Let the streets police themselves.
Via NY Post
Is Bill Bratton eyeing an exit? If so, who can blame him.
Forty-five years a cop, a motive force in Rudy Giuliani’s reclamation of New York City’s streets 20 years ago and a public-safety intellectual with a stellar international reputation, Bratton has been swimming with the minnows for 18 months now — and the exasperation is peeking through.
“I will not be commissioner for [another] six-and-a-half years — that’s the reality,” announced Bratton last month. Clearly, departure is on his mind.
“You can’t arrest your way out of this problem. It requires coordinated effort,” the commissioner said a week ago of disruptive street vagrancy — an obvious fact that seems only recently to have dawned on the folks who inhabit City Hall.
“There are people in our society — criminals . . . bad people. We need to work very hard to put them in jail and keep them there for a long time,” he declared on Thursday — delivering an explicit rebuke to an administration that came to office preaching an unadorned anti-police gospel.
Frustrated much? So it would seem.
After all, murder is up, some city police precincts have become virtual free-fire zones for gang-bangers, aggressive vagrants plague city streets and parks — all of it combining to tarnish the reputation of one of America’s leading public-safety professionals.
Certainly none of Bratton’s thoughts can be endearing him to the Lilliputians now running government in New York City — most notably First Frequent Flier Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito.