Gearing up: A look at the OPD consultant panel

In part two of a four-part series that will be published over the course of two weeks on Oakland North, meet the six new police consultants who have just been hired by Oakland to help reduce crime citywide. Each member of the panel has a different task and will be evaluating Oakland for a period of six months and before the panel makes its recommendations to the city.

Robert Wasserman

Robert Wasserman is a national law enforcement and security expert and the head of Strategic Policy Partnership, LLC, the Massachusetts-based company in charge of the consultant group that will be working with the Oakland Police Department. Wasserman served as a senior executive of several large city police departments, including those in Houston and Boston. In addition to traditional police departments, he has also overseen public safety at the Massachusetts Port Authority and Boston’s Logan International Airport.

Wasserman is a former chief of staff of the Office of White House National Drug Control Policy. He has also served as a consultant to the Department of Homeland Security. In his role at the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, he was responsible for developing and implementing international law enforcement academies in Bangkok and Roswell, New Mexico. He was sent to Bosnia to help restructure that country’s law enforcement.

In his work at Strategic Policy Partnership, he has aided in developing policing strategy, performance improvement and technology usage for departments in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, among others.

Wasserman holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Antioch College in Ohio and a master’s degree in police administration from Michigan State University.

Robert Stewart

Robert “Bob” Stewart is a senior advisor for Strategic Policy Partnership, LLC and is the CEO of his own law enforcement consulting group, Bobcat Training and Consulting, based in Florida. Stewart gained practice experience in law enforcement after serving as chief for the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department and the Ormond Beach, Florida department. He’s trained officers of the police department in Louisville and also served as the interim public safety director at Rutgers-Newark University. His law enforcement advising experience extends to overseeing policing efficiency studies for the departments in San Francisco, Memphis and Albany, NY, as well as serving on the monitoring team overseeing a consent decree for the U.S. Virgin Islands Police Department.

William Bratton

William “Bill” Bratton made a name for himself at major police departments across the country, most notably in New York and Los Angeles, where he served as top cop. He got his start in the Boston Police Department in 1970 and climbed the ranks to become superintendent of police—the department’s highest sworn rank—in 1980. Later in that decade, he took the reins at agencies like the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and the Massachusetts Metropolitan District Commission Police.

In 1990, Bratton accepted the chief position at the New York Transit Police Department. Two years later, he returned to his hometown to become the police commissioner of the Boston Police Department. In 1994, he moved to New York to take the commissioner job at the NYPD, where he gained a reputation for reducing crime. Two years later, he opened a private consulting firm called The Bratton Group, LLC, which offers safety and security advising both domestically and internationally. He continues to head this company.

He moved to Los Angeles in 2002 to take charge of the Los Angeles Police Department, where he served until 2009. In addition to his work with The Bratton Group, LLC, Bratton also serves as a senior advisor for Kroll Advisory Solutions, a security and intelligence company. He holds a bachelor’s degree in law enforcement from Boston State College/University of Massachusetts.

Patrick Harnett

Patrick Harnett has been in the police consultant business for nearly a decade. Harnett began his career with the New York Police Department in 1968 as a police officer, spent 32 years with department and retired as a three-star chief of the NYPD’s Transportation Bureau. He served in both the NYPD’s narcotics and SWAT divisions, and he also established the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline. Harnett has worked to establish and retool CompStat procedures—a tracking system that lets police allocate resources based on crime data—in cities such as Buffalo, Schenectady, Binghamton, and Niagara Falls. He has also led performance assessment teams for the Oakland Police Department and the Trenton, NJ Police Department and has performed police consulting projects in Caracas, Venezuela and Fortaleza, Brazil.

Harnett holds a Bachelor of Arts in history from Iona College and a Master of Arts in criminal justice form the State University of New York. He is a graduate of the Police Management Institute of Columbia University.

William Andrews

From 1994-1996, William Andrews served as the special assistant to William Bratton when he was serving as New York City’s police commissioner. Currently he works as a police and security consultant with the Bratton Group.

Prior to joining the NYPD, Andrews served with the New York City Transit Police. Since 1997, he has been a police management consultant and has worked with police departments in Los Angeles, Birmingham, AL and Stamford and Hartford, CT, among many others.

Edmund Hartnett

Edmund Hartnett served as the commissioner of the Yonkers Police Department from 2006 to 2012. Under his watch, Yonkers was listed as the second safest city in the U.S. in the 2009 Uniform Crime Report, a statistical compilation which is produced annually by the FBI.

Prior to serving as commissioner, Hartnett spent 27 years with the NYPD where he served in the intelligence division and on the Drug Enforcement Task Force. Hartnett holds a Bachelor degree in political science from Fordham University and a masters degree in public administration from Marist College.

Photos courtesy of Robert Wasserman, Colleen Scully and Robert Stewart.
Sources: City of Oakland report, Strategic Policy Partnership website, LAPD website, University of Massachusetts, Boston alumni website, Bobcat Training and Consulting website, Homeland Security Management Institute Board of Directors at Long Island University-Riverhead.