My first reaction when I heard that William Bratton was stepping down as New York City’s police commissioner was surprise at all the attention his departure was attracting, not just locally but nationally.  It goes to show Mr. Bratton’s status as a crime-fighting figure.  My second thought was to wonder when and in what administration Commissioner Bratton might pop up again as New York City’s top cop. Mr. Bratton has already served twice, as police commissioner under Mayor Rudy Giuliani from 1994 to 1996 and under Mayor Bill de Blasio from 2014 until next month.  While Mr. Bratton, who will be replaced by Chief of Department James O’Neill, has run the New York Police Department for just five of the last 22 years, his “broken windows” law enforcement strategy looms large over the department. The changes he first put into effect in the ’90s—until he and Mr. Giuliani had a falling out over who deserved credit for the city’s falling crime rate—are as responsible as any other factor for New York retaining bragging rights as the world’s capital city.  Indeed, it felt something of a personal affront when the crime fighter took on the role as Los Angeles police chief in 2002. Particularly when the job called on him to wear a black-shirted, four-star uniform.  While Mr. Bratton rose through the ranks, first at the Boston Police Department and then as chief of the New York City Transit Police Department before being appointed to the NYPD’s top job, there seemed something quintessentially civilian about him.  During the ’90s, he was as likely to end his night at Elaine’s, that literary Second Avenue watering hole, with John Miller, his aide-de-camp and current deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, and the late Jack Maple, his bow-tied chief strategist, in tow—as he was at a crime scene. Though there were certainly evenings when he did both.  To truly appreciate Mr. Bratton’s impact on the city’s quality of life it helps to have lived here for a while. In the late ’60s when I was a teenager—my parents were just starting to let me roam the city on my own—a man came up to me and a classmate and asked for the time. When my classmate told him, the man produced a knife and slipped the watch off my classmate’s wrist. The encounter didn’t occur in some back alley, but on the corner of 43rd Street and Third Avenue at rush hour.  Car break-ins were so common in the ’80s and ’90s that people fashioned homemade signs that said, “No radio,” to dissuade thieves from smashing their windows. And I recall learned discussions with cops, when I started covering crime as a reporter, about crooks’ vehicles of choice.  They were as likely to covet Japanese subcompacts as Rolls-Royces, perhaps because they were harder to trace and easier to fence or cannibalize. Indeed, a new Toyota Corolla that my brother parked on the Upper East Side one evening was gone when he went to retrieve it the following morning.  All that began to change during the Giuliani administration when Mr. Bratton started focusing on petty crimes that challenged the social order. Just as significantly, he inaugurated the CompStat system for tracking crime and holding precinct commanders accountable for the incidents within their borders—from misdemeanors to robbery and murder.  I recall the palpable tension at the 19th Precinct station house on the Upper East Side in the days each month before the captain or deputy inspector in charge had to report to 1 Police Plaza to justify his or her performance.  Mr. Bratton isn’t going anywhere. I have no doubt he’ll show up more on television and at high-profile social events with Rikki Klieman, his wife, lawyer and TV personality now that he is being liberated from the daily grind of police work. This comes at a moment when the city feels precariously safe, with policing strategies in minority communities under a microscope and terrorism in the back of everyone’s mind.  What the city will lose is a colorful public figure who somehow managed to straddle the public and private spheres and make the city better and safer in the process, even if a lifelong New Yorker continues reflexively to look over his shoulder.
Columnist Ralph Gardner Jr. looks back on the career of William Bratton, the outgoing commissioner of the New York Police Department, and the impact of his crime-fighting tactics.