NEW YORK — William J. Bratton, the commissioner of the New York Police Department and the most widely recognized face in American policing, will step down next month to take a job in the private sector, ending a 45-year career in public life that spanned the country, from Boston to Los Angeles, and that reshaped the image of what a police commander could be.
Bratton’s departure was announced Tuesday afternoon by Mayor Bill de Blasio at a news conference at City Hall.
Bratton will be replaced by the Police Department’s top uniformed officer, Chief James P. O’Neill, a veteran New York commander who became a police officer in 1983 and has a long relationship with Bratton, dating to their time together in the city’s old transit police force.
De Blasio, in one of his first major appointments after being elected in 2013, chose Bratton, a move that was seen as bolstering the new mayor’s law-and-order credentials after a campaign in which he pointedly criticized the Police Department for heavy-handed practices in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.
For Bratton, who had served as police commissioner in the mid-1990s under Mayor Rudolph W. Guiliani, the appointment was a welcome opportunity to once again lead the nation’s largest police force, and in his post, he has served as a key adviser and surrogate for de Blasio at some of the rockiest moments of his first term in office.
The change came earlier than expected; last month Bratton, 68, said in an interview that he would not stay into a second term if de Blasio were reelected next year. Bratton has said the choice of when to go was his alone.
At the news conference Tuesday, Bratton praised his boss. “We have a passion for what government can do, what policing can do,’’ he said of his relationship with Mayor de Blasio.
Speaking last and calling himself a “proud adopted son of New York City,’’ Bratton said “it’s now time to move on’’ from the job of commissioner.
He and de Blasio stressed continuity in the change. Bratton called it a “seamless transition.’’ De Blasio said O’Neill would reflect the “shared vision’’ of the current administration.
For Bratton, who began as a beat cop in Boston in 1970 and rose to the highest perch in New York policing, the announcement most likely marked the close of his career as a police leader.
In Boston, he received an award for valor in 1976 for rescuing a hostage from a bank robber, according to his biography on the NYPD website. He also led the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Police department during the early 1980s.
Bratton served as commissioner of the Boston Police Department from June 1993 until January of the following year, when he left to begin his first tenure as NYPD commissioner.
Bratton, a Vietnam war veteran, has held a criminal justice fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and Queen Elizabeth II granted him the honorary title of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, his biography states.
For de Blasio, the announcement introduced new questions: Can O’Neill, who is grounded in the culture of the Police Department, enact the changes to police-community relations the mayor has promised?
