Bill Bratton — Broken Windows, Stop-and-Frisk, and the Defund Years | Part 1

Bill Bratton is the only person ever to have led both the New York City Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department. He joined the Boston Police Department in 1970 at twenty-three, badge 1190, and over the next five decades he ran six agencies, presided over the largest crime decline in modern American history, and became the most identifiable advocate for a philosophy of policing that is still argued about today. He now chairs the Homeland Security Advisory Council.

He does not open this conversation by defending the profession. Asked what he would warn his younger self about, he says expectations — and then describes the department he actually joined as one with a lot of corruption, a lot of racism, some degree of brutality and a lot of incompetence. That candor sets the terms for everything after it.

The centerpiece of Part 1 is broken windows, explained by the person who was living it before it had a name. In 1978, four years before Kelling and Wilson published their article, Bratton was running community meetings four nights a week in Boston's Back Bay and finding that residents cared less about serious crime than about the disorder they walked past every day. He connects that directly to stop-question-frisk, which he defends without qualification while insisting on the five conditions that keep it from going wrong: policies, procedures, guidelines, training, supervision and accountability. Along the way he recounts the 9/11 intelligence failure, the two federal agencies that were forbidden by law from speaking to each other, and a working relationship with Rudy Giuliani that he compares to a Rubik's Cube.

The last stretch is the hardest. Six years after George Floyd, Bratton calls the defund movement one of the stupidest ever inflicted on American policing, and he is specific about the cost — officers who left early, and a generation that never applied, because they had been shown a version of the job in which police are oppressors rather than guardians.

In Part 2, the compliment he ranks above every medal he was given, a night in 1994 that has stayed with him for thirty-two years, and what the work took from him and his family.

New episodes drop one Tuesday and Thursdays. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learn more at https://heroesbehindthebadge.com.