De Blasio picks William Bratton as New York's top cop

Holly Bailey
·National Correspondent

NEW YORK — In the most closely watched hire of his new administration, Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio tapped William Bratton to serve at the city’s police commissioner.

The long-rumored move returns Bratton as chief of the nation’s largest police force at a time when the department’s “stop and frisk” practices, which allow officers to randomly search people, have come under intense legal and public scrutiny.

De Blasio made rolling back “stop and frisk” a major element of his winning mayoral campaign — even featuring his multiracial son, Dante, in an ad in which he vowed that his dad would be the “only one who will end an era of stop-and-frisk that unfairly targets people of color.”

But as many of de Blasio’s political rivals pointed out during the campaign, Bratton has been a proponent of “stop and frisk” — a program that expanded when he ran the Los Angeles Police Department between 2002 and 2009. But Bratton quickly moved to clarify that he will back whatever policies de Blasio moves to enact, which presumably includes a rollback of some "stop and frisk" measures.

"Mayor-elect de Blasio's priorities are my priorities," Bratton said in a statement.

But de Blasio’s pick is likely to soothe at least some critics who have worried about dramatic change at City Hall when Mayor Michael Bloomberg departs on Jan. 1.

Bratton is a respected law enforcement veteran. He served as police commissioner in Boston before he came to New York, where he was tapped as the city’s top cop in 1994. Although he was credited with a dramatic drop in crime rates, Bratton resigned the post in 1996 amid rumors of conflicts with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

In an odd twist of fate, Bratton replaces police commissioner Ray Kelly for the second time. Kelly was New York's top cop under Mayor David Dinkins until 1994 when Dinkins lost his bid for re-election to Giuliani — who tapped Bratton to replace Kelly. Nearly two decades later, Bratton is again replacing Kelly, who was hired by Bloomberg in 2002.