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Kevin Cullen

Final days at NYPD keep Bill Bratton on his toes

New York police commissioner Bill Bratton will step down Sept. 16.Bryan R. Smith/New York Times/File 2016

NEW YORK — Bill Bratton walked out of a luncheon at the Odeon in TriBeCa the other day and hopped into the back of the black SUV that is his mobile office.

He was on his way to a world far away from Manhattan.

A couple of days before, in the middle of a sunny afternoon, a Muslim imam and his assistant had been assassinated, shot in the back of their heads as they walked away from a mosque in Queens.

Bratton’s boss, Mayor Bill de Blasio, was already at the parking lot in Brooklyn where prayers were being said for the imam, Alauddin Akonjee.

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“We’ve got the guy who did it,” Bratton said. “Haven’t charged him yet. I’m going to let the people in that community know we’ve got him.”

Less than three years into his second tour as police commissioner in New York, Bratton has given notice. He’s gone. He’ll have his walk out, as they call the last day, the last act, of a New York police commissioner, on Sept. 16.

But the idea of coasting toward retirement is not an option in a city that doesn’t sleep.

The cold-blooded execution of the imam had the potential to blow up. Many people in the Bangladeshi community around Ozone Park were convinced it was a hate crime, that the men were targeted because they were wearing Muslim garb, having just left a prayer service. The anger on the ground was palpable.

“The honest-to-God’s truth is we don’t know why they were targeted,” Bratton said, scrolling through his BlackBerry. “We just don’t know. We’re missing a motive.”

The murders were captured on security cameras. The imam was holding an umbrella as a shield from the sun. The gunman approached from behind and shot the two men before turning and going in the other direction.

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“He didn’t run,” Bratton said, almost to himself. “He didn’t run.”

The suspect, Oscar Morel, a 35-year-old man from Brooklyn, was identified after he got into an altercation with a bicyclist moments after the murders. Detectives got a warrant and found a gun in his house. Ballistics matched the gun to the bullets removed from the victims.

“The detectives did a great job,” Bratton said.

Why a Hispanic guy from Brooklyn would shoot a couple of Muslims from Queens is, at this point, anybody’s guess.

Only a few days before the imam’s murder, Bratton was honored at a dinner by the fraternal group that represents Muslim members of the NYPD. During the dinner, Bratton had a Skype conversation with Khizr Khan, whose son, a US Army officer, was killed in Iraq while trying to save his soldiers. After Khan spoke at the Democratic National Convention, criticizing Donald Trump, Trump made a mess of it by attacking Khan and his wife.

“Thank you for what you said,” Khan told Bratton over Skype.

What Bratton said is that Donald Trump is categorically unfit to be president of the United States. Bratton doesn’t like getting in the middle of political fights. He’d rather focus on policing. Throughout a career that stretches back more than 40 years, the biggest bumps in the road were almost always about politics. Like when he got demoted in Boston after being seen as too ambitious. Like when Rudy Giuliani made his first go-round as New York police commissioner untenable because Bratton was more popular than the mayor.

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But when he was asked about Trump, he felt he had to say what he really thought.

“He’s dangerous,” Bratton said. “His propagation of fear and division is unacceptable.”

Bratton is leaving the NYPD to head up a consulting group called Teneo Risk, part of a company run by people who once worked for Bill and Hillary Clinton. That has led to the inevitable speculation that Bratton has his eye on a job in a potential Clinton administration.

He shakes his head. His future is in business, not government. He’s going to write another book. He wants to make some money.

“I don’t mind being an adviser,” he said, “but I’ve managed to avoid working for the federal government for 40 years at this point.”

Bratton is leaving the NYPD just a year earlier than he expected. He wasn’t going to stay on for a second de Blasio administration — if there is a second de Blasio administration. But the Teneo job was too good to pass up.

If Bratton’s first run in New York was about aggressively targeting the quality-of-life issues that had made the Big Apple something of a rotten apple, his second tour has been all about de-escalation. The stop-and-frisk tactics that had alienated huge swaths of minority communities have shrunk from a record of 684,330 stops in 2011 to 22,939 last year.

Arrests have fallen 20 percent. That’s something a police commissioner doesn’t usually brag about. But Bratton sees these numbers as empirical evidence of de-escalation, that he and the NYPD have done what de Blasio’s voters wanted them to do, and that was pull back.

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“It’s the peace dividend,” he said. “Even as we stopped ‘stop and frisk,’ we kept crime from going up.”

There hasn’t been a successful terrorist attack during Bratton 2.0, which explains why he was so determined to reassure Muslims that the NYPD was on their side. Without community support, the cops are flying blind in these neighborhoods.

The black SUV pulled over in front of P.S. 214 in Brooklyn, not far from the sprawling parking lot where thousands of Bangladeshi men wearing white tunics and knit skullcaps gathered for funeral prayers for the imam.

Chief Joanne Jaffe, who used to walk a beat on these streets, greeted Bratton and filled him in. They moved the entourage from the relentless sun into the lobby of P.S. 214, and the murdered imam’s sons were brought to meet Bratton.

“Sorry for your loss,” he said, the same thing he would say at a wake in his native Dorchester. “We hope we can bring you some peace.”

Outside, a steady stream of Muslim men came up and shook Bratton’s hand and put their hand over their heart.

“Thank you for what you said,” they kept repeating. Meaning: what he said about Trump.

He was about to climb back into the SUV when a group of plainclothes officers approached. They were Muslims, on their days off, with their badges on, showing respect.

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One of them, a hulking guy named Omar Eltabib, was born in Egypt. He was an accountant before joining the police last year.

“I gave up a six-figure job to do this,” he said.

Bratton slaps him on the shoulder and said, “You sound like me.”

Bratton, whose salary is $208,000, figures he gave up a million bucks every year he worked for NYPD. He’s about to go from six to seven figures. He said he’ll never leave New York.

On the way back to Manhattan, he spoke with Bob Boyce, the chief of detectives, and to Rikki Klieman, his wife, the chief of his house. He was supposed to meet with his wife and their accountant at 5 p.m. Instead, he headed back to Police Plaza, to announce charges in the murder of the imam and the imam’s assistant.

“Now,” he said, putting his BlackBerry down, “all we have to do is figure out why he did it.”


Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeCullen.