I think the internal experience is going to be really, really helpful to me. I didn’t operate in a vacuum. I was a precinct commander for a long time. I know a lot of people in the community. I know a lot of the electeds. So that learning curve, if I were an outsider, it’s not there. I’m sure there’s going to be things I’m going to need to do better and need to learn about, but I think I’m well prepared to go upstairs.

What sort of expectations has Mayor de Blasio set for you and for the department?

His expectation is that I continue to keep the people of the city safe, and continue to build on the neighborhood policing model. That’s going to be my primary focus as police commissioner. As you’ve seen over the past two and a half years, we need to evolve, we need to make a better connection to the community.

I think we’re ready to operationalize neighborhood policing. It’s a change in the way we do business, so there is a learning curve for the cops. We’re pushing that decision making down to its lowest level, that problem solving down to its lowest level. It’s not something they can learn overnight. But we don’t have this expectation that they’re just magically going to be able to do it.

How are you measuring the success of the neighborhood policing program?

A number of different ways. Ultimately, it’s a crime-fighting model. So we have to make sure we’re keeping the violence down. A huge part of this is to make sure there’s community satisfaction, and anecdotally, it’s working, but we need to do more than that. We’re in the middle of putting together now a survey instrument to make sure we get almost real-time feedback to see how we’re doing.

You’re following Commissioner Bratton, a huge figure in American policing. What’s the most notable way you’re different from him?

That’s a question I’m getting a lot. A lot of what I do is person to person. I was a precinct commander for six and a half years, and I made it my business to know every cop in that precinct, and I made it my business to make sure I knew not every community member — because there’s 140,000 in the 44th Precinct [in the Bronx] — but as many as I could. That connection, that local connection, is something that I’ve built on since I was a transit cop, for the last 33½ years. Just coming up through this organization and being a supervisor since 1987, and seeing so many different aspects of this job, probably makes me a little different than him.