When Bratton was sworn in, he said he wanted to figure out why New Yorkers are on such terrible terms with the cops. Well, here's a pretty clear instance: the LGBTQ community asked him not to send thousands of unformed officers to the biggest anti-gay parade in the world. He didn't even grace us with a reply. Instead, a reporter asks him and he says "yeah", without any acknowledgement that this is a huge issue. And it's a huge issue because New Yorkers, gay and transgender and otherwise, have daily interactions with police officers in which we are not safe. Requests for help turn into arrests. Standing in the vicinity of a cop turns Ito an interrogation, and god help you if they perceive you as less than willing to go along with it. It turns racial or homophobic very easily. Day to day, many, maybe even most New Yorkers don't have the expectation that a cop is going to be respectful rather than bigoted.
Having a gay sister is not policy. Bringing thousands of uniformed cops to an anti-gay parade, which is so bigoted that it's subject to an international boycott from NYC to Ireland, that is policy. Refusing even to address the concerns of communities who raise the parade as a matter of bias, that is policy. It's policy that says to individual officers "we're not going to bother you about the homophobic culture of the department." And it says to the community that calling the NYPD for help is a crapshoot -- maybe you'll get a cop who's personally sympathetic because they have a gay sister, maybe not. So think twice before you call.
Mayor de Blasio has gotten a lot of good work underway, he's brought a lot of people who have been advocating for communities into positions of power. Bratton is not one of those guys. When de Blasio appointed Bratton, social media lit up with "what the @#$% is de Blasio doing?" And "here we go again", because everyone remembers Bratton from Giuliani days, and those were not good days for community relationships with the police. Bratton criminalized youth and homeless people in ways that we're still suffering from now. He brought in CompStat which turned New Yorkers into numbers for cops to process. Bratton is clearly de Blasio's Achilles heel, already the source of a lot of tension and more to come.
