Former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton says he 'can't understand' how Rudy Giuliani became 'subsumed by Trump'
- Bill Bratton said Rudy Giuliani had "made a caricature of himself" with his close ties to Trump.
- "I can't understand how he allowed himself to be subsumed by Trump," Bratton told The New York Times.
- Bratton served as Giuliani's police commissioner in New York City from January 1994 to April 1996.
Former New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said former Mayor Rudy Giuliani had "made a caricature of himself" with his close association with former President Donald Trump.
In a recent conversation with the New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd, Bratton said Giuliani, a former lawyer for Trump, had diminished his legacy with his public appearances over the past few years.
"As somebody who's got a big ego, speaking about another guy with a big ego, I can't understand how he allowed himself to be subsumed by Trump," Bratton said. "He's made a caricature of himself and he's lost the image of America's mayor because of the antics of the last two or three years."
Bratton served as the police commissioner from January 1994 to April 1996 under Giuliani and from January 2014 to September 2016 under Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Throughout much of the 1990s, New York City battled high rates of violent crime.
In 1994, the year Bratton took over as commissioner, there were 1,561 murders in the city, according to The Village Voice. The following year, there were 1,177 murders.
Bratton told The Times he had been trying to "take back a city that was out of control."
After Bratton was featured on the cover of Time magazine in January 1996, with the periodical describing him as "a leading advocate of community policing," his relationship with Giuliani soured, The Times said.
In March 1996, Bratton announced he would resign the next month.
Bratton also told The Times that Giuliani "had such awful relations with the Black community and the Black leadership, it really prevented police commissioners, myself included, from developing relationships that we would love to have made with the Black community."
After the 2020 presidential election, Giuliani tried to overturn the result through a series of unsuccessful lawsuits and made media appearances that were nothing short of bizarre.
In January, Dominion Voting Systems sued Giuliani, seeking $1.3 billion and alleging that he pushed debunked conspiracy theories that the company had produced faulty results in favor of Joe Biden.
Giuliani sought to dismiss the lawsuit in April, but Dominion asked the judge in May to bring the case to trial.
In late April, the FBI searched Giuliani's apartment on Madison Avenue and his office on Park Avenue in Manhattan, seizing cellphones and computers as part of an investigation into his dealings in Ukraine, The Times reported.