The top cop finds the sweet spot

After too many years of responding to ever less crime with ever more policing, we may finally be getting it right. “Policing is like medicine,” Police Commissioner Bill Bratton told the Daily News Wednesday, employing one of his favorite similes. “You effectively try to resolve the problem while doing minimum harm. Crime is down. Am I going to keep giving you chemo and radiation when the patient is getting better?”

He hasn’t. Overall, crime is down almost 10% so far this year from last year’s record low. While murders and shootings are both up by about 10%, those are small rises over a short span and from a historically low baseline.

At the same time, said Bratton, cops are on pace for about a million fewer policing actions — stops, summonses and arrests — than at their recent peaks. They’ve done that even as felony arrests have held steady.

“I would describe that (drop) as a good thing. There are others who would describe that as (police) not being as productive or active as they should be. I’m sorry. I don’t see it that way,” said Bratton.

“There’s a level that we’re going to arrive at that’s going to fluctuate up and down by 5% or 10%, but we’re starting to see some potential bottoming out on crime levels.”

If crime stays plateaued while enforcement falls, that would mark a new, better normal in the dance of cops, crooks and citizens — one Bratton said was always the plan, going back to his first stint as commissioner:

“In ’94 and ’95 working with Giuliani, (the idea was) that we would increase arrests and enforcement action for a certain period of time . . . but like a bell curve, once the city became safer, the police would be making fewer arrests, fewer summonses, fewer people going to Rikers.”

Now, that’s finally happening. With much of the city mostly policing itself, cops — no longer under pressure to make numbers to prove how much chemo they’re delivering — are free to go after “the worst of the worst,” as Bratton repeatedly put it, while also restoring the trust lost over years of what he called “over-policing” that alienated so many in the very neighborhoods where cops are most needed.

“What we have been consciously changing over these last 15 months is delivering on the peace dividend,” said Bratton. He defined that payoff: a safe city with “less interruption in the daily lives of people.”

He continued: “While I still focus on broken-windows enforcement, even that is focused broken-windows enforcement rather than broad-based.”

It’s “what you you’d expect in a city that has 80% less crime than in the ’90s: a lot fewer interactions” between cops and citizens.

“Projections going forward are that we will continue to be able to reduce the enforcement action (without crime going up) and what we are instead able to do . . . is focused activity.

“That is what the community is talking about: Don’t think of every black kid walking down the street as a potential criminal. Instead, focus on the 237 people who’ve been involved in three or more shooting incidents in the past couple of years. Focus on the several thousand gang and crew members.

“In other words, in that population of several million, let’s focus on the four to six thousand that are effectively causing the concern around homicide and shootings . . . concentrated in certain neighborhoods, and that’s where we’re concentrating.”

That’s happening at the same time that Bratton is working to reorient the department toward more community policing, to give cops more perspective on the neighborhoods they patrol than they get “riding around in those little cocoons, those radio cars,” responding to emergency calls.

Past restoring trust, “there’s also this idea from a management standpoint: Reduce my costs. Every arrest I don’t make, the amount of money I save in overtime to process it is phenomenal. The DA saves money. The court saves money. Rikers saves money.”

Bottom line: It’s time to consolidate the gains of nearly a quarter century of falling crime, and to reduce the costs, in bad arrests and lost trust, that accompanied that drop.

“The police department is in a very good place in terms of resources, in terms of starting to rebuild relationships with communities, while also being able to keep crime down,” said Bratton.

“I’m very comfortable that crime is going to continue to go down in this city, that disorder is going to continue to go down in this city, but with less enforcement action” — and less of the distrust and damage some of those actions, strong medicine indeed, inevitably create.

“It’s a peacetime dividend,” he repeated. “People are just behaving themselves.”

Bratton to cops: ‘don’t think about every black kid walking the street as a potential criminal’