Background and career
William Joseph Bratton CBE (born October 6, 1947) is an American businessman and former law enforcement officer who served two non-consecutive tenures as the New York City police commissioner (1994–1996 and 2014–2016) and currently one of only two NYPD commissioners to do so. (The other is Raymond Kelly.) He previously served as the Commissioner of the Boston Police Department (BPD) (1993–1994) and Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) (2002–2009). He is the only person to have led the police departments of the United States' two largest cities – New York and Los Angeles. Bratton began his police career at the BPD before becoming police commissioner in New York, where his quality-of-life policy has been credited with reducing petty and violent crime. He was recruited to lead the LAPD in 2002, following a period when the LAPD was struggling to rebuild public trust after a series of controversies in the 1990s. Bratton presided over an era of reform and crime reduction. In January 2014, Bratton returned to the post of police commissioner in New York, and served until September 2016. Bratton has served as an advisor on policing in several roles, including advising the British government and is currently the chairman of the Homeland Security Advisory Council for the U.S. government. Bratton's policing style is influenced by the broken windows theory, a criminological theory of the norm-setting and signaling effect of urban disorder and vandalism on additional crime and anti-social behavior. He advocates having an ethnically diverse police force representative of the population, being tough on gangs and maintaining a strict policy toward anti-social behavior.
Bratton is from the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. He attended Boston Technical High School, graduating in 1965. From there, he served in the Military Police Corps of the United States Army leaving in 1970 to pursue a career in law enforcement.
Bratton returned to Boston in 1970 to start a police career in the Boston Police Department (BPD), and was sworn in as an officer in October 1970. He was promoted to sergeant in July 1975. While serving as a Boston Police Officer, Bratton earned a Bachelor of Science in Public Service/Public Administration in 1975 from Boston State College (later absorbed by the University of Massachusetts-Boston). In his early police career, he served as the partner of Francis Roache. Like Bratton, Roache also later served as Commissioner of the BPD. In October 1980, at the age of 32 and ten years after his appointment to the BPD, Bratton was named as the youngest-ever Executive Superintendent of the Boston Police, the department's second highest post. He was dismissed as executive superintendent after he told a journalist that his goal was to be the Police Commissioner. He was reassigned to the position of Inspector of Bureaus, a sinecure which was responsible for liaison with minority and LGBTQ communities. He was later brought back into police headquarters to handle labor relations and 9-1-1 related issues. Between 1983 and 1986, Bratton was Chief of Police for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, following which he became Superintendent of the Massachusetts Metropolitan District Commission Police. Bratton was Superintendent in Chief of the Boston Police Department from 1992 until 1993, then he became that city's 34th Police Commissioner. He holds the Department's highest award for valor.
Bratton became the chief of the New York City Transit Police in 1990. In 1994, Bratton was appointed the 38th Commissioner of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) by Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He cooperated with Giuliani in putting the controversial broken windows theory into practice. He introduced the CompStat system of tracking crimes in New York City. Critics have argued that CompStat has created perverse incentives for officers to allow crimes to go unreported, and has encouraged police brutality, citing that complaints by citizens that involved incidents where no arrest was made or summons was issued more than doubled during the Giuliani administration. Bratton resigned in 1996, while under investigation by the Corporation Counsel for the propriety of a book deal that he signed while in office as well as accepting multiple unauthorized trips from corporations and individuals. These offenses were generally considered minor. Front and center were alleged personal conflicts with Giuliani, partly due to Giuliani's opposition to some of Bratton's reforms and partly due to Giuliani's belief that Bratton was getting more credit for the reduction in crime than Giuliani. The experiences of Bratton and New York Deputy Police Commissioner Jack Maple were used as the inspiration of the television series The District.
Bratton worked as a private consultant with Kroll Associates, also known as LAPD's Independent Monitor, until his appointment by the Mayor of Los Angeles James Hahn as the LAPD's 54th Chief of Police in October 2002. Bratton was one of three candidates recommended to Hahn by the Los Angeles Police Commission under Commission President Rick J. Caruso. On June 19, 2007, the Los Angeles Police Commission reappointed Bratton to a second five-year term, the first reappointment of an LAPD chief in almost twenty years. Bratton has been criticized for his extensive travel; in 2005, he was out of town for a full third of the year on both official and personal business. In March 2009, Councilman Herb Wesson proposed an amendment to the City Charter, allowing Bratton to serve a third consecutive term as Police Chief. On September 11, 2009, he was awarded with the honorary title of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II "in recognition of his work to promote cooperation between US and UK police throughout his distinguished career". On August 12, 2011, Bratton said he was in talks with the British government to become an adviser on controlling the violence that had affected London the prior week. He said he received a phone call from U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, and that he would continue speaking with British officials to formalize an agreement. Bratton was approached by British Prime Minister David Cameron to become the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner in July 2011, but Theresa May and the Home Office said that the commissioner was required to be a British citizen. Bratton instead was offered an advisor role to the British government, which he accepted in August 2011.
On December 27, 2012, he was hired as a consultant for the city of Oakland, California.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
