Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and his wife Rikki Klieman stand on an antique police wagon at 1 Police Plaza in downtown Manhattan during a ceremonial send-off today. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images What Bill Bratton changed in 990 days at the NYPD

Today is Bill Bratton’s 990th and last day as New York police commissioner under Mayor Bill de Blasio.

As he walks out of NYPD headquarters this afternoon, he leaves behind a police department — and profession — deeply shaped by his view of the profession he has obsessed about since he was a child.


Bratton's most notable change since January 1, 2014 is to the department itself, replacing the manpower-heavy strategy of his predecessor with a more tech-driven approach that he has portrayed as more sensitive to the notions of “customer satisfaction.”

“His most profound impact is the implementation of technology throughout the department,” said Richard Aborn, a longtime friend and collaborator and head of the Citizens Crime Commission.

Since Bratton’s return, the NYPD is now “adopting a style of precision policing in which he has abandoned this notion that you ‘flood the zone’ in order to drive down crime but rather you use all your available information, utilizing technology, to identify who your offenders are and you go after those offenders. And as part of that, he has essentially eliminated stop-and-frisk.”

Each top official and precinct commander has a Twitter account. Each officer has an email address. And there are, overall, more police officers — the department will have 1,200 more than when Bratton started, thanks to a City Council push he belatedly supported.

Each of those officers was given smart phones and tablets, enabling them to do everything from cutting down the amount of time it takes to identify suspects to enabling cops on the street to access information stored on their computers in their precincts. Bratton yesterday said he’s basically turned each officer on the beat into a walking, real-time crime center.

Police cars will also have GPS devices, enabling police brass to know at any given moment precisely where every single car is located and who is in the car, and adjust strategies accordingly.

Bratton settled lawsuits filed by critics of the NYPD surveillance tactics that allegedly targeted law-abiding Muslims. He created a standing, anti-terror unit, ending the practice of pulling a rotating group of officers from local precincts to do the work.

Police officers are evaluated not solely on the number of police stops or arrests they conduct, but rather by how many fewer crimes are on their beat. In short, instead of stop-and-frisk figures, police will be judged on customer survey responses the NYPD will send to the public.

Bratton has gotten the NYPD brass to accept the notion that they not only have to be effective, but also liked. And that means repairing tensions between people of color and law enforcement officials, steeped in historic inequities, fueled by high-profile incidents and now, energized by activists who are more socially connected, mobilized and organized than any generation before.

And, in light of a spate of mass shootings around the country (and Europe), the NYPD has revised its plans for confronting gunmen. The plan today is for the first officer on the scene to confront the shooter; no waiting for more specially trained officers to arrive before taking action. Department leaders believe the largest factor in saving lives is reducing the amount of time the gunman’s finger is on the trigger.

It's bigger, more tech-savvy department, on the cusp of using body cameras and a high-tech sensors to find gunfire that goes unreported to 911. There is hardly a tech device in law enforcement Bratton has not sought to embrace (except, perhaps, drones and Google Glass).

But in addition to changing the department and its culture, Bratton is also credited with changing the agenda of the man who hired him.

Bill de Blasio was a Park Slope progressive who purposely sought to distinguish himself from rivals in the 2013 Democratic primary on the issue of public safety and police reform. So high were expectations for change that when, in December 2013, police reform advocates met with Bratton to lay out their agenda, they said they wanted to see their plan put into place in just 100 days.

Bratton took their plans, smiled, and spent the next 990 days either watering down the proposals or flat-out opposing them.

Alyssa Aguilera, co-director of VOCAL-NY, an advocacy group that attended that December 2013 meeting, recalled recently, “It was very meet-and-greet. I don’t think it was particularly substantial. And frankly at that point, and I think it’s a lesson learned for us, a lot of us were very supportive and worked on the de Blasio campaign through our C4s and our affiliations and the political arena.”

They viewed de Blasio as one of their own, she said.

“This guy we all helped elect and fought for, literally door-knocking and talking to our neighbors — you want to give him the benefit of the doubt and this appointment made a lot of people very uneasy and concerned, I think we still were hoping the mayor’s the boss and that he’ll get this stuff done for us,” she said.

De Blasio left advocates fuming when he opposed a law to criminally ban police chokeholds, require police to obtain proof of consent before conducing searches that require consent, and mandate that officers give their business cards to people they stop without arrest or summons. And no longer will the NYPD release personnel or disciplinary information of officers, despite a judge ordering it to do so, and decades of precedent.

“We have de Blasio, who we had so much hope for that we’d get a lot of police reform done, and the fact that it was so much more of the same, I think, is a big testament to Bratton’s influence in the administration,” Aguilera said.

Bratton allies say the advocates are uninformed, unrealistic, and in some cases, motivated to block his policies because, for 27 months starting in 1994, he worked as commissioner under then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, the tough, law-and-order Republican who reveled in antagonizing critics.

As one Bratton aide put it, the advocates hate Giuliani, and by extension, they have to hate Bratton too.

The man who led the police fight to take back the streets during the crime spike of the early 1990s, is the same one obsessing over police-community relations, in an era of historically low levels of street crime, punctuated by high-profile fatal incidents that often inflame long-simmering racial tensions.

Peter Moskos, a former cop who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said in an interview, “Giuliani is sort of a fascist asshole but his policing philosophy, the Broken Windows, does come very much from a community policing perspective in that, you go to the community and say ‘What do you want us to do?’ And the answer is almost inevitably quality of life policing.”

Bratton popularized the Broken Windows theory, which calls for addressing signs of disorder, and low-level crime, in order to create the public image that rules and laws are being enforced, which sends a signal of security to residents and acts as a deterrent to would-be lawbreakers.

“Murders is one thing, but in a way, there are not too many innocent victims,” said Moskos, curtly describing the kinds of complaints heard at local community meetings. “The problem is ‘these assholes on the corner; the junkies hanging out on my stoop.’ That sort of thing. So, it sort of allowed police to listen to the community.”

At Bratton's ceremonial walkout from the NYPD headquarters Friday afternoon, hundreds of uniformed officers lined the plaza to bid him farewell. Bratton and his wife, Rikki Kleiman, went down the line, hugging and shaking hands. At the end of that line was de Blasio. The 6’5” mayor known for hugging colleagues extended his arms wide and leaned forward. Bratton took one of the mayor’s hands in his own, and they settled for a two-armed hand-shake hug.

Then, above the sound of a handful of protesters, Bratton and Kleiman walked onto an old-time green NYPD emergency flatbed truck, waved to the crowd, and drove off.

