MANHATTAN (CN) — As NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton leaves office amid controversy over his "broken windows" legacy, Mayor Bill de Blasio introduced his successor James O'Neill as the "architect" of a new tactic: "neighborhood policing."
The surprise announcement occurred at noon on Tuesday, on the second day of a small but feisty demonstration of Black Lives Matter activists calling for Bratton's resignation, an end to his signature policing strategy and other systemic reforms.
If the protesters thought they shook City Hall, they would have been disappointed by Bratton's hero's send-off in the Blue Room. The mayor effusively praised and embraced the exiting police chief, and the changes within the NYPD represented less an institutional earthquake than a changing of the guard.
O'Neill, who takes over as commissioner in September, served as Bratton's former chief of department, and he will keep on much of his predecessor's team. The old guard includes Bratton's deputy Ben Tucker and current housing chief Carlos Gomez, who will take over O'Neill's current position the force's first Latino chief of department.
All of these changes, the mayor insisted, had been carefully planned for weeks and had "110 percent nothing to do" with the demonstrations.
On July 8, the mayor said, Bratton confided that he intended to transition into the private sector, and he wanted to keep his career change a secret until his new employer Teneo, an advisory firm for CEOs of global corporations made an announcement.
"We had a heart to heart, a very personal discussion about life, about family," de Blasio told reporters. "You know, I like him so much. It was a conversation where you want to say, 'What about the team?' But he has served so much of this city and this nation."
As de Blasio struggled to recall what Bratton said, the police chief finished the mayor's sentence: "There's never a good time, but there's a right time." 
Affectionately resting his hand on Bratton's shoulder, the 6-foot-5 mayor likened his relationship with Bratton to a basketball team where one player can throw the other a "no-look pass."
"I wish I had words for what this man has achieved," the mayor said. "You can spend years researching and analyzing and you won't get it all."
De Blasio's wholehearted endorsement of Bratton's legacy — and open fondness for the man — has upset many of his progressive critics, who view the Boston-born police chief as a symbol of a discredited crime-fighting model.
In his first stint as New York's top cop in the early 1990s, Bratton championed a then-obscure, decade-old theory of criminology called "broken windows." The thesis lumped petty offenses like graffiti, public urination and subway fare evasion into a category of "signs of disorder" that invited more serious crimes into a neighborhood.
The first police chief to act on this theory, Bratton rolled out zero-tolerance policies for so-called "quality of life offenses." He then mapped out crime hotspots through CompStat, a statistical crime-modeling program created by his late deputy commissioner Jack Maple.
For decades, both programs became staples in the NYPD's arsenal, and crime plummeted in New York.
"We remember what the city used to be like," de Blasio said, noting that crime spiked at more than 2,000 murders the year before Bratton's appointment in 1991.
