Bratton Has More Than First and Last Words on the LAPD

He speaks without commas and if I were going to tell you about my first encounter with Los Angeles police chief-in-waiting Bill Bratton I wouldn’t even know where to begin because he talks so fast even I was out of breath and amazed at his ability to segue onto the subject of the Renaissance and the future of the American city without ever completely answering a single question about things like whether the LAPD is going to have a bigger gang unit and how exactly he’s going to storm the streets and bring down the crime rate immediately and into eternity without indiscriminately beating people up.

Bill Bratton is the kid you knew in school who could hold his head underwater for three minutes.

He hasn’t even moved here yet and Broadway Bill’s already the biggest star who isn’t in the movies, and the former Bostonian also brings to Los Angeles the only accent we didn’t already have.

“Two to one, he ends up hosting the Oscars next spring,” says Mike Barnicle, a Boston and New York newsman who’s known Bratton for 30 years.

Only time will tell whether the former New York City police commissioner, who clashed with Mayor Rudy Giuliani in a war of egos, can deliver. But we know he can talk. He swaggers into a room chest first, and although it’s a little scary that he keeps talking about Sgt. Joe Friday’s “Dragnet” as if it were real, you have to admire the confidence of a man who promises results before he’s even been sworn in.

Graffiti?

He’s going after it fast and hard and without delay because he hates it oh he hates it with a passion and even his wife the Court TV anchor who came along with him to the editorial board meeting hates it and they went traveling to other cities that were beautiful cities and they were covered with it.

It has to be eliminated.

The LAPD?

It’s an under-performing department and they know it and the public knows it and all of that is going to come to an immediate halt as soon as he decentralizes the centralization and takes care of the training division mess and if there’s a cop out there who doesn’t get with the program and realize that assertive policing is about productivity and activity and creativity (and at least several other itys) he can send in his retirement papers because guess what folks.

There’s a new sheriff in town.

His relationship with the mayor?

They’re on a honeymoon and getting along just famously because first of all they have the same vision for what the Police Department should be and secondly and of course most importantly you can put the two of them in a room together and ask a question and Bratton can be relatively certain that whatever else happens he can bet his badge on one thing.

Hahn will not interrupt him.

After a half-hour with Bratton my ears were bleeding, and so I walked across the street to City Hall and sat down with the mayor, not just to see if he uses earplugs, but to find out how he narrowed the field to Bratton.

Hahn recalled a moment several months ago, when his search had not yet begun and Bratton dropped by his office while working as a monitor of the LAPD.

“I was sitting there,” Hahn said, pointing to the sofa, “and he was sitting there, and he said, ‘I know exactly who you need to be your next police chief, but you’d never hire me.’ ”

My guess is that Bratton went up to the front of the class in second grade, told the teacher to take a break, and never let her back in the room.

Hahn said he gave Bratton big points for doing his homework, cobbling together a detailed plan, and making it clear he badly wanted the job.

As for Bratton’s Jupiter-sized ego, Hahn could only see it working to the city’s advantage. When it comes to the two main goals they share--reducing crime and advancing the reform of the department--Bratton does not intend to fail.

But was Hahn at all worried that Bratton only intends to be here long enough to get his own star on Hollywood Boulevard, or that he’ll use too much rough stuff on the streets to get results?

You’re bound to be a star as chief of the second-largest city in America, Hahn said. “Bernard Parks was one of the 50 sexiest men” in America, according to People magazine.

As for the rough stuff, he said, he pressed Bratton on how he intended to implement his so-called assertive policing philosophy without going too far. Bratton said, among other things, that he would get the community’s “authorization,” meaning he would bring law-abiding citizens in on the deal.

We’ll see. It isn’t going to be easy in a vast city-nation, with only 9,000 officers as compared to New York’s 40,000. And Bratton’s success in New York can be attributed in large part to a strong national economy that also dropped the crime rate in many cities.

But Bratton already has L.A. cops buzzing, some out of fear they’ll have to get out of the office and work, and some out of respect. One lieutenant told me Bratton was the first LAPD chief in a while who seems to like cops.

“I am very certain I made the right decision,” Hahn said.

But not as certain as the man who speaks without commas and might already have made several arrests just for the exercise because he’s a professional who’s done the job wherever he’s gone and does not intend to be parked behind a Vegas buffet table like Willie Williams or locked in his office like Bernie Parks and if anyone has any doubts that Bratton invented modern police science here’s the shortest quote I have from him in my entire notebook:

“It’s what I do. I’m very good at it.”

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Steve Lopez will be on assignment and on vacation for two weeks. His column will resume Oct. 23.