Chris Mitchell is deputy editor at the Week and co-author of The Crime Fighter and The Cell.

A victory lap? Hardly. A little more than a year into his second act as the leader of the largest police force in America, Bill Bratton is just coming off a season in which he was forced to watch the profession he loves endure a nightmare. For the last several weeks of 2014, police across the country were denounced in the media and on the streets as racist brutes, and New York City’s nearly 35,000 cops caught some of the worst of it. The chant “What do we want? Dead cops!” rang out in at least one of the demonstrations that flared up nightly across the city. Even several weeks later—after the fury was quelled by the shocking assassination of two Brooklyn patrol cops—the very thought of that vicious refrain sickens Bratton. “How the hell can any country tolerate that kind of free speech?” he says.

Bratton hadn’t needed to return to a 24/7 high-pressure job if all he wanted, as he entered his mid-60s, was to claim the title of America’s top cop. Older New Yorkers still hailed him for saving their city from chaos 20 years earlier. His management innovations and game-changing philosophy had been adopted at least in part by many other large police forces across the country. In Los Angeles, where he served as police chief for seven years, he remained widely celebrated for ending a toxic half-century battle between the police force and the African-American community.


He returned to New York with eyes wide open, he insists. Sitting over dinner in early February at his favorite Upper East Side restaurant, he says he knew full well he was coming back to the force at a time when tensions between cops and many minority communities were high, and those tensions had to be erased. “Race,” he says, “is something that’s always haunted American policing. It’s our intention to have a lot of the issue resolved here.”

Bratton badly wants to see the city’s cops redeemed, too. Their work, in his view, was largely responsible for the 80 percent decline in New York’s crime rate since 1993, for transforming New York from America’s murder capital into the country’s safest big city. Yet now his cops were being treated like menaces by the public and by too many political leaders. “It’s as if they won the war and nobody gave them any credit for it,” he says. “If anything, they came back not as victors but as if they were defeated.”

This is personal, too: Although he wasn’t in charge for many of the years when the backlash began building in various of the city’s minority communities, the revolution that he had launched in the 1990s has lately attracted much blame for the rising anger. “Something I built my reputation on—assertive policing, ‘broken windows’ policing—was under attack,” he says. “I could see there was a growing momentum against it.”

To Bratton, the great American crime waves of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s were enabled by dysfunctional policing, the type of passive law enforcement he had worked for years to do away with.

But winning now requires more than winning a battle of ideas. It requires repairing a broken operation—with the whole nation watching.

“It’s not going to be easy,” Bratton says. “It’s going to be damn hard.”

NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton with Mayor Bill de Blasio at a January 2014 press conference announcing that the city would not appeal a judge’s ruling that “stop and frisk” is unconstitutional. | Andrew Burton/Getty

***

William J. Bratton brings to the challenge a résumé that no one in law enforcement can match. A highly visible proponent of innovative policing since his early 30s, the Boston native has been tripped up twice by his own hubris—but he rebounded the first time to oversee historic crime declines in 1990s New York, then followed up with similar success in Los Angeles. In 2011, he nearly became the first non-U.K. citizen to be hired as London’s police chief.

Bratton has been a national figure for so long that non-cops might forget that he once walked a beat in Boston himself—back when patrol officers still stopped at call boxes to report to their bosses, and the city he grew up in was bitterly split along racial lines. He never wanted to be anything but a cop, he frequently says, even though there were none in his immediate family. Something about introducing order to a chaotic world appealed to him, as he acknowledged in Turnaround, his 1998 memoir: Growing up in Boston’s blue-collar Dorchester neighborhood, this son of a two-paycheck chrome-plant employee found it thrilling to serve as a sixth-grade crossing guard, and he spent many hours of his boyhood creating whole armies of miniature clay soldiers, detailing them down to the hand-painted insignia on their hats.

Bratton graduated from Boston Tech High School in 1965, and although he was a natural student, he decided that college was out of reach financially for a city kid just waiting to turn 21 and sign up with the Boston police. Enlisting in the Army instead of waiting to be drafted, he became an MP by choice, then logged a relatively quiet tour of duty in Vietnam before returning home to an America roiled by protests and assassinations. “I disliked everything about the ’60s,” he wrote in Turnaround. He was discharged in late 1969 and sworn in as a Boston police officer the following fall.

His education in police leadership began three years later, when he watched closely how the department was transformed by the first outsider who was hired as Boston’s police commissioner in decades. Today, the blueprint for every Bill Bratton takeover looks like a Robert di Grazia tribute. Di Grazia, a Californian who had last made stops in Kansas City and Missouri’s St. Louis County, reached outside the department to bring in free-thinking civilians as some of his top aides and reached deep into the ranks to find ideas for reform. One of di Grazia’s long-haired “whiz kids” was Bob Wasserman, who soon helped bring Sergeant Bratton to headquarters and has since been part of Bratton’s brain trust at virtually every organization he has run. It was Wasserman, Bratton later said, who first convinced him that the police could prevent crime and shouldn’t just manage the aftermath.

Bratton earned his college degree while working for the Boston Police Department, and he earned his ticket to headquarters by distinguishing himself as an independent thinker. But he had come to the attention of department brass for his performance as a street cop during a single moment of thriller-level drama.

One summer morning in 1975, an armed bank robber in a red leisure suit burst out onto busy Dorchester Avenue dragging a hostage with him. The holdup artist was a large black man, his hostage a young white woman, and as an angry South Boston crowd moved in on him, he retreated to a bridge that put him in plain view of scores of gawkers.

Twenty-seven-year-old Officer Bill Bratton was the first cop on the scene, and he pushed through the crowd to find himself standing, with gun raised, about five yards from the wild-eyed suspect and his writhing shield. The standoff seemed to stretch for minutes, as Bratton began talking to the hostage-taker, trying to persuade him to drop his gun. Other cops were sneaking in from behind, and Bratton shouted to them to keep back, fearing that someone would be dead before the scrum ended. Finally, Bratton realized that his own gun was panicking the assailant, and he lowered it to his side. The bank robber paused, then dropped his pistol and the arm he had wrapped around his hostage’s neck. Bratton was awarded the department’s highest medal of honor. He had won by backing down.

Two years later, he was ushered into a new commissioner’s inner circle at age 29. By 32, Bratton was the No. 2 man in the department. But soon after telling Boston Magazine that he aspired to his boss’s job, he was theatrically demoted. He would have to rebuild his career with an end-around move that put him in charge of Boston’s small transit police force, where he knocked down crime by 27 percent.

***

Two catchphrases had attached to Bratton by the time he left Boston in 1990 to take his first New York post. “Community policing” was a philosophy that stressed the importance of police working in partnership with the neighborhoods they patrolled. Bratton had built a model of that collaborative ideal in Boston’s District 4 and remained a proponent of the concept even when his New York brain trust later disparaged and dismantled Gotham’s community policing infrastructure. He placed a bigger bet on the so-called “broken windows” theory, though, and was about to meet the New York subway cop whose ideas about crime prevention would create a direct operational link between that theory and violent-crime prevention. In future attempts to measure which police efforts contributed most to the city’s historic crime reduction, distinguishing one revolution from the other would become all but impossible.

A Life of Crime How Bill Bratton changed policing. Boston | Bratton joined his hometown force in 1969 and rose through the ranks. By 1983, he was chief of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Police. After an interlude in New York, he became Boston’s police chief in 1993. New York | Left: Bratton’s first stint in New York was as chief of the transit police beginning in 1990—right as the city’s murder rate peaked. Bratton embraced the “broken windows” policing theory in the job—and got results: During his two-year tenure as transit chief, New York subway robberies declined some 40 percent. Cover Cop | Right: tapped by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as New York police chief in 1994, Bratton oversaw a historic crime drop thanks in part to his use of CompStat to target crime hot spots—a method embraced around the country. But his success cost him: The attention he got, like in his 1996 solo Time cover, contributed to a rivalry with Giuliani, and Bratton was gone after just 27 months. Los Angeles | Named L.A. police chief in 2002, Bratton oversaw another drop in crime and worked to mend relations with minority communities. Here, he greets Reverend Jesse Jackson and Antonio Villaraigosa, then the city’s new Latino mayor. Photos: Justine Ellement/The Boston Globe via Getty; Tom Herde /The Boston Globe via Getty; Time; Wally Skalij/Getty

When Bratton complains today that New Yorkers fresh to town don’t appreciate what the NYPD has done for the city, his mind flashes to images from pre-1990 New York that explain why residents found the broken windows metaphor so powerful. When political scientist John Q. Wilson and criminologist George Kelling famously floated the theory in a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article, New Yorkers in some of the city’s safest neighborhoods knew that a car left unattended on a street would generally go untouched for days. But if a single window were smashed by a crook determined to yank out the radio, the car would be ravaged overnight—stripped of its fence-able parts and often battered and torched. We humans seem to change in our behavior when society’s surface order is punctured. Maybe, Wilson and Kelling theorized, criminal behavior would decline if our police would reassert, even in the poorest neighborhoods, peaceful citizens’ preference for orderly streets scrubbed of graffiti, aggressive panhandlers and disorderly young men.

An even more widely read version of the theory appeared in Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 book The Tipping Point. Gladwell describes a famous 1984 subway shooting and hypothesizes that the shooter, Bernard Goetz, might not have pulled a gun on the teenagers who were threatening him had he not been frazzled by his surroundings: the graffiti-covered walls and windows of the train car, the grime and litter, the general sense of lawlessness. It’s this leap in assigning blame for criminal behavior that separates the true believers in broken windows. We might all agree that cleaning up the graffiti would have a calming effect. We might agree that more attractive subway cars might bring more law-abiding riders into the train and thus help discourage others’ criminal behavior. But did the graffiti really alter Goetz’s psychological state at that moment in any way that compares with the effect of certain local knowledge that the skinny native New Yorker would have acquired—the knowledge that wolfpack robberies on the subway were common, and that teenagers carrying knives or guns were more common still? Which types of behavior truly merit police intervention?

By the time Bratton arrived in New York in 1990 to take command of the city’s beleaguered transit police, Lieutenant Jack Maple had been battling the wolfpacks for years, leading a squad that went undercover on the subway trains and nabbed thieves and muggers red-handed, one lush worker or teen mob at a time. For Maple, who instantly earned Bratton’s confidence, his new boss’s talk about broken windows provided a way to cast a wider net. I wrote a 1999 book with Maple, and I learned along the way that he didn’t believe that the city’s young men became predators because they were allowed to enter the subways by jumping the turnstiles. He believed that scattered predators were mixed in among the sea of law-abiding citizens, that the predators were off-duty more often than they were on and that police had to seize on legitimate ways to engage with the predators during that downtime. A cop who stops a fare evader has a legitimate reason to check for further warning signs: a concealed weapon, an outstanding warrant. The big fish were sat down for questioning, leading to additional arrests. Bratton embraced that thinking enthusiastically. By taking care of the little things, his transit cops started locking up some dangerous characters. Subway robberies plummeted 40 percent over the next two years, making Bratton a natural choice for Rudolph Giuliani when the incoming Republican mayor wanted to put his own stamp on the NYPD in 1994.

Bratton today seems to harbor little doubt that broken windows represents the heart of the change he effected in policing, or that the change in policing is the principal reason—rather than some broader economic or social shift—that New York has enjoyed such astonishing crime declines, including an 85 percent decline in murders since 1990.

That didn’t just happen,” Bratton has said of New York’s decline in crime. “Cops were very assertive.”

“So many people are new to this city they don’t remember what it looked like in 1990,” Bratton said recently. “The place was a mess. An absolute mess.” Today, a younger generation decries the Disneyfication of Times Square and the gentrification of Harlem, but back then whole neighborhoods were open-air drug markets racked by violence. Murders peaked that year at 2,262, while robberies rose past 100,000. By comparison, there were just 333 murders and 16,539 robberies in 2014, in Bratton’s first year back in the job.

“That didn’t just happen,” Bratton said this past November to a liberal audience that had laughed when he assigned most of the credit to the NYPD. “Cops were very assertive,” he said. “We began to change behavior by controlling it.”

The 1994 introduction of CompStat pushed that new spirit of assertiveness into the furthest reaches of the department. CompStat was an accountability system dreamed up by Maple that was named haphazardly but succeeded in remaking policing by demanding a few simple changes: Crime had to be mapped quickly, and precinct-level commanders regularly had to stand before those maps and answer questions from their bosses about why the crime was occurring and what they were doing about it—how their patrol officers and their detectives were working in tandem to clean up those crime maps. Murders and shootings were given more attention than parking violations, and high-crime neighborhoods were given more resources than wealthier brownstone districts. Maple, who had spent 20 years in the subways being looked down on by NYPD cops, hated the department’s old ways, including the disdain so many members of the force showed for young minority victims. When Bratton installed Maple as his crime strategies guru and energetically backed the demands that CompStat made on precinct commanders, he was endorsing a new ethic that could be expressed, as Daily Beast writer Michael Daly recently pointed out, with the same three words that became a favorite of police protesters this past fall: “Black lives matter.”

The change worked. Crime had begun dropping in the early 1990s, after Mayor David Dinkins brought on several thousand additional police officers. But the largest declines in murder and other major crimes closely coincided with Bratton’s 27-month run as Giuliani’s first police commissioner. Soon, New York’s CompStat model would be adopted in Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, New Orleans, Philadelphia and many other major cities.

Once again, though, Bratton accrued more notoriety than his boss could abide. The Republican Giuliani, who needed to appear indispensable to secure his reelection in a heavily Democratic town, forced out his supercop after Bratton appeared alone on the cover of Time magazine in January 1996. “Finally, we’re winning the war on crime. Here’s why,” the magazine trumpeted over a photo of Bratton. Barely two months later, Bratton resigned under pressure, with the New York Times citing the mayor’s “rivalry for the limelight.”

Bratton briefly mulled a run for mayor against Giuliani, and his name came up as a possible FBI director, but in 2002, he landed the L.A. job. His performance there re-burnished his reputation. Even while working with an undermanned force that was coming off a major corruption scandal, he managed to reduce violent crime by 54 percent and keep the city safe from terrorism. Perhaps more significantly, he ended a virtual war that the department had waged against the city’s African-American residents for half a century. When he left on his own terms in 2009, 83 percent of the city’s residents rated the department’s performance as good or excellent.

A lucrative stint in private industry followed, as Bratton was quickly named chairman of Kroll, a global risk management firm, while running his own consulting company and serving on the boards of Rite Aid and Motorola, among others. When London was rocked by days of looting and rioting in 2011, Prime Minister David Cameron reached out to Bratton to help shape a response.

Nothing compared to leading a police force, though. In his mid-60s, Bratton made himself a candidate for the open top job in London before seizing the chance at a return engagement in New York.

***

By then, the storm clouds were gathering. Bill de Blasio, the liberal Democratic mayor who rehired Bratton, had run an insurgent’s campaign whose centerpiece was a promise to end over-aggressive policing. In one particularly effective campaign ad, de Blasio’s mixed-race son, Dante, declared, “He is the only one who will end a stop-and-frisk era that unfairly targets people of color.” The promise to target the runaway use of stop-and-frisk hit home with a community subjected to hundreds of thousands of unpleasant encounters each year between police and innocent black or Hispanic New Yorkers. Use of the tactic had exploded during the 12 years that Raymond Kelly served as police commissioner under billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, both of whom left office as popular figures who had racked up an unbroken string of continued crime declines.

But in the city’s minority communities, the damage was done, and the critics who linked Kelly’s stop-and-frisk tactics to the Bratton revolution weren’t entirely wrong. Even former NYPD Chief of Department Louis Anemone, one of Bratton’s hardest-charging allies in the 1990s, was horrified by what hot-spot policing had become as stops skyrocketed. “Kelly doubled down on this divisive policy. Why? Why?” Anemone laments. “This was the old Vietnam model: You burn down the village to save it.”

That’s not what Bratton had ever meant his policing model to be. In returning to the city, he was staking his legacy on his ability to prove that broken windows policing had been broken by someone else, and that he could fix it. The possibility that the problem with broken windows instead resides at the concept’s core is not an idea he is willing to entertain.

“Academics have their pet theories,” he says. “Having been on the front lines for 30 years, I have a different perspective.”

Bratton’s takeover process has, in many ways, looked like the transitions he engineered in 2002 at the LAPD and in 1994 in New York. He brought in consultants he had favored since meeting them in 1970s Boston, plus allies and advisers he picked up in L.A. and during his first time around in New York. He took the temperature of the department with confidential surveys and some 95 committees populated by middle-ranking officers instead of top brass. None of this is headline-generating stuff, but it excites government watchers who value collaborative decision-making. “Bill Bratton is one of the greatest public administrators that America has ever been graced with,” says former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, a Democratic presidential hopeful who served with Bratton on the national Homeland Security Advisory Council. “He has an uncanny talent for pulling people together.”

After last year’s high-profile police shootings, protests broke out around the country, and “Black Lives Matter” became a rallying cry and a meme. In New York, demonstrators threw fake blood on Bratton during a November march. | New York Daily News; Getty

But Bratton was less assertive during his first several months back in New York than he had been before, and his relatively quiet approach cost him when tensions flared late in the year. In 1994, he used the New York tabloids to shame do-nothing cops and to roll out initiative after initiative. This time, though, he often gave the impression across 2014 that he was letting de Blasio lead.

Following through on de Blasio’s main campaign promise, Bratton radically curtailed stop-and-frisks, bringing them to a level more than 90 percent lower than the 2011 peak of 686,000. When de Blasio pushed to legalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana, Bratton went along with that too. (The illegal marijuana trade generates most of the shootings and murders in today’s New York, he pointed out to me; on the other hand, too many people, in his view, are being jailed for trivial possession offenses.) Whatever Bratton’s thinking on these issues, he looked to be back on his heels. One police union leader—Ed Mullins of the Sergeants Benevolent Association—was so emboldened by the end of 2014 that he told a radio interviewer that in the eyes of the rank and file, Bratton had “tainted” his reputation because he appeared to be “doing the mayor’s bidding for him.”

On the day that Eric Garner was killed last July outside a Staten Island beauty supply shop, Bratton must have realized that his re-engineering process was proceeding too slowly. Garner, a heavyset 6-foot-3 father of six, was unarmed when officers approached him on a sunny street and told him he was about to be arrested on suspicion of illegally selling loose cigarettes. After Garner protested verbally, plainclothes officer Daniel Pantaleo jumped on his back, wrapping an arm around Garner’s neck to take him down. On a cellphone video of the incident since seen by millions, Pantaleo’s arm reddens as he sustains the hold, and Garner rolls to his side, repeating, “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” He was unconscious moments later and died of a heart attack as an ambulance carried him away.

Bratton quickly stepped out in front of news cameras to declare that Pantaleo seemed to have employed a chokehold prohibited by the department, and that the training of his 20,000-member patrol force had to be dramatically improved. He charged Ben Tucker, his deputy commissioner for training, with putting together a program that would add at least a day of training for all veteran patrol officers. A call also went out a day after Garner’s death to Michael Julian, Bratton’s former deputy commissioner of personnel, asking the native New Yorker to return from Australia to help shape training encouraging officers to convey more respect to the public.

Bratton’s new vision now couldn’t come soon enough. A police shooting of an unarmed man in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked protests a month later that dominated television news and turned police violence in minority neighborhoods into a national civil rights issue. In late November, when a grand jury returned no indictment against the cop in the Ferguson shooting, protests flared again, including in New York, where one demonstrator splattered Bratton with fake blood as the commissioner surveyed the scene in Times Square. When a Staten Island grand jury voted 10 days later not to bring charges against Pantaleo in the Garner case, the protests in New York turned into nightly affairs. Many protesters marched peacefully, but a few were vicious. Signs called for Bratton’s firing, and protesters across the country made “I can’t breathe,” Garner’s final words, as famous as Ferguson’s chant of “Hands up, don’t shoot!”

And then came perhaps the darkest moment: Five days before Christmas, two NYPD officers, sitting in their patrol car in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, were assassinated by an ex-convict from out of town who had bragged earlier in the day on social media, “I’m putting Wings on Pigs Today,” then traveled to New York to do just that.

The murders, condemned from all sides, presented a bitter irony to those who had followed the NYPD’s history: The two officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, represented the force’s hard-won diversity and were on patrol in a gentrifying neighborhood that, before Bratton’s first stint as commissioner, had been overrun by crime and drugs. As FBI Director James Comey memorialized the officers later, “Twenty years ago, Bed-Stuy was shorthand for a kind of chaos and disorder in which good people had no freedom to walk, shop, play or just sit on the front steps and talk. It was too dangerous. But today, no more, thanks to the work of those who chose lives of service and danger to help others.”

When Mayor Bill de Blasio expressed sympathy for black New Yorkers who must “take special care” when interacting with police, Bratton’s NYPD officers revolted. At the funerals of two murdered cops, some police turned their backs on de Blasio while he spoke. | Getty; NYT via Redux

For Bratton, the tragedy was a deep blow, tearing at the heart of his profession and his department. Union leader Patrick Lynch, president of the 25,000-officer Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, stoked anger further that night addressing reporters outside the hospital where the victims were taken. “There’s blood on many hands tonight,” Lynch said, referring to the protesters and those who had indulged them. “That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall in the office of the mayor.”

***

If New York, and in turn the nation, are ever to emerge stronger from the rifts opened last year by prominent police killings, Ramos’ December 27 funeral will be remembered as the moment the recovery began. At the time, the event created new cause for alarm: As many as 25,000 fellow police officers, some from as far away as Texas and California, had arrived in Glendale, Queens, in their dress blues that morning to honor Ramos and Liu. But a large contingent of the local cops in the record assembly castigated a villain of their own when de Blasio rose to deliver a eulogy in Ramos’ honor. Theirs was an awesome show of dissent. As the mayor’s face appeared on the stadium-style screen outside the Christ Tabernacle Church, hundreds of members of the blue army amassed outside on Myrtle Avenue and the narrower side streets turned away as if following a drill command. The largest police force in America, representing a profession being vilified across the country for operating outside the bounds of justice, was again setting itself apart. Any observer could see that the gesture expressed pain as well as defiance, but the gulf had widened.

There’s blood on many hands tonight,” said police union leader Patrick Lynch. “That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall in the office of the mayor.”

To say that Bratton had much at stake when he rose next to address the crowd obscures how much he was needed just then by various other players in the drama. In the following days, he would be harshly criticized by some in the mainstream media for statements he would issue soon afterward, counseling against funeral protests but doing nothing to discipline the dissenters or crack down on the thousands of NYPD cops who staged a dramatic work slowdown. But de Blasio badly needed Bratton as a bridge on this morning, and all that this moment required of Bratton was that he find words that expressed how he felt about the job that a cop does. He had an audience bowed in sorrow, ready to listen.

When Bratton speaks in public, he sometimes festoons his Boston-accented speech with traces of the university vocabulary he might have picked up while he was a research fellow at Harvard in the 1990s or perhaps many years earlier, when the young Vietnam War veteran took advantage of a Boston Police Department program that enabled him to enroll at Boston State College. But on this occasion, he was serenely plainspoken, frequently addressing Ramos’ two sons directly and turning the refrain “Here we are ( Heah we ahh)” into a powerful expression of apology, of solidarity and of perseverance. “Your dad was assassinated because he represented something,” he said. “And that’s true, he did. … He represented the blue thread that holds our city together, when disorder might pull it apart ( apaht). He represented the public safety that is the foundation of all our democracy.”

Bratton described the murders of Ramos and Liu as evidence of a national crisis and blamed that crisis on people’s tendency to cluster in factions and then strike out against other tribes. “We don’t see each other—the police, the people who are angry at the police,” he said. “If we can learn to see each other—to see that our cops are people, like Officer Ramos and Officer Liu; to see that our communities are filled with people just like them too—if we can learn to see each other, then when we see each other, we’ll heal.”

He departed the podium to sustained applause, having succeeded in reassuring every cop watching that he considered them heroes and that he venerated the urge to serve others that he recognized in so many of them, because he still felt that urge too. A poll conducted about a week later indicated that public approval for Bratton had surged to its highest point in several months, crossing the 50 percent mark—well below the peak of his 1990s idolatry, but still improved from earlier in 2014.

***

The Bill Bratton who sat down with me in early February was still riding a surge of midwinter momentum. The NYPD’s work had returned to normal once the new year arrived. The deaths of Ramos and Liu had been shocking enough to produce at least a temporary lull in anti-police protests both in New York and around the country. Although shootings and murders had ticked up in January, a string of 12 days without a murder had put New York back on pace to beat 2014’s record low. Perhaps most energizing was a sudden shower of gifts from de Blasio’s City Hall, including the purchase of 13,000 new bulletproof vests for his police and a dramatic stiffening of the city’s commitment to defend individual cops against lawsuits, both likely to boost Bratton’s relationship with the balky police unions at a crucial time. Just days before, Bratton had apparently felt the protests to be far enough behind him that he had recommended a change in state law to make resisting arrest a felony.

But Bratton always plays to several audiences, and when we talked he returned more than once to the idea that race-based tensions had become the central challenge facing American policing, and that his ultimate goal has become to help all sides “see each other.” He said that ending the tensions between cops and the communities they serve was the principal reason he had returned to the field. He also promised no quick fix, even in New York.

The revolution that Bratton has begun sketching out in various forums is no straight reprise of 1994. He instead speaks about a return to the beat-cop model of old and a system he put in place in Boston’s busy District 4 back in 1978, when he was just a brash boy wonder. This time his national renown requires that he be not just right but loudly right. Every big idea he has accumulated along the way depends on it.

The challenge ahead of Bratton is stiff. What if you had figured out the secret to saving thousands of American lives a year, and you couldn’t convince enough Americans to trust that you had done something real? What if you were confident you could finally assemble all the many pieces of the perfect police department but just needed everyone who was watching to afford you a little time?

Only when Bratton soon unveils a new department-wide plan of action will his various audiences be able to begin judging if his latest revolution matches the apparent challenges. Bratton outlined the new approach during a speech to New York business leaders in late January, but the list of innovations was so long and attenuated that much of the press coverage focused on a single new specialized unit, and Bratton had to spend the next day clarifying that he didn’t intend to suggest that he would be sending cops with machine guns both on terrorism calls and to all political demonstrations.

Bratton has always been good at finding money for flashy purchases that boost morale, and this time he is promising a tablet and GPS in every patrol car, a smart phone for every officer and a four-precinct pilot program to help usher in the era when every patrol cop wears a body camera. All those purchases advance his pursuit of a department that can tell its own stories accurately and quickly at a time when social media have made every civilian with a camera phone a potential reporter and shaper of the news.

Bratton speaks at the December 2014 New York City Police Academy graduation ceremony, two days after police officers turned their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio at the funeral of a murdered cop. | Richard Perry/New York Times via Redux

He gave no name to what might be the heart of the re-engineering, though, and it’s not hard to see why. A new police leader with the same ideas would probably package them under a new brand name, but Bratton isn’t just trying to innovate; he’s trying to redeem broken windows and community policing by redirecting them. This is about legacy, about creating a story in which he has been advocating the right cures all along.

Bratton’s new form of community policing won’t look exactly like the 1980s model. Although he will be asking a new generation of young cops to go out and solve neighborhood problems, he will back them this time with an organization built to quickly identify and address the problems that are too big to be handled by a young cop or two.

Still, street-level policing is an art, not a science, and Bratton’s remade department puts an unusual level of trust in cops. His NYPD of the future will rely on many thousands of officers becoming true maestros of the trade, becoming people who lead with their hearts, work collaboratively with others, run toward danger when required, and maintain their composure when challenged or threatened.

Bratton has already ended Ray Kelly’s practice of sending officers right out of the academy to posts in the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city. (A few years ago, those were the cops being pressured to tally up stop-and-frisks.) In Bratton’s new world, a new cop’s immersion in the community would be gradual, beginning with a six-month transition period in which he or she would rotate through the morning, evening and overnight shifts to experience or witness every aspect of a precinct cop’s life. Many would eventually become beat cops in a single small pocket of the precinct, knowing that every day they would patrol the same streets, see the same faces and witness the same problems unless they engaged with partners in the community to reach solutions. Both new and veteran cops will also be trained to speak politely to the public, to never try to “win” a dispute at the expense of getting done what’s needed, to lower their guns when the weapon becomes just a snake at a picnic. Whenever possible, they will not attempt to apprehend a suspect who’s resisting arrest—as Eric Garner arguably was—without two peers on hand to help execute a new, safer three-officer takedown.

Specialized units, from the precinct, borough or citywide level, would intervene when needed—if a street gang congregated for a nighttime initiation rite or if a war broke out between marijuana crews. Any precinct cop might be asked to step up enforcement on misdemeanor violations, like public urination or riding a bike on a sidewalk, when an outbreak of violence demanded creative ways to remove guns or habitual criminal offenders from the streets. But most of the time, the level of enforcement applied to broken windows, or quality-of-life, violations would be guided by the complaints and standards of the neighborhood. You could play dominos at a table on the corner if you didn’t bother your neighbors by doing so. Bratton never said broken windows meant zero tolerance for minor infractions; that’s just how others sometimes interpreted it.

The turmoil of the past year suggests that transforming the NYPD this time around might prove to be the greatest challenge of Bratton’s long career. New York will certainly put up a fight in the months ahead. Unlike L.A., where the black community is fairly small, homogeneous and largely concentrated in a few neighborhoods, New York has many black communities, with many cultural backgrounds and many leaders. During his time out West, Bratton could stop in at L.T.’s, a popular black-owned barbershop, and both hear the voice of South L.A. and instantly convey solidarity. He could and did invite widely known African-American critics of the department to come inside and help him change the culture. In New York, by contrast, he looks at a single neighborhood like Brooklyn’s East Flatbush, home to an outsize share of the city’s shootings and police protests, and he counts 150 to 200 clergy among a mostly immigrant population that blends Haitian, Guyanese, Jamaican, Trinidadian and various other West Indian cultures. “Trying to find a vehicle to touch all that, and to be touched by all that, is a challenge,” he says. And East Flatbush represents just one precinct of New York’s 77.

Some cops I don’t like,” Bratton says—“the corrupt, the brutal.”

Toward the end of our dinner at Elio’s—after the wine was gone and so was the family-style plate of green beans that his wife, criminal defense lawyer Rikki Klieman, said she has been trying to recreate at home—Bratton asked me a question about Jack Maple. I told him that I recently had been thinking about Jack, who died of cancer at 48, and how he had said he was able to change the department because he was so angry about the arrogant, indifferent organization it had been during all the years when he was working for the smaller, less celebrated transit force. Jack was a cop through and through, but he also believed that great cops were a minority in the then 41,000-officer NYPD because great employees are a minority in every profession or large organization.

Bill Bratton in his office. | Ben Baker/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

Bratton didn’t accept my suggestion that he might love cops more than Maple did. “Some cops I don’t like—the corrupt, the brutal,” he said. He also has shaken up the department’s leadership enough to suggest that he retains a keen eye for talent and a keen appreciation of how indispensable true talent is, even in the most brilliantly engineered organization.

But Bratton is trusting tens of thousands of individual cops to understand their profession almost as deeply as he does. And while he, and the rest of the country, wait to see whether his trust has been placed wisely, NYPD officers spread throughout the five boroughs will continue each day and night to respond to calls coming disproportionately from the city’s minority neighborhoods, and they will continue to make a disproportionate number of stops in those neighborhoods in efforts to reduce shootings, robberies or drug trafficking. The vast majority of those encounters aren’t violent, but Bratton would prefer that many fewer of them be hostile. For now, as he waits for his hoped-for cultural change to take hold, he leads, when he can, by example.

On this night, when the police commissioner stepped out onto the narrow sidewalk in front of Elio’s, he encountered a wheelchair-bound panhandler who is an almost nightly fixture outside the restaurant’s door, This was Bratton’s beat, so he knew the man by name and that he had been a crime victim, paralyzed in a shooting. Bratton asked him how he was, handed him a folded bill and wished him well. Then, he rejoined his wife, and they stepped into a waiting car that glided away down Second Avenue.