NYPD commissioner vows to root out bad cops
Commissioner William J. Bratton. Image from NYPD.
New York City Police Commissioner William J. Bratton warned against bad cops in a talk he gave to NYPD commanders Thursday. In the closed-door session, Bratton told the audience of about 800 officers that the department must rid its ranks of “[t]he brutal, the corrupt, the racist and the incompetent,” the New York Times reports.
“We will aggressively seek to get those out of the department who should not be here,” Bratton said.
Afterward, Bratton told news reporters that video recordings of questionable police actions, internal affairs investigations and citizens’ complaints can all help identify those officers who don’t belong in the police department.
Immediately after Bratton’s speech to police leaders gathered at the new Police Academy building in Queens, the group was shown a training video, titled “What Would You Do?” with a compilation of examples of police aggression.
“Just about everything we do is captured on video,” Deputy Commissioner Joseph Reznick told the assembly when he ran the video. “If a picture is worth a thousand words, I cannot imagine how much a video could be worth, especially if it is used against us in a lawsuit.”
Bratton told the gathering that 1 percent of police are bad officers who “are poisoning the well.” The NYPD has 35,000 members. Bratton called for increased, department-wide training for the others.
“We, the leadership of this department, have to commit ourselves to lead our offices better, supervise them better, train them better,” he said.
Bratton did not directly address the most discussed recent incident involving the NYPD, in which Staten Island man Eric Garner died after he was confronted by police on the suspicion of selling loose cigarettes. Garner, 43, died after a chokehold was used on him, and the July 17 incident was caught on video. A grand jury is investigating the matter. The New York Daily News has a list of other controversial incidents involving the NYPD in the past few years.
The commissioner did note the more recent incident in Ferguson, Missouri, where the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed man, sparked a national conversation on police brutality. He acknowledged an “eroding trust” between police and some minority communities.
As for the 1 percent figure Bratton gave for bad cops in NYC, Edward D. Mullins, president of the sergeant’s union, said: “I’m curious who he means. What I would connect that to is corruption. I don’t think he’s connecting it to the chokehold case.”
