Joshua Malbin

Chief William Bratton announced his departure from the Los Angeles Police Department he helmed for the last seven years. He leaves better-liked than any chief in recent memory.

The chief has twin gifts that he employs in complement to one another. The first is his CompStat program, which he invented in New York City and imported in finished form to Los Angeles. Monthly meetings see the attendance of auditoriums full of police, held publicly responsible for tabulating, mapping and comprehending every reported crime in their geographic sub-regions. It has the soothing power of maps to render the unknown known and the unknowable inexpressible. It gives Bratton his own numbers to marshal against criminologists, whose efforts to qualify the effectiveness of his methods he regards as mean-spirited.

The second gift is his personality, which he can reel out and retract as easily as if it were a lipstick, or a stiletto. Bratton’s arrival in Los Angeles was marked by a series of delightful gaffes. He called a community activist who had more of a base in the media than the community a “nitwit” (you be the judge). When the city council amended his budget request, he goaded them by suggesting they “start attending some of the funerals of the victims of crime”.

He performed adequate apologies and, having established a reputation as an uncontainable truth-teller, retreated to his quiet, mammoth number factory. Crime fell and CompStat recorded it. Community policing took hold, to good effect.  When LAPD officers beat up media representatives at a May Day immigration rights march, Bratton swiftly condemned their actions, earning praise by eschewing the reflexive defensiveness of law enforcement officials responding to reported abuses. His candor had turned from abrasive to charming. The LAPD now has record levels of public support that spans ethnic groups.

Fusing statistics and panache, Bratton is an Irish beat cop swinging a sheaf of TPS reports. William Parker, the midcentury LAPD chief whose name activists hope will not transfer from the department’s rotted old headquarters to its brand new one, is known in promotional materials for “professionalizing” the LAPD, and in history for developing a police force that fell upon minority neighborhoods like an occupying army. If Parker’s LAPD was professionalized, Bratton’s is managerialized; its reams of data make it look sober and prepared for the Monday meeting.

Now, those data and their father have proved persuasive enough to win the lifting of the department’s consent decree, despite the troubling persistence of racial profiling.

It’s a capstone achievement, but it seems to have been won with an unsavory ratio of panache-to-stats.  The federal overseer who lifted the consent decree, Michael Cherkasky, is a longtime friend of Bratton’s and has invited him to join the private security firm Altegrity.  His swift departure appears baldly rigged, the hasty work of someone eager to reap private-sector bounty. In the rear-view mirror, Parker’s “professional” LAPD looks abusive. Bratton’s managerial LAPD looks, well, managed.

The next chief will have a lot to do to live up to Bratton’s record. So, it seems, would Bratton.

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