Can Bratton’s System Work in L.A.?

The man in the leather jacket with the miniature assault rifle dangling from a chain around his neck had no doubt who sparked the recent renewal of this Brooklyn suburb.

“Giuliani tried to take credit,” he says. “But Bratton’s The Man.”

Six years after William J. Bratton, L.A.’s new police chief, got booted as New York’s top cop by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, he is still revered here by people like Caesar Calderone, a former corrections officer who now runs a security business.

“If he runs for president, I’ll hand out fliers for him,” Calderone says, interrupting a midday chat with two friends outside a row of freshly painted brownstones. The neighborhood had been blighted by vacant storefronts and street crime since the riots of the 1960s.

Bratton has promised to deliver in Los Angeles the police reforms that he credits for a renaissance of public safety in New York.

His primary tool is a crime-fighting program called Compstat, which he started when he headed the New York Police Department.

Compstat uses computer mapping to identify crime hot spots and then requires precinct commanders to figure out a solution. Far from just computer wizardry, police bosses use weekly crime figures to pressure police managers for results. Promotions or stalled careers are often determined by how well precinct commanders in the NYPD respond to spikes in crime.

Bratton boasts that Compstat has revolutionized policing and is responsible, in significant measure, for the rapid drop in violent crime over the last half-dozen years.

Although many criminologists attribute falling crime to such broader social trends as the retreat of the crack epidemic, Bratton’s system has been adopted by dozens of police departments across the country.

New York has had three new commissioners since Bratton left the post in 1996, but the top brass in the NYPD say they still practice Compstat in largely the same way Bratton and his chief strategist, the late Jack Maple, set it up.

“Compstat is the reason that crime will not, will not, go up in New York City again,” Bratton said. “There will be spikes, peaks here and there, but overall crime in New York City, you will not see it go up. It’s gone down for 12 straight years. It’s going to continue to go down in that city, and Compstat is the engine driving it.”

The celebrated renaissance of Manhattan across the East River has spawned a wave of tourism to trendy new spots like the restaurants on Greenwich Street in TriBeCa.

Less heralded is the impact of the city’s aggressive policing on such depressed areas as Bedford-Stuyvesant, the largely black and Latino suburb in Brooklyn that is still no tourist attraction but now has a thriving commercial district.

From the postman walking his route to store owners under the dank shadow of the Broadway elevated train, people say they feel safer.

“It was very tough before,” said Persio Genao from behind the counter of his cramped convenience store and grill.

For years, he said, drug dealers, drunks and thugs made a gantlet for his customers on the street right outside his store.

“Now it’s a lot more safe,” Genao said. “No question about that.”

“You say, ‘I’m going to call the police,’ most of the time they go,” brother and co-owner Jose Genao pitched in.

There may still be a lively debate over who got rid of the bums, the panhandlers, the muggers, the drug dealers and the prostitutes. The Genao brothers vote for Giuliani, who they said stood up to doubters.

But many merchants said police protection improved dramatically starting with Bratton and that it has stayed that way.

“The drug guys come out later in the afternoon,” said Elliott Polinsky, third-generation owner of Gates Lumber. “They see a cop, they walk the other way as opposed to they see a cop, they spit on them.”

The heart of the Compstat program is the weekly crime-fighting session conducted by the department bosses.

Precinct commanders are selectively called to the Compstat meeting and find themselves being grilled by Chief of Department Joseph Esposito and Deputy Commissioner Garry F. McCarthy. Esposito is the highest ranking uniformed officer, responsible for all operations. McCarthy, a crew-cut 21-year NYPD veteran, is on a leave of absence to fill the civilian post responsible for crime reduction. Compstat is his No. 1 focus.

Both men report directly to Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, the department’s top official. McCarthy said that relationship is essential.

“I can’t blast someone who outranks me,” he said.

Each week McCarthy reviews a book of crime stats before deciding which precinct commanders to summon. He sends detectives into the precincts to scout for such quality-of-life issues as prostitution and vagrancy. He and Esposito then press the commanders to explain how they will address the problems and why they haven’t already done so.

McCarthy and others said the confrontational nature of weekly Compstat meetings has mellowed since the regime of Maple and then Chief of Department Louis Anemone. But commanders are still held accountable.

“You can hold somebody responsible without berating them,” McCarthy said. “You can ask tough questions without personalizing.”

In its early days, Compstat derailed careers. Bratton said he dismissed more than half of his precinct commanders because they didn’t boldly attack crime. Other officers, including McCarthy, shot up the ranks because they did.

McCarthy said his defining triumph as a precinct commander was the quick bust of a convenience store robber who hit three stores in two days.

He put all his patrol officers on plainclothes surveillance duty at 26 potential targets. Before Compstat, McCarthy said, he wouldn’t have had the authority to put his whole precinct in plain clothes.

“Plainclothes cops were perceived as a corruption hazard,” McCarthy said. He said he would have had to file a request that would have bounced around for a month.

A crackdown on “quality of life” crimes is a hallmark of the system that Bratton has vowed to bring to Los Angeles. The practice at first raised protests from civil liberties groups that contend it contributed to police abuses, including the torture in a police station of Abner Louima, an offense committed after Bratton left.

Once, when confronted about the increase in the number of citizen complaints, Bratton responded that 5,000 complaints was a reasonable trade-off for the city’s plummeting crime rate, said Norman Siegel, former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union and one of Bratton’s most prominent critics.

Siegel, now in private civil rights practice, said that despite his past criticisms, he admires Bratton because he became more sensitive during his 27 months as police commissioner.

More than other commissioners, he said, Bratton listened.

In an unprecedented meeting, Siegel said, “Bratton called me and came to our turf to talk to us about some of his issues.”

Whether police work by itself can substantially change crime trends is a question that bedevils academics and criminologists, despite a large body of research on the dramatic decreases in violent crime during the 1990s in America’s large cities.

Some contend that police reforms, including Compstat, have little measurable effect.

“The data do not support a strong argument for Compstat causing, contributing to or accelerating the decline in homicides in New York City or elsewhere,” said criminologists John E. Eck and Edward R. McGuire.

Among the possible contributing factors, say some researchers, are long-term cycles in illegal drug use, restrictive gun laws dating to the mid-1980s, expanded police departments and prison systems, demographic trends and the collective influence of family, community groups and police.

In Brooklyn, one longtime community leader says Bratton was successful because he understood that police must work cooperatively with residents and community groups.

“I’m saying under the Bratton administration the idea of community policing made a difference,” said Sharonnie Perry, an aide to a Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-Brooklyn) and chairwoman of the Brooklyn neighborhood council.

Bratton, despite his reputation for tough talk, improved community-police relations, she said. One of his biggest legacies is the civilian review board, which gave police more credibility. The board reviews complaints about police behavior and can recommend a punishment to the department.

Today, she said, complaints get an immediate response, and the police are careful to brief her when there is an unusual occurrence.

“Before Bratton, there wasn’t a rapport,” she said. “The police that came in thought everybody in Bedford-Stuyvesant was a criminal.”