He will be policing the police.
New York City on Friday appointed out-of-towner Philip Eure as its first inspector general for the NYPD.
Eure, whose job will be to oversee the nation’s biggest police force, says he’s up for the challenge.
“Leading the first inspector general office of the NYPD is an incredible opportunity to work with the premier police department [that] is globally recognized in one of the greatest cities in the world,” said Eure, 52, who starts May 27.
Eure, currently head of the District of Columbia Office of Police Complaints, insisted his office would not duplicate the work of the NYPD’s internal affairs unit or the Civilian Complaint Review Board as some critics have claimed.
“The NYPDIG will not be redundant,” he said. “It will, however, fill a void.”
Police Commissioner William Bratton, who met Eure earlier, said, “I’m sure we’ll have a collegial and collaborative relationship.”
Eure will be “looking into the existing policies and procedures of the department,” said Bratton. “So it’s a pretty broad-based set of responsibilities.”
Bratton said he has experience working with oversight — when he was Los Angeles’ police chief, he answered to a federal monitor.
“You don’t fight with them, you work with them, you agree to disagree, you make your best case,” he said. “It worked out quite well in Los Angeles.”
Eure got a wary welcome from Michael Palladino, head of the Detectives’ Endowment Association.
“This is definitely a new frontier for the NYPD and how we all will coexist is going to be interesting,” he said. “But at the end of the day it is about working together for the safety of our city.”
Palladino said he had not met Eure, but expected “him to reach out quickly to have some open dialogue with the unions.”
Councilman Jumaane Williams and Brad Lander, both Brooklyn Democrats who were big critics of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk tactics, were sponsors of the law that created the civilian post. They praised Eure’s appointment — and the decision to increase his staff from 30 to 50.
“These reforms will help reverse the damage done over the last 12 years and re-establish ties to communities long ignored,” they said in a statement.
Eure was the choice of Mayor de Blasio and city Department of Investigation Commissioner Mark Peters, who was tasked with finding a candidate for the post under a new law passed by the City Council last year.
Then-Mayor Bloomberg and the police unions vigorously opposed the new position, saying the NYPD already had the IAB to monitor cops. Bloomberg vetoed the bill, but the Council overrode his veto.
Eure may be a blank slate to the 35,000-strong New York Police Department, but he has headed the agency that oversees the much smaller 4,000-member Washington police department since 2001.
Before that, Eure was an assistant federal prosecutor in the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil rights division.
Eure make his mark cracking down on so-called “contempt of cop” cases — civilians illegally arrested after making disparaging comments to cops.
The police unions called Eure’s new post a waste of taxpayer money and redundant to the department’s internal affairs unit.
Eure contends that aggressive civilian oversight is crucial to eliminating abuse by police, which he says undermines their credibility in the communities they serve.
In a 2010 paper, Eure noted that police abuse of such laws “can have far-reaching consequences ranging from undermining the public’s confidence in the police to the inefficient allocation of law enforcement resources.”
