Dorchester native pens new book ‘The Profession’
Bill Bratton, once the city’s top cop, said it’s time to “refund the police” — not defund them — before summer violence spirals out of control.
“We need to listen to what the people want the police to do with them. That’s community policing and it works,” said Bratton, who has just come out with a new book titled “The Profession.”
“Let’s take a breath and look at what we could do better,” he told the Herald in a lengthy interview Friday. “Instead of defund the police we should refund them with money for training, more cops and support from the government.”
He said the hashtag calling for police defunding will only hurt the innocent in the long run. He stressed the first order of business is to “prevent crime and disorder.”
Bratton, who ran the police departments in Boston, New York (twice) and Los Angeles, was born in Dorchester and joined the force here where he said he learned how good cops get the job done.
That’s when ComStat — the use of computer-generated crime analytics — was melded with community policing based on the “broken windows” theory where if you left busted glass go unrepaired, crime was sure to follow.
“The criminal justice movement is the flavor of the month, but critics are attacking everything that was working,” he said, adding that while what the world learned from the slaying of George Floyd in Minneapolis was evil captured on video, most police officers want to do an honest day’s work.
More from the Boston Herald here.