When William Bratton was a year and a half old, his mother caught him directing traffic in the street out front of their Boston home. From that moment on, it seemed destined that he would become a cop.
William J. Bratton was appointed Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department in October 2002. Chief Bratton oversees the third largest police department in the United States, managing 9,500 sworn officers, 3,000 civilian employees, and an annual budget of more than one billion dollars. After directing a major reengineering and reform effort, he is now driving initiatives in LA aimed at utilizing real-time information to further reduce crime, target gang violence, and mitigate the threat posed by terrorism. After four years in office, crime in LA has been reduced to historically low levels, with Part 1 crimes down 25% and homicides down 27%. The only person ever to serve as chief executive of both the LAPD and the NYPD, Chief Bratton established an international reputation for reengineering police departments and fighting crime in the 1990s. As Chief of the New York City Transit Police, Boston Police Commissioner, then New York City Police Commissioner, he revitalized morale and cut crime in all three posts, achieving the largest crime declines in New York City’s history. He led the development of CompStat, the internationally acclaimed command accountability metric system that uses computer-mapping technology and timely crime analysis to target emerging crime patterns and coordinate police response. From 1996 on, Chief Bratton worked in the private sector, where he formed his own private consulting company, The Bratton Group, L.L.C., working on four continents, including extensive consulting in South America. He also consulted with the Kroll Associates monitoring team overseeing the implementation of the Federal Consent Decree with LAPD.
Chief Bratton holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Law Enforcement from Boston State College/University of Massachusetts. He is a graduate of the FBI National Executive Institute and was a Senior Executive Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He currently serves as the elected President of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF). His critically acclaimed autobiography, Turnaround, was published in 1998. Among his many honors and awards, Chief Bratton holds the Schroeder Brothers Medal, the Boston Police Department’s highest award for valor. Chief Bratton is married to Attorney Rikki Klieman and has one grown son, David Bratton.
