http://www.city-journal.org/2014/eon0408gw.html
The New York City charter delegates the “control” and “administration” of the NYPD to a police commissioner appointed by the city’s elected mayor. It further grants the commissioner responsibility “for the execution of all law and the rules and regulations of the department.” By agreeing to a court-appointed monitor for the NYPD earlier this year, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has violated those binding provisions. Bill Bratton, de Blasio’s choice for police commissioner—he called Bratton “the best police leader in the United States”—accepted the position knowing that the court-appointed monitor would be looking over his shoulder. Why? It’s a fair bet that Bratton hoped to salvage the policing techniques he pioneered during a previous stint as Gotham’s top cop, when he helped rescue New York City from its crime-plagued past.
As police commissioner under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in the mid-1990s, Bratton called the patrol tactic properly known as stop, question, and frisk (but more commonly known as stop-and-frisk) “a basic tool” that is “the most fundamental practice in American policing . . . done every day, probably by every city force in America.” And, he added, “If the police are not doing it, they are probably not doing their job.”
Bratton was correct. In 1990, Mayor David Dinkins’s first year in office, an astounding 2,245 murders took place in New York. In 2012, after almost 20 years of stop, question, and frisk—and other innovative policing techniques—the number of murders had fallen to just 417, a decline of 81 percent. Other major crimes had similarly declined, despite a 10 percent increase in New York’s population. The verdict on stop, question, and frisk? New Yorkers won and criminals lost.