This week the news broke that Bill Bratton and his wife Rikki Klieman have taped a testimonial for the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay rights organization working for marriage equality. He has done it, he says, because equality is the best preventative for anti-gay crime.
This is the best side of Bratton and makes perfect sense as a move for him.
When he first came to LA he talked with me about his dream that the LAPD could become a positive force in Los Angeles race relations, where it had once been a negative one. He sees those connections across sociological lines and his thinking on such issues is, I’ve found, unusually clear headed.
Al Baker, who is blogging for the NY Times, has the story. Here’s a clip:
The headlines come with depressing regularity: two men attacked in the bathroom of the Stonewall Inn; a group of men set upon by those hurling homosexual slurs in Chelsea; a wicked antigay attack in an abandoned apartment in the Bronx. And just days ago, the beating of a young gay man outside a McDonald’s in the West Village.
In the city’s schools, students suffered nearly 900 cases of harassment based on sexual orientation in the 2008-09 school year, according to the city Education Department.
To William J. Bratton — a former law enforcement leader in three of the country’s largest cities: New York, Los Angeles and Boston — the roots of the spasms of violence against gay and lesbian New Yorkers lie in the lack of equality that gays and lesbians endure in society and under the law.
With that in mind, Mr. Bratton, a New York City resident once again, has taped a 30-second video in favor of legalizing gay marriage in New York. Only unlike other advocates, whose chorus he is joining — including politicians like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and celebrities like Julianne Moore — Mr. Bratton is making his appeal for change from the decidedly square-jawed perspective of public safety.
Baker talked to Bratton and characterized him as very passionate on the topic:
He invoked history, saying that tensions around any number of issues — including the introduction of women in policing — were eased when legal rights were extended to those being discriminated against. Reforms remove the aura that enables prejudice, he said, and the result is “a safer community” for gays and lesbians and for the wider society as a whole.
“I was speaking from the perspective of my police experiences, that once you pass these laws, a lot of the bias or the hatred or the violence that is associated dissipates,” said Mr. Bratton, in expanding on the meaning of his video testimonial.
Go, Bill & Rikki.