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"You have delivered big time," says Bratton, standing to address his Comstat managers. He reminds them that when he was hired away from the Boston Police Department in January 1994 by Mayor-elect Rudolph Giuliani, who had made crime and quality of life his major campaign themes, Bratton had asked for an immediate 10% decrease in crime (the request was met with derision and disbelief). "In the end, we got 12%," he notes. "In 1995 I raised the bar to a 15% reduction, and you gave me 17. Last year you accounted for 60% of the national crime decline--all from one city. You proved that police can change public behavior. For that you should be proud." Bratton pauses, then snaps, "Now get your feet off the desk. It's 1996." In the new year, he says, he wants an additional 10% reduction--more than even Giuliani expects. If he gets it, New York's crime rate will be half what it was five years ago. That, he says later, "should show the criminologists who refuse to give police credit."
Some experts doubt that Bratton is responsible for any of New York's crime drop. "It's like trying to take credit for an eclipse," says former New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. Others are watching Bratton with mouths agape. "I've never seen anything like it," says University of Maryland criminologist Lawrence Sherman, who has studied 30 police departments in the past 25 years. "Police chiefs routinely say, 'Don't expect us to bring down crime, because we don't control its causes. But Bratton says just the opposite. It's the most focused crime-reduction effort I've seen. It will take time before we can say how much effect it has had, but this clearly is new. When I sat in at Comstat, I thought, 'Bratton is using crime data for management by objective--a basic idea that's never been tried before.'"
There's more to the Giuliani-Bratton strategy, of course, than terrorizing captains at early-morning meetings. Though their predecessors, Mayor David Dinkins and Kelly, deserve real credit for putting more cops on the beat, Giuliani instructed Bratton to do something Dinkins would never have allowed: use those cops to crack down on minor offenders, public drunks, potheads, those who urinate on the street, aggressive panhandlers, graffiti scribblers and "squeegee pests," who converged on cars at stoplights to clean windshields for spare change.
This quality of life campaign tested a principle that Giuliani and Bratton had believed for years: the "Broken Windows" theory, first put forth in 1982 by criminologists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. Wilson and Kelling argued that minor violations create a disorderly environment that encourages more serious crime. "I chose Bill Bratton," says Giuliani, "because he agreed with the Broken Windows theory." Sure enough, as arrests for small offenses rocketed, New York's streets became notably more civil. Then Maple, who has been Bratton's aide-de-camp and crime strategist since Bratton was slashing subway crime as New York's Transit Police chief in the early 1990s, proposed an intriguing corollary to the theory.