About a week after announcing that he had no intention of staying into a second term, New York City Police Commissioner William J. Bratton has formally announced his plans to step down in September, NPR reports.
During the announcement made on Tuesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that Chief of Department James O'Neill will be taking over the position of top cop.
As NPR notes, Bratton started off as a beat cop in Boston in 1970 before rising to the position of commissioner in 1980. He served his first round as police commissioner in New York City in the mid-1990s before heading to Los Angeles, where he was chief of department from 2002 to 2009. Bratton returned to New York in 2014 to once again serve as commissioner.
Bratton has been credited with boosting the de Blasio administration's public-safety record, with the city crime rate holding for the most part at historic lows. Throughout his career in Los Angeles and New York City, he has been praised with reducing crime. However, the style of policing he made famous in New York during his first tenure—broken-windows policing—has come under scrutiny for disproportionately affecting the poor and minority groups. The style of policing aggressively curbs low-level crime in hopes of deterring bigger crimes.
Bratton's most recent tenure with the New York City Police Department has also been marked by the deaths of unarmed black men by police, including Eric Garner and Akai Gurley.
Last fall an inspector general found that the NYPD had "frequently failed to discipline officers who use force without justification," NPR reports, prompting the department to announce new rules around the subject.
Just yesterday, Black Lives Matter activists gathered at City Hall in New York City, demanding that Bratton be fired.
Read more at NPR.