Bratton sounds off on left-wing criminal justice reforms: 'We're going in many wrong directions'

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Bill Bratton calls out liberal cities' prosecutors for 'defending criminals'

Former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton says that liberal criminal justice reforms are 'going too far, too fast'

Former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton joined "America's Newsroom" Tuesday, with crime spiking across major cities in the US. Bill Hemmer pressed him and asked how hard will it be to reverse the crime wave throughout the country. 

FORMER NYC POLICE COMMISSIONER WARNS WE ARE GOING BACK TO THE 'BAD OLD DAYS'

BRATTON: It's going to be extraordinarily difficult this time back in '94, '95. We had a lot going for us. The public was fed up. We had many lot more allies to work with. We had one hundred thousand additional police that were given to us by the 94 crime bill. We had many reforms that were intended to deal with the criminals. Sounds now like most of the prosecutors in this country, in our major cities are more focused on effectively defending the criminals than defending the public and the victims. And that's part of the problem that we are in the midst of this reform movement that is going too far, too fast. And at the same time, we're losing thousands of police officers. We had 800,000 cops in the mid 1990s to deal with what was then a much worse crime problem. This accelerating crime problem is now being dealt with by about 670,000 cops, and we're losing them by the thousands. So we're going in the wrong direction. We're going in many wrong directions at the moment.

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