In a blunt message, the first of its kind by the city’s top cop, Commissioner of the New York City Police Department William Bratton made it clear that officers who abused their authority are “poisoning the well” and will be aggressively removed from his department. Bratton announced his plan last Thursday, when he addressed some 800 NYPD commanders about the future of the Police Department at the new Police Academy in College Point, Queens.
“We will aggressively seek to get those out of the department who should not be here,” said Bratton. “The brutal, the corrupt, the racist, the incompetent. The reality is, at this moment, that there are some in the organization who shouldn’t be here.”
He added, “They’re not the right fit for the NYPD of 2014. There are a few, a very few, in a very large organization, who just don’t get it. They don’t understand that when they take that oath of office and put that shield on, that they commit to constitutional policing, respectful policing, compassionate policing.”
Bratton’s remarks came in the wake of growing criticism nationwide about police misconduct and the use of excessive force.
The nation’s largest police department has seen critical fallout, particularly from New York’s minority communities, since the July 17 caught-on-camera chokehold death of Staten Island man Eric Garner by an NYPD officer. Garner’s death was ruled a homicide by the city’s medical examiner’s office in August, as a result of a prohibited chokehold he was placed in for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes on Staten Island. A grand jury is hearing evidence to determine whether to bring criminal charges against the officers who were involved.
Even though Bratton did not mention any specific case of police misconduct, he admitted that there’s an “eroding trust” between the NYPD and minority communities. He backed up his points with a series of videos in a montage that recently went viral, showing officers mistreating members of the public. For example, one video shows an officer tackling a pregnant woman to the ground.
“The vast, vast, vast majority—that 99 percent—of officers do their jobs well,” said Bratton. He also talked about his plan to retrain all of his nearly 35,000 officers and called on top leaders in the Police Department to execute his reform measures in their precincts.
“We, the leadership of this department, have to commit ourselves to lead our officers better, supervise them better, train them better,” he said.
In response to Bratton, President of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association Patrick Lynch said in a statement,“Police officers are entitled, like anyone else, to due process. It is our job to ensure that every officer who is accused has the same opportunity to defend him or herself as any other American. We have defended police officers from rush to judgments in the past, we are defending them today and we will continue to defend them long into the future.”