NYC's next top cop touts strategy to repair rift with public

NEW YORK (AP) — The career cop picked to lead America's largest police department is embracing a throwback strategy to repair the deep rift that has opened between officers and the public.

In announcing O'Neill's selection, Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio said he would be tasked with expanding a "neighborhood policing plan" the department first unveiled last year amid tensions stirred by the police chokehold death of Eric Garner and the subsequent ambush slaying of two NYPD officers by a suicidal gunman out for revenge.

O'Neill, who has been with the NYPD for his entire career, said the program draws on some of the same lessons he learned in 1983 when he was a rookie transit officer patrolling a subway system ravaged by crime.

Under former Democratic Mayor David Dinkins, the department put more cops on foot patrols, asked beat officers to focus on long-term solutions rather than quick-fix arrests and recruited tenants as informants against drug dealers in their buildings in the early 1990s.

Bratton, in his first tour as police commissioner under Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, shifted the department's focus toward cracking down on "quality-of-life" crime as part of a theory that aggressively going after urban annoyances like vandalism and subway fare evasion would reverse a societal decline.

Officers can be trained to bring "softer skills" to resolving problems, but "they're not social workers, they're not camp counselors — they're law enforcement," Eugene O'Donnell, a professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said Tuesday.