Bratton: Law enforcement morale at lowest point in decades

Morale among law-enforcement officers across the nation is at its lowest point in decades, former NYPD Commissioner William J. Bratton told cops, prosecutors and other officials who attended Sheriff Errol Toulon’s Executive Leadership Conference Wednesday at Stony Brook University.

"You literally have to go back to the 1970s to have a time where from a morale standpoint, the attractiveness of the profession, is quite as bad as it is now," said Bratton, whose career as a cop began 51 years ago when he joined the Boston Police Department on Oct. 7, 1970. "The good news is it's beginning to change but it is a long way to go."

Bail and pretrial discovery reform and other changes to the criminal justice system have hampered the ability of police to fight crime, according to Bratton, who said communities should "re-fund" the cops by devoting more resources to salaries and training.

"The good news is that stupid slogan, ‘defund the police,’ has been thoroughly repudiated now," said Bratton.

Bratton, joined by NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller, was one of the featured speakers at the two-day event hosted by Sheriff Errol Toulon. Suffolk County District Attorney Timothy Sini, former U.S. Rep. Peter King, former Suffolk police commissioner Geraldine Hart and ex-New York Giant Perry Williams also gave presentations Tuesday and Wednesday.

The goal of the conference, Toulon said, was to assist police in confronting community distrust and officers' low morale.

"It is occurring throughout our country, that negative perception of law enforcement," Toulon said. "I thought that it was very important for us to get together with law-enforcement leaders and have some dynamic speakers who could talk about their experiences to help not only those future leaders, but those leaders currently in place to do their jobs."

Police are responsible for some of the community backlash against cops, Bratton acknowledged. He said 100 highly trained NYPD cops, working in four-member street crime crews, were exceptionally successful at seizing illegal weapons during the 1990s. Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani ordered the department to add 300 more cops to the unit, but those officers did not receive the same level of training.

"What was one of the first things that happened after that? Amadou Diallo," he said, referring to the Guinean immigrant shot to death by cops in the Bronx in 1999.

Speaking earlier in the day, Sini agreed that criminal justice reforms have made it harder for police and prosecutors to do their jobs but said the political climate is changing, making it easier to make modifications to the criminal justice reforms. Sini, recently elected president of the influential District Attorneys Association of the State of New York, said he would use that position to push for legislative changes.

Sini was especially critical of discovery reform, which requires prosecutors to share evidence with defendants and their attorneys within 15 days of arraignment. He said the amount of information prosecutors are required to turn over is too burdensome and needs to be changed.

"At the end of the day, the people who drafted the discovery legislation, I believe, and maybe I’ll get in trouble for saying this, but I believe their intent was to bring the system down," Sini said.

State. Sen. Jamaal Bailey (D- Bronx), the Senate sponsor of the 2019 discovery reform bill, did not return a call for comment. Former Assemb. Joe Lentol (D-Brooklyn), the sponsor in the Assembly, could not be reached for comment.