Former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton discusses the rise in violent crime across the U.S. in 2020

Bill Bratton, Teneo Risk Executive Chairman, Former Police Commissioner of NYC & Boston LAPD. Chief, and Co-author with Peter Knobler of ‘The Profession’, joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss Issues around crime and quality of life in major cities.

Video Transcript

- A crime wave is sweeping our nation with murder rates up by double digits in many cities, including large cities like New York and LA, but also in smaller cities like Omaha and Louisville. Bill Bratton has served as police commissioner of New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. And he is out with a new book. It's called "The Profession A Memoir of Community, Race, and the Art of Policing in America." And we are delighted to have Commissioner Bratton here with us today. Commissioner, always good to see you. So--

BILL BRATTON: Good to see you.

- --With this book it's certainly, it's certainly very timely, right. There has been this intense backlash against the police in the wake of the George Floyd murder. You've seen a lot in your 50 year career in law enforcement. How do you even begin to build trust again between the community and the police, especially trust with the Black community?

BILL BRATTON: It will not be easy because we've lost so much of it. In many respects-- and I talked about this in the book-- it takes me back to the 1970s when there was also a great deal of mistrust of American police. And over the years we got a lot of it back, even in the Black community. But the events around the death of Mr. Floyd have really set things back dramatically.

Good news is that it can be regained, and the George Floyd bill that's working its way through Congress-- if it ever gets out of Congress-- might be, particularly for the Black community, a significant first step in building trust with our police forces once again. That's going to take a lot of hard work and I talk about it a lot in the book.

The book is a combination of leadership history and things that have worked and things that didn't work. So it's very timely and my co-author and I, Peter Knobler, spent four years putting it together. But I think it's a good read.

- So what are some of the keys to better policing as you see it? There's been a lot of conversation around police reform, calls to defund the police, for example, but also a lot of calls to increase funding around some other social issues that perhaps the police shouldn't have to deal with, like dealing with folks with mental illness or the homeless population. How should we be navigating moving forward, at least when it comes to that police reform and what do you make of some of those calls to defund police?

BILL BRATTON: This is where it's important to understand the history of the last 50 years because we're repeating many of the same mistakes of the 70s. We deinstitutionalized the mental institutions, mental illness institutions, put those people out on the street, created the homeless population. We [? de-police, ?] we reduced the size of police forces in the 70s as crime was beginning to grow. We decriminalized, basically took away a lot of the tools the police had to work with.

We're seeing some repeat of that now in the calls for defunding the police. The idea for some people is take money away from the police and deal with the emotionally ill, deal with the narcotics disabled, deal with many of the other societal ills that society has not figured out how to deal with.

Myself, I'm skeptical that money is going to be allocated in sufficient amounts to deal with those issues. So I think the police are going to end up still being the safety net for some time to come. As we fail dealing with emotionally ill, with the homeless, with the drug epidemics, police ended up being the safety net as everything ended up being dumped into the laps of the police.

And that's where we get into so much trouble because we don't have the current funding, the current staffing, to be able to successfully deal with those issues that we do pretty well, all things considered. But we were never designed to deal with the scope, scale, and intricacy of the societal problems of today.

- Commissioner, we know that rising crime is a major issue in cities across the country. It's a major issue in the New York Mayor race, which is taking place right now. As the former Police Commissioner of New York, you have a unique perspective there. You're also a resident of the city. What would you like to see the next Mayor of New York City do?

BILL BRATTON: Well New York City's Mayoral race is a microcosm in some respects of the current debate around the country. We have the criminal justice reform movement on the left that in the case of New York City went too far, too fast. And that's evidenced by some of the candidates in the race who are still talking about defunding the police, reducing the size of New York police force, in the midst of the largest crime wave in 30 years. Doesn't make much sense, I think, to the average person.

On the other hand, that we have this issue going forward that we are going to have to basically grapple with a long hot summer ahead of us. Good news is that we have, if you will, things we have learned from the past how to deal with it. But it's going to cost money. And the problem is even with that money it's going to be used for police overtime as most departments are having trouble hiring to fill vacancies and they are losing large numbers of officers as a result of the tensions in the last two years.

So we're not in a particularly good place but out of crisis comes opportunity. In my case, I consciously went into New York twice and into LA to deal with crises. That's what I like to deal with. Is you get out of crises. You get opportunities. And you can expedite change. If we're smart about this we can take advantage of this current crises-- the many crises we're actually dealing with-- find common ground that we can all get something out of coming together, and move forward.

Hope is not lost but right at the moment is a lot of pessimism, a lot of concern. Reminds me of the 1990s all over again. But we got through the 90s didn't we? And New York before the epidemic was probably the best it's ever been until the legislation got into the mix and messed it up.

- Yeah, I'm a lifelong New Yorker. I've lived through all of what you just talked about. I'm happy to hear though that you are hopeful Commissioner. I know that you support a lot of reforms that have been called for since George Floyd's murder, including mandatory police body cameras. But where do you-- where are you in terms of abolishing qualified immunity, which protects police from criminal charges if they use deadly force in the line of duty? Will that have a chilling effect on people wanting to be part of the police force?

BILL BRATTON: Policing believes that would be the case. That it would make it even more difficult to attract young men and women. The idea that a police officer who is oftentimes called to make a split second decision in a life threatening situation, if he makes an error that he may lose his home, may have his salary basically taken away, why would anybody want to put themselves at that risk? It's ironic that we want qualified immunity, that means limited immunity for police officers who have to make those one second decisions, meanwhile, the people who are designing the bill in Washington, in state capitals, and the prosecutors have absolute immunity.

They can't be sued. The scales of justice [? is ?] a little out of balance when you look at that. Can't qualified immunity as it's currently structured be changed? I think so. But to do away with it, it would not be fair to police officers who are expected to make split second decisions. In that regard, this is where the defunding movement is ridiculous, because we need to basically fund more training for our officers so when they do get into a tough situation they make fewer and fewer mistakes so they're not at risk and the people they're interacting with less risk also.

I would guarantee if you asked nine out of 10 people in New York City, or for that matter in Albany, or in Washington, DC in the nation's capital who are debating qualified immunity, they couldn't explain it. It is a very difficult issue to understand. On page 460 in my book I consciously designed that section of the book to try to put it in layman's terms so that the average person would understand what this issue was all about. It's a complex issue not easily defined, not easily understood, not easily changed.

- Well, the book is called "The Profession," and it is an eye opening look at policing in America and your 50 year career in it. Commissioner Bill Bratton, always good to see you. Thanks.