Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images
- Bratton said Giuliani has "made a caricature of himself" due to his close ties to Trump.
- "I can't understand how he allowed himself to be subsumed by Trump," Bratton said.
- Bratton served as Giuliani's police commissioner from January 1994 to April 1996.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Former New York Police Department commissioner William "Bill" Bratton said in a recent interview that former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has "made a caricature of himself" by his close association with former President Donald Trump.
In a conversation with New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd, Bratton remarked that Giuliani, a former lawyer for Trump, has 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 police commissioner from January 1994 to April 1996 under Giuliani's mayoralty and again from January 2014 to September 2016 under current Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Throughout much of the 1990s, New York City battled high rates of violent crime.
In 1994, the first year that Bratton took over as commissioner, there were 1,561 homicides in the city, according to The Village Voice. The following year, there were 1,177 homicides in the city.
Bratton describes the fight to reign in crime as 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 noting that he was "a leading advocate of community policing," his relationship with Giuliani soured.
In March 1996, Bratton announced that he would resign from his post 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."
Giuliani, who in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential campaign traveled the country in an attempt to overturn the election results through a series of unsuccessful lawsuits, made numerous media appearances that were nothing short of bizarre to most observers.
In January, Dominion Voting Systems sued Giuliani for $1.3 billion, alleging that the former federal prosecutor pushed debunked conspiracy theories that the company produced faulty election results in favor of now-President Joe Biden.
Giuliani sought to dismiss the lawsuit in April, but Dominion responded the next month, asking the judge to bring the case to trial.
In late April, the FBI searched Giuliani's Madison Avenue apartment and Park Avenue office in Manhattan, seizing cellphones and computers as part of an investigation into Giuliani's dealings in Ukraine, according to The New York Times.