Too Early To Write Off De Blasio

There was a lot of consternation that Mayor Bill de Blasio was being destroyed by the outright hostility many NYPD officers and the police unions were showing toward him in the past few weeks, but a new Quinnipiac poll suggests protesting cops may have overplayed their hands:

By overwhelming margins, New York City voters objected to the back-turning protests and work slowdown that have roiled the Police Department, an auspicious turn for Mayor Bill de Blasio as he seeks to end weeks of open tensions between officers and City Hall.

A poll released on Thursday revealed deep dismay — across racial, gender and geographic lines — over the tactics and incendiary statements of protesting officers, and a desire to discipline those who deliberately made fewer arrests.

For Mr. de Blasio, who had initially appeared beleaguered as he confronted a rebellion within law enforcement, the poll offers vindication of his strategy of waiting out police protests and refusing to apologize for his efforts at reform.

In their zeal to show the mayor he had neglected them, leaders of police unions appear to have overplayed their hand, giving Mr. de Blasio a key advantage by alienating a public accustomed to years without such explosive tensions in the ranks.

The poll, conducted by Quinnipiac University, comes as Patrick J. Lynch, the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, faces growing challenges from members who believe he has gone too far in his attacks on City Hall.

The Times article goes on to say that de Blasio purposely didn't engage publicly with the police unions or critics, telling his aides that he trusted the "public’s judgment on how people conduct themselves.”

There's no overall approval/disapproval in the poll on de Blasio - just on Commissioner Bratton (who is up 12 percentage points to 56% approval.)

And you can bet there's some lasting damage from this battle that de Blasio will probably never be able to undo.

But any politician or former politician looking to exploit the battle between the NYPD and de Blasio - including one Eva Moskowitz and one Harold Ford - must understand that de Blasio is a lot wilier and skilled at politics than he appears on the surface.

Many pols facing what de Blasio faced in the last month might have panicked in response to the crisis.

De Blasio didn't, he let Bratton handle a lot of the public relations and he looks like he may have weathered the crisis - at least for now.

De Blasio's NYCDOE - Probably Not Going To Be Too Much Different Than Bloomberg's

In picking William Bratton to replace Ray Kelly as NYPD commissioner, Mayor-Elect De Blasio has shown that while he is looking to make a break from some of the Bloomberg NYPD policies of the past, he is not looking to make a "clean" break:

Michael Bloomberg's police commissioner, Ray Kelly, waited 63 days before sending police officers in riot gear to clear Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park back in 2011.

Bill Bratton, according to a former New York City official who talked to him afterward, said that if he were commissioner he would have "cleared them out right away."

(A spokesperson for Bill de Blasio, who yesterday announced that Bratton would be the new commissioner, did not confirm or deny the quote.)

Bratton, who was NYPD commissioner under Rudy Giuliani, has now been given a mandate to implement the more community-friendly police strategies that de Blasio promised during his spectacularly successful mayoral campaign. And he was presented by de Blasio on Thursday as a kindred spirit on policing theory.

But de Blasio supporters looking for the clean break from the Bloomberg administration the mayor-elect promised in the campaign, during which he also pledged to “end the stop-and-frisk era” in New York, may find Bratton's substantive views about police work to be remarkably similar to the current administration's.

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Bratton's record in achieving low crime rates, like Kelly's, is well known. And in a series of speeches earlier this year which largely went unnoticed, he staked out unflinching support for the kind of aggressive, proactive policing he first used when he served as Rudy Giuliani’s first police commissioner from 1994-1996, and when he was the Los Angeles Police Commissioner from 2002 to 2009.

In June, at an event hosted by the Manhattan Institute, Bratton called stop-question-and-frisk “the most basic, fundamental and necessary tool of American policing. We cannot function effectively without it.”

Bratton has suggested that the department has gotten into trouble with its stop-and-frisk program because it's gotten "too small." The smaller NYPD can't assign cops to permanent beats where they could develop relationships with local residents and collaboratively work to reduce crime, Bratton said.

Instead, the NYPD flooded high-crime areas with rookie cops, who probably didn’t have proper supervision, leading to “huge numbers of stop-and-frisk” incidents. In Bratton’s view, the stop-and-frisk controversy “was created by a political decision to cut the size of the police force to try and meet budgetary needs with the justification that crime was down so dramatically.”

Make no mistake, Bratton will run the NYPD differently than Kelly did (as this Times article pointed out here), and putting an end to arrest, ticket and stop-and-frisk quotas would be an important step toward making this city less of a police state.

But de Blasio's pick of Bratton is a conservative one and shows for all his campaign rhetoric of breaking with Bloomberg's policies, he is looking to do more tweaking than breaking.

Given the Bratton pick for the NYPD, I wouldn't be surprised to see de Blasio pick former Baltimore schools chief Andres Alonso for the DOE.

Just as Bratton is more of a change in tone and style than a change in policy from Kelly, Alonso is a testing-friendly, corporate-style education reformer with solid deformer credentials who nonetheless has a reputation for reaching out to all stakeholders and working respectfully with the teachers union.

Picking Alonso for chancellor would allow de Blasio to reassure the moneyed classes that the Bloomberg-style reforms they support aren't going away, they'll just be toned down, implemented with a little more subtlety.

One of the other rumored picks, Joshua Starr, might also fit that "tweak it without breaking it" bill.

Starr did call for a three year moratorium on high stakes testing accountability for schools and teachers, but not because he believes a test-based accountability system is bad for children.

Rather, he wants to give schools, administrators, teachers and children time to adjust to the CCSS and other changes wrought over the past few years before attaching high stakes to the "assessments."

He wrote:

A moratorium from state standardized tests tied to NCLB is necessary to allow school districts the opportunity to organize their systems to what we’re being asked to do now and in the future: prepare adults to engage students in much deeper learning so they will be equipped not just with the academic skills but with the problem-solving skills necessary to be globally competitive. We have to organize our systems to achieve this goal, which is incredibly difficult when we’re still being measured by an outdated model. In the interim, we can continue to measure ourselves by standard indicators of college and career readiness, such as SAT, Advanced Placement, and ACT tests and graduation rates. We could also use a nationally accepted criterion-based reading test to determine our current status, but not for high-stakes accountability purposes.

Once the CCSS is fully implemented and the new assessments aligned to these standards have been completed, we can begin to construct a meaningful accountability system that truly supports teaching and learning.

De Blasio, for all the shrill rhetoric from the NY Post, is no bomb-throwing Sandanista looking to turn New York City into Havana on the Hudson.

He's a corporatist politician in a corporatist political system who made his bones under the Great Triangulator, Bill Clinton, and maintains good relations with neo-liberal Andrew Cuomo.

Whichever candidate de Blasio picks for chancellor, whether it's Andres Alonso or one of the other rumored names like Kathleen Cashin or Joshua Starr, there is likely to be a change in the tone and style of how the school system is run, but not necessarily the policies.

The moneyed class that owns this city does not want the policies governing the police, the schools or anything else changing too much.

That doesn't mean a change in tone and style from the current administration won't be welcome.

I look forward to opening up the paper and not seeing the chancellor or the mayor calling teachers incompetent criminal pieces of shit every day.

But it is a far cry from the kind of change de Blasio called for during the campaign.

Of course, after seeing how "Change We Can Believe In" in 2008 morphed quickly to "same old same old," I never really believed de Blasio's campaign promises anyway.

What The Bratton Pick Could Mean For Schools

I know there have been some people who were disappointed by de Blasio's pick of William Bratton to be NYPD Commissioner, but I see the Bratton pick as a  positive for both the city and the NYPD.

The NY Times provided some analysis on where Bratton may take the NYPD that leaves me feeling hopeful on a number of fronts:

Speaking at the news conference where Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio announced his appointment, Mr. Bratton said he would conduct an examination of the department’s resources, a process that one person familiar with his thinking said would be part of the kind of broad review that he undertook at the outset of his earlier tenure in 1994. 

This review is intended in part to look at the department’s priorities and resources and how they are allocated. 

Mr. Bratton’s management style could not be more different from his two-time predecessor, Raymond W. Kelly, who has overseen sharp declines in crime over his 12-year tenure and has won both praise and criticism for the counterterrorism units he built from the ground up after the Sept. 11 attacks. 

Mr. Kelly has concentrated almost all decision-making power in the 35,000-member department in his own hands. Mr. Bratton, on the other hand has been the quintessential delegator, pushing down authority to precinct commanders and giving more discretion to officers, both in his earlier time in New York and during his leadership of the Los Angeles Police Department. 

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At the news conference, Mr. Bratton also provided some broad outlines of his plans and priorities, echoing his new boss’s pledge to “bring police and community back together.” 

One of the people familiar with his thinking, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity because Mr. Bratton’s plans have not been made final, said one goal of the planned assessment was to determine how to reconfigure the department to rebuild relationships, with the community, with other agencies and with the media.

Reaching out to the community, building relationships to stakeholders outside the NYPD, delegating authority to precinct commanders and giving more discretion to individual officers sounds like some pretty good reorganization ideas to me.

If we got a chancellor in the DOE to do those kinds of things - reach out to the community, build relationships with stakeholders outside of Tweed, delegate authority from Tweed to others, give more discretion to individual teachers - that would be a good thing.

While I understand why some people are upset with the Bratton pick, connecting it to the Bad Old Giuliani days, I think that there are leadership qualities that Bratton brings that will be a refreshing change from Kelly's "My way or the highway" style.

We'll have to see what de Blasio decides to do at Tweed.

If we got someone who was ready to change as much about how Tweed operates as Bratton says he wants to do at the NYPD, we'll be doing okay.

If Bratton Replaced Kelly As NYPD Commissioner

Interesting piece from City-Journal about William Bratton's time at the LAPD.

Dunno what de Blasio's thinking on NYPD commissioner is, but whomever he picks must be less contemptuous of people of color than Ray Kelly is.

De Basio also must choose someone who will be someone strong enough and savvy enough to handle the pro-Kelly propaganda that will come his way as criticism from the likes of Mike Lupica and others.

I think Bratton could be the kind of commissioner who could transform the NYPD in a positive way while keeping crime levels down.

I bet stop-and-frisk wouldn't have become the issue it became if the mayor and the NYPD commissioner had the trust of people in neighborhoods like East New York and East Flatbush.

Community relations, having police work as part-cop/part-social worker instead of some member of a paramilitarized occupation force, ending the insane monthly quotas that put such pressure on the cops to constantly make stop-and-frisks, hand out tickets or make arrests - these kinds of policy changes could go a long way to making this city safer than ever while transforming the way the police are seen by people in this city.

Bratton is not the only person who could do this kind of transformative work at the NYPD.

But he does have a reputation for doing just that at the LAPD.