The Slatest

Bill Bratton Is Stepping Down. Did His “Broken Windows” Policy Actually Work?

New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton attends a news conference Tuesday with Mayor Bill de Blasio where it was announced that Bratton will be stepping down.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton is resigning next month, it was announced on Tuesday amid a second day of protests outside of New York’s City Hall calling for his departure.

As CNN reported, Bratton had said last month he would be stepping down in 2017, and it was unclear why he was moving that date up. The New York Times noted that he would be taking a job in the private sector, “ending a 45-year career in public life that spanned the country, from Boston to Los Angeles, and that reshaped the image of what a police commander could be.” Citing anonymous city officials, CNN reported that Bratton was not forced out and was leaving on his own accord.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, who picked Bratton to head the department in 2013, backed him at a news conference last week, saying “as long as I’m mayor, I welcome him to continue as commissioner.” In announcing that he would be replaced by longtime Bratton ally and the department’s top uniformed cop, Chief James P. O’Neill, de Blasio said he had an “intense bond” with the departing commissioner.

Protesters had taken over a public park near City Hall and were occupying it during daytime open hours starting on Monday. According to the Guardian, their list of demands included Bratton’s termination and the end of his “broken windows” method of policing, that money be moved from police funding towards minority and working-class communities, and reparations for the families of victims of police violence. Broken windows is a policing policy of focusing on smaller so-called quality of life crimes like public intoxication under the theory that it discourages worse felonies.

As news broke, protesters could be heard celebrating with chants of “Nah nah nah nah! Nah nah nah nah! Hey hey hey! Goodbye!”

Bratton served as New York’s police commissioner from 1994 to 1996 and as Los Angeles chief of police from 2002 to 2009. He credits “broken windows” for sharp reductions in crime in those two cities during those periods—violent crime fell by 54 percent when he was chief in Los Angeles and was also greatly reduced during his first tenure in New York.

However, there is little evidence that “broken windows” policing, which critics say ends up unfairly targeting minorities and poorer communities, actually contributed to the crime reduction.

“You’re not going to find the scientific study that can support broken-windows one way or the other,” Bratton told the New Yorker last year. “The evidence I rely on is what my eyes show me.”

A report was actually issued last month, though, by NYPD’s watchdog inspector general concluding that—not only was there no evidence that quality-of-life enforcement reduced felonies—serious crime rates actually continued to fall even when those lesser crimes were not being enforced.

As the Washington Post reported, “when the NYPD decreased its quality-of-life policing from 2010 to 2015, the number of felony crimes kept dropping, suggesting that there wasn’t a causal relationship between the two.”

Felony rates either didn’t increase or decreased in those years, which also saw a significant drop in the number of quality-of-life summonses.

“Broad generalizations about quality-of-life summonses as a panacea are not supported by empirical evidence,” the report read. The report also found that the policy was costly to the city “in police time, in an increase of the number of people brought into the criminal justice system and, at times, in a fraying of the relationship between the police and the communities they serve.” The report found that enforcement of these smaller crimes was higher in communities with more black and Hispanic residents, and lower in communities with more white residents.

That study contradicted one released last year by Bratton’s police department which claimed that this approach was responsible for reduced felony crime rates in the city.

As the Post also noted, de Blasio’s government had already started to pull back from Bratton’s “broken windows” approach even before word of his departure was revealed.

“[In June], the city passed a series of bills that make such offenses, like public urination and alcohol, civil rather than criminal matters,” the newspaper reported.