the long term. Kevlar is used in bulletproof vests.

“If anything, they keep adding more Kevlar plates to my body armor here,” Bratton said. “I want to get out of the alarm business, so we can put more cops on the street. They don’t want to do that. I’m fighting for more cops. They don’t want to do that. I’m fighting for reorganization to get more cops affecting the streets. They don’t want to do that.”

Bratton, who scaled back some of his plans for reducing crime after the council balked at raising the police budget, said political obstacles in L.A. only make the challenge of improving the LAPD more appealing.

“If crime goes up, if response time goes up, you’re bringing in the best police manager in America to manage a police department and you don’t let him manage. The beauty of the situation,” he said, “is that I have nothing to work with. Success here is going to be so much more significant.”

Ultimately, Bratton said, he will be judged by his ability to motivate officers and reduce crime rates, which so far this year include a 20% drop in murders and a 5% decrease in overall crime.

“People think the chief is losing the confidence” of the City Council, Bratton said. “The confidence of the public is the one that is the most important.”