Bill Bratton — Sweet Alice, the Bronx, and What the Job Costs | Part 2

Bill Bratton led six police departments over fifty years, including the NYPD twice and the LAPD from 2002 to 2009. In the second half of this conversation, the policy arguments give way to the people who shaped him — and to the parts of the job that no one applies for.

It opens in Watts. When Bratton arrived in Los Angeles, his community relations sergeant told him to go see Sweet Alice, a sharecropper's daughter from the South who had become the driving force of one of the city's most distressed neighborhoods. She once stood up at a community meeting and told an activist attacking the new chief to shut up. When Bratton left the city in 2009, she told him why her neighborhood had trusted him, in three words he still calls the highest honor of his career.

From there he turns to training, and to the difference between the departments he ran. The NYPD he took over in the 1990s was reactive and discouraged; the LAPD was proud, self-reliant and permanently short of officers, working with a fraction of the numbers he believes it needed. His own academy in Boston in 1970 lasted seven weeks. He argues the country still undertrains its police, and that the cost falls on officers first. Asked for his best moments, he describes lowering his gun in front of an armed man holding a bank teller hostage, and the 2007 MacArthur Park crisis he says was his finest hour as a chief.

Then the worst. For Bratton it is not a single moment but every officer he had to bury, and one night in 1994 when a young officer's widow arrived at a Bronx hospital still in her waitress uniform. He has carried what he heard in that hallway for thirty-two years.

He closes with Steven McDonald, the NYPD detective paralyzed in 1986 who publicly forgave the teenager who shot him, and who rode 235 miles by ambulance to attend Bratton's father's funeral. Across both parts, this is a portrait of a leader who changed American policing and remains unsentimental about what that took.

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