The Gang Buster

JAMES NACHTWEY/VII FOR TIME
STREET JUSTICE: A man who ran when he saw a cop car is restrained but will later be released

William Bratton strides into evening roll call at the police station in the Rampart section of Los Angeles, and the 50 officers in the room break into applause. The police chief cracks a smile. It is the week before Christmas, murders in Los Angeles are down 22% from the previous year, and the man whose crime-busting tactics cut New York City's homicide rate almost a decade ago, landing him on the cover of this magazine, is once again being hailed as a savior.

Ten seconds later the smile is gone, and Bratton is back on message. "We have a domestic-terrorist problem here gangs," he says with the urgent conviction of a televangelist. Indeed, a resurgence in gang activity was one of the main reasons Los Angeles' homicide rate rose 51% in three years, making it the murder capital of the U.S. in 2002 with 658 killings. And Bratton announced they were "job No. 1" after Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn hired him in October 2002.

In the past, Bratton had produced near miraculous results in Boston, paving the way for a steep drop in crime before he moved to New York City, where, as police commissioner from 1994 to 1996, he presided over a 50% drop in homicides. But his techniques putting more cops on the street, making individual officers more accountable for offenses in their neighborhoods and shortening the civilian-complaint process have been controversial. The U.S. as a whole experienced steep drops in crime in the '90s. But even as cities across the nation hired more cops and jailed more young men, many academics disputed the idea that strong policing was the key to controlling crime. "It is still not clear what actually brings crime down," says Andrew Karmen, professor of sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "There is a certain contribution the police make, but they are not the only thing." Other possible factors, he says, include the number of young men in the population, the availability of jobs and shifts in the drug market.

Bratton has little time for such theories. "Economics and demographics are influences, not causes. It is a great disservice to the poor to say they lose jobs and so become criminals," he says. "The penicillin for dealing with crime is cops. I thought I had already proved this. Criminologists who say it is economics or the weather or some other thing are crazy."

Continued success in Los Angeles will give Bratton additional bragging rights and the kind of fame he clearly enjoys. After being forced out of his New York City job by what Bratton claims was then Mayor Rudy Giuliani's dislike of his high media profile, Bratton, now 56, went into the private sector, setting up his own security consulting firm, the Bratton Group, and giving speeches around the world, particularly in South America. But he missed being in the limelight in the U.S. and even explored a run for mayor of New York in 2001. Then came the 9/11 attacks, which left him feeling helpless in the private sector and convinced him he should go back into public service which meant the police force. He lobbied hard for the Los Angeles chief's job not simply for the satisfaction of fixing a crime epidemic in the nation's second biggest city but also for the chance to hammer home once and for all his personal conviction that cops matter.

Bratton's vision of justice is old-fashioned. Old Testament style old-fashioned. At a press conference in the city's gang-ridden 77th division two days after the Rampart roll call, the chief told the story of Laudeina Salazar, 39, who was decorating her Christmas tree on Dec. 12 when a stray bullet "shot by some thug" passed through her front door and killed her. Bratton's message to gangsters with guns was simple: "You use a gun, we're going to put you in jail in federal jail. You are going to be 1,000 miles from here in Utah, where you have no family, no homeboys, no friends and no future." Arrests for all crimes in Los Angeles are up 11% this year.

Most Angelenos have quickly warmed to their new police chief, and his campaign against gangsters has received widespread support, particularly from the black and Latino communities, which suffer disproportionately from Los Angeles' high murder rate. "He has enormous charisma, and his public articulation of the relation of policing to crime is brilliant," says Eric Monkkonen, professor of policy studies at UCLA.

Nowhere has the impact of the new policing regime been felt more strongly than in the city's 77th division, which straddles the 110 Freeway five miles south of downtown. In 2002 it was the most violent of all 18 police districts in Los Angeles, with 118 murders in its 12 sq. mi. Mirroring the L.A.P.D. as a whole, cops in the 77th had become demoralized and cynical following the 1991 Rodney King beating and the 1999 police-corruption scandal in the Rampart district. Many admit they had adopted a "drive and wave" style of policing, in which they rarely got out of their car unless an actual crime had been committed.