NEW YORK — Too many cooks in the kitchen brought the NYPD’s leadership dynamic to a boil — and may have led to Commissioner Keechant Sewell’s surprise resignation, former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said Tuesday.
“Normally everyone in the (NYPD) should be responsive first and foremost to the police commissioner who is then responsive to the mayor,” Bratton said on the Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning show on 710 WOR.
But Mayor Adams and Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Philip Banks, a former NYPD Chief of Department, have thrown that dynamic out of whack, Bratton said.
“You have first a public safety mayor who is clearly very involved in the day-to-day running of the department,” Bratton said, noting that Banks was also heavily involved in department decisions.
“It’s not very clear as to who is running the department ... You can’t have cops looking up, down and sideways trying to figure out who to report to.”
Sewell, the first woman to run the nation’s largest police force, removed herself out of the equation by resigning Monday.
Sewell received a two-minute standing ovation Tuesday morning from her chiefs and other attendees at a “Police Commissioner for a Day” award presentation at NYPD headquarters in Lower Manhattan.
Those saluting her with applause included NYPD First Deputy Commissioner Edward Caban, Chief of Department James Maddrey and Chief of Patrol John Chell.
Looking embarrassed by the attention, Sewell smiled broadly and motioned for everyone to sit so the event could continue. She didn’t speak to reporters and left the stage through a rear exit afterwards.
In an email to the department’s rank-and-file on Monday Sewell said she “will never step away from my advocacy and support for the NYPD and I will always be a champion for the people of New York City.”
Her goodbye letter to the department made no mention of the mayor.
The email was blasted to every cop’s smartphone shortly after Sewell had a meeting with Adams at City Hall. Adams in a statement thanked Sewell for 18 months serving the NYPD and the city.
“The commissioner worked nearly 24 hours a day, seven days a week for a year and a half, and we are all grateful for her service,” he said. “New Yorkers owe her a debt of gratitude.”
With so many people helping run the department, some high-ranking officials attempted to do “very public end runs around the police commissioner and being rewarded with more significant appointments,” Bratton said, noting the clash between Sewell and former NYPD Chief of Training Juanita Holmes, who went over Sewell’s head and got Adams to back her plan to eliminate the required 1½-mile run all recruits must complete in 14 minutes and 21 seconds before graduating the Police Academy.
Holmes is no longer with the NYPD but Adams named her commissioner of the city’s Probation Department.
Sewell did not give a reason for her departure or a date for when she is leaving. She’s expected to be out by July 1, according to a city government official.
Caban will be the next commissioner on an interim basis but even he doesn’t know what his future holds, a source close to him said.
“He thought Sewell did a phenomenal job as commissioner,” the source said. “Whatever happens to him, that’s in god’s hands.”
Not everyone believes Adams and Banks kept Sewell sidelined but she did not relish giving press conferences, leaving many of them to her deputies.
“She made a lot of the decisions,” one NYPD supervisor told the Daily News Tuesday. “Yes, the mayor is all over, has a lot of press conferences, but he also wants his commissioners to be out there, to promote what’s being done. Sewell didn’t like doing that. So a lot of times when she said no the answer was: ‘We’ll put Maddrey’ up or ‘We’ll put Chell up.’”
“He wasn’t keeping her under wraps,” he added.
Sewell maintained a relatively low profile in her 1½ years as commissioner, giving few sit-down interviews and often restricting press conferences to questions from reporters only about the topic at hand.
A City Hall source said Adams had supported Sewell from the beginning.
“She could have stayed on for eight years if she wanted to,” the City Hall source said, adding that Sewell “never embraced the position.”
“This was her choice,” he said of the resignation. “(Adams) never wavered on her. He gave her the resources, the tools, the money.”
Bratton believes Banks was Adams first choice for police commissioner but thinks the mayor knew the stigma of Banks being embroiled in a federal corruption probe would not have sat well with the press or the public.
Instead, Adams made him Deputy Mayor of Public Safety. Banks was Bratton’s chief of department during his second tenure as police commissioner.
“He is arguably right now the most powerful person in the NYPD,” Bratton said. “But (the media) always bring up the corruption every time he’s brought up.”
Sewell had won over rank-and-file officers, one of the first steps of becoming a good commissioner, Bratton said.
“I believe she had an opportunity to be an extraordinary leader,” Bratton said. “That was reflected by the very positive comments (the NYPD unions) gave when she resigned. They clearly thought she was concerned with the interest of the police in the department. Not too often do commissioners get glowing praise from the unions going out the door.”
A mayor having multiple police commissioners during their term is not uncommon. Mayor de Blasio had three police commissioners in his two terms as mayor: Bratton, James O’Neill and Dermot Shea. Bratton ran the department for two years while O’Neill and Shea each ran the NYPD for three years.
Although Bratton doesn’t know who will succeed Sewell, he knows one thing: it’s not going to be him.
“(My wife) Rikki would kill me,” he joked. “We don’t want to contribute to the murder rate.”
