On his final full day as the city’s top cop, outgoing Police Commissioner Bill Bratton presided over his last CompStat meeting — one of the keystones of his law enforcement legacy.
“Needless to say this morning is a morning of mixed emotions for me,” Bratton told a room full of Bronx-based NYPD brass at the start of the meeting analyzing crime statistics at 1 Police Plaza.
“I leave with a great satisfaction knowing as I continue to live in this city, I will be living in the safest large city in America… A far cry from what it was in 1993, when we were arguably one of the crime capitols of the world.”
New York has experienced more than two decades of drastic crime reductions, starting in 1994 when Bratton helped institute the CompStat system — a numbers-focused approach to crime fighting created by then Deputy Commissioner Jack Maple.
To show how far the city has come, Bratton compared historical crime levels with that of today. As of Tuesday, 70,476 people have been victims of some sort of crime so far in 2016.
At the same time in 1993 — the year before CompStat was introduced — nearly 300,000 people had been victimized, an approximately 76 percent decrease.
‘I leave with a great satisfaction knowing as I continue to live in this city, I will be living in the safest large city in America…’
- Police Commissioner Bill Bratton
Bratton said the CompStat system got off to a rocky start in 1994 as it became apparent that precinct heads had an inadequate grasp of the issues in their commands. But things slowly improved.
“The first meeting was a bit of a disaster… As precinct commanders and borough commanders attempted to present what was going on in their borough, hands would go up… asking questions about this, questions about that.”
“After those first couple of meetings… it became quite apparent there was not enough intimacy with the stats,” he said. “Precinct commanders were really not comfortable with what was going on in their precincts.”
“Everyone in the department began to start preparing more intimately.”
Bratton said that on his final night as commissioner, he and Chief of Department James O’Neill will go out on patrol together in the city’s transit system before turning the department over to him.
O’Neill will be sworn in as commissioner on Monday.
“This is the last CompStat [meeting] for me in uniform…This is my last full day as a police officer,” O’Neill said.
“You know how much I enjoy wearing this uniform and how proud I am of it but I think [becoming commissioner] is going to give me the opportunity really show my appreciation for the men and women who do such a great job throughout the city.”