New NYPD Commissioner Takes Shots at Old Regime

He's feelin' himself. Just a little.

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Complex Original

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Current NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton has a quiet confidence about him regarding his job. Perhaps it's because he's held the job down before. This confidence has resulted in Bratton letting off a few shots at the previous regime, because he can do that.

During an interview with ABC New York, Bratton criticized previous commissioner Ray Kelly and former mayor Michael Bloomberg, while patting himself on the back for a job well done (so far). "Morale, coming into this department, was awful," he said. "’ll be quite frank with you. I don’t think I have an officer come up to me that doesn’t thank me for improving morale. Morale in this organization was awful."

According to Bratton, this was the result of years of internal and external animosity, as well as from orders deliver from the top. "It was an organization, I think, beat down over several years, beaten up by the political establishment and the press." The biggest problem? Stop-and-frisk.

"The commissioner and the former mayor did a great job in the sense of keeping the community safe, keeping crime down, but one of the tools used to do that, I believe, was used too extensively," he noted. So, while his criticism wasn't too hard (or even incorrect), it was still criticism. 

While Bratton is celebrating the fact that has continued to drop during his first three months back on the job, Kelly is prepping to be an ABC News consultant and Bloomberg just has more money than he knows what to do with.

[via Daily Intelligencer and ABC New York]

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