William Bratton

After serving in the Boston Police Department from 1970 to '83, Bratton held a variety of law-enforcement positions in Massachusetts and New York. He returned to Boston in 1993, ultimately being named police commissioner. He left in 1994 to run the New York City Police Department, and in 1996 was named president of First Security Consulting, which is based in New York.

I'm wondering if Boston has noticed something that is so prominent in New York. New York looks upon immigration as a strength, not a weakness, because so many of the immigrants tend to be so hungry to move up. They provide energy, and are able to bring back neighborhoods that were in decline. In Boston, in the Dorchester section where I used to live, Fields Corner, you've got a Vietnamese population. My wife's neighborhood, over in East Boston, is literally an immigrant neighborhood now. It is a city that is in some respects replenishing itself with new waves of immigrants, and I'm not sure that people have picked up on that yet.

From a personal perspective, I'm very pleased to see what's happened to the Boston Police Department. Through most of its history, the department was not well thought of. It was extraordinarily parochial. And it has recently moved onto the national stage.

If you think of it, the turnaround has been spectacular. When I came back to Boston, in 1993, it was in response to the St. Clair Commission, which issued a scathing report on the Boston Police Department. Here it is four years later, and it's one of the leading police departments in America -- something that myself, [current commissioner] Paul Evans, and others only dreamed about in the '70s.

For the first time since I've been associated with the department -- 26 years -- it has literally established itself as a crucial and essential part of the forward movement of the city. As the city becomes safer, investment increases, more people want to come to the city as tourists, more people want to live in the city. And as the city becomes safer, the schools become safer and the race issue diminishes.

Those most affected by the drop in crime, in all reality, have been in the black community. The good news is fewer victims, but also something we don't tend to look at, which is fewer perpetrators. Fewer young black men going to jail. Fewer young black men on probation or parole. For a community that had been devastated by crime, both in terms of its victims and its perpetrators, there have been multiple benefits.

In many respects, Boston is moving toward a vision that has been espoused going back to Mayor John Hynes's days in the 1950s -- the idea of Boston as a capital city, as a truly international city. It's already there in its ability to attract tourism, business investment, all of the infrastructure that's being laid in place right.

As I travel around, and people hear I'm originally from Boston, I hear nothing but positives when they think of Boston: "I love it when I go there." "What a great town." Interestingly, the outsiders' perception of the city is sometimes stronger than that of those who live in the city. It's a cleaner city, it's a more attractive city. And if you can get the schools, the crime, and some of that to a point where we're not reading about murders, we're not reading about schools falling apart, then the residents' sense of self will also change.

<-- Mary Bonauto | Larry Moulter -->