Cops aren’t perfect when it comes to how they deal with minorities, but city officers have saved thousands of lives in their communities in recent decades and are committed to healing rifts with them, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said Tuesday.
“American history and the black experience are inextricable. And both are inextricable from policing. Far more often than not, that’s been a good thing,’ ” Bratton said in a speech marking Black History Month at the Greater Allen AME church in Jamaica, Queens.
“Many of the best parts of America’s history would have been impossible without police. All the freedoms we enjoy — freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear — sit on a foundation of public safety,” he told the crowd of several hundred.
But Bratton noted that the relationship has also been undeniably fraught with mistrust and fear.
“Because many of the worst parts of black history would have been impossible without police, too. Slavery, our country’s original sin, sat on a foundation codified by laws and enforced by police,” the commissioner said.
He recalled the city’s crime-plagued decades of the 1970s and ’80s, when murders, drug-dealing and disorder were rampant — particularly in impoverished minority neighborhoods.
“For two decades, crime-fighting took a back seat to report-taking,’’ Bratton said. “Crime and crack and chaos nearly obliterated some communities.
“But 20 years ago, we began a new chapter in the story for black New Yorkers and the police. Together, we took back the city, block by block.”
The city’s top cop repeated statistics showing the dramatic drop in killings and overall crime after the introduction of his Broken Windows method of cleaning up neighborhoods.
He said thousands of black lives were saved as a result. But tensions persist, he said, heightened by high-profile incidents last year including the deaths of unarmed black me in Ferguson, Mo., and on Staten Island at the hands of white cops.
Bratton vowed that the NYPD would continue to target high-crime minority neighborhoods while acknowledging that cops’ behavior sometimes blunted the good will that lowering crime rates should foster.
“We are often abrupt, sometimes rude — and that’s unacceptable,” he acknowledged. Still, “My officers spent much of the fall being accused of terrible, untrue things,’’ Bratton said. “They were shouted at, spat upon, even assaulted. Two were assassinated for nothing more than being cops.
“When protestors chant, “What do we want? Dead cops!” we have gone too far as a society,” he said, denying that the department is guilty of “systemic brutality.”