Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Speaks at Dedication Ceremony for Jack Maple Compstat Center

September 23, 2014

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Thank you, Lieutenant. This is an extraordinary honor to be here, but it’s also a true pleasure because we’re celebrating someone – someone totally, entirely unique and someone who did so much for all of us and left so much behind. It’s tragic when we lose someone too young. Jack Maple left so much that we can feel to this very day – of course, starting with his beautiful family. Brigid and Brendan and all the family gathered here today – you know what an extraordinary man he was. We all honor him so deeply because we feel it. We feel it. Everyone in this room feels what this man did for us.

And there is something interesting to me, looking around the room, at generations of people who took these ideas and brought them to life. With Commissioner Bratton, I know you did take a chance – you took a chance in so many ways and you started, in those years, a pathway that’s brought us to today. It’s something everyone in this room should be proud of. I give you credit for have the brilliance, the vision, maybe we could say the cojones to bring Jack Maple with you into a position of power – but everyone in this room participated. That spark that happened over 20 years ago built and built and built.

It’s an honor to be with you because this is a room full of people who changed history, each contributing in different ways but all adding up to an extraordinary outcome for this city – and then a story told again and again, emulated again and again, which has now become the philosophy of how to keep people safe. I’m honored to be in the presence of my old boss, Mayor Dinkins, and [inaudible], the deputy mayor, and all the folks who were around at the very initiation of our march towards a safer city and helped to put it on this path. I’m so proud of the fact that we have all the greats of law enforcement in this town gathered in one place – our U.S. attorneys, our district attorneys, the leaders of our police department. There’s a reason that everyone finds absolute unity in moment – we all understand what we owe to Jack Maple.

And his ideas are living in this room. You know, when Commissioner Bratton told me he was going to have an event and this room would be named for Jack Maple, I could see what it meant to him personally and emotionally. I could see why it was so important to do that. But I also understood implicitly that the room didn’t need to have Jack Maple’s name on it for Jack Maple’s presence to be felt. I was at CompStat a few weeks ago. The individuals asking the questions might change from year to year, the people here on the hot seat might change, but it felt as if Jack Maple was sitting there the whole time, ruefully watching. And when someone has that kind of personality, that kind of vision, that it projects forwards – forward decades and decades after they’ve stopped doing this work – but it feels like they’re still in the room, that is something particularly powerful.

You know, we, in society, often place credit in the wrong place. There are people who are famous for certain achievements and then, oftentimes, there’s the people who actually did them. Here, we have some people in this room who actually did them. And then we have Jack Maple, who was the innovator and the foundation – got some of the credit he deserved, but not all that he should’ve gotten. I was over at Brooklyn Technical High School a few months back, where my son Dante goes, where Jack Maple went. I don’t think the world understands that Brooklyn Technical High School turned out a lot of great important people. Some very famous names, some very bold-faced names, but I would argue, no alumnus ever did as much for as many people as Jack Maple did. I think there’s more of a story to tell and this room will help to tell it.

I’ll just say, the creativity, the brilliance, the energy, the relentlessness that this man brought – we don’t see many like him. There’s a reality that the message gets transmitted in one form or another about what someone was and what they did, but we don’t see many people who combined so much that even against all odds, even when told their ideas were out of place, they still somehow keep coming back and keep coming back until they break through on such a grand scale.

Take a moment – take a moment to appreciate everyone in this room, what we have all achieved – and I say that as a relative newcomer. I say that with honor to everyone who was here at the foundation of this extraordinary march – two decades plus – to become the safest big city in America. Think of the coalition that Jack Maple started. Think of how each and every one of you followed in his footsteps – each and every one of you took his game plan and ran the play – and how it added up. Sometimes we may feel like we’ve had disagreements over the years, but if you think about what we agreed upon, we all agreed in one form or another to run the plays that Jack Maple called as the coach – and it worked. Everyone in this room was on a victorious team because it worked. This is a case where the truism that history is written by the victors – sometimes that phrase is used as a negative, I want to use it as a positive – history should be written by the victors in this case, because people took the most challenging situation and pulled from it something new and something better and made it last – and everyone in this room deserves credit.

I’ll conclude with just a thought, a personal thought, because I never got to know Jack Maple personally and yet I feel such a clear appreciation, such a clear sense that he made possible so much of what we do, such a sense of obligation and respect and appreciation and a debt – I feel a debt to him, a man I never even had the honor of shaking the hands of – but I can tell you exactly how he made our lives better. So there’s a famous story, a simple story, that after Franklin Roosevelt died, his body was on a train being brought back to Washington. All over the country, wherever the train passed, people stood by the railroad tracks and watched – took their caps off, took their hats off, watched with reverence and emotion. And a journalist happened by at one railroad crossing in Georgia and saw a farmer and the farmer had a tear running down his face. And the journalist went up to the farmer and said, “I noticed you feeling so much. Did you know President Roosevelt?” And the farmer turned to the journalist and said, “I didn’t know President Roosevelt, but he knew me.” I think Jack Maple knew all of us. Jack Maple knew he had to help all of us – and he did. Thank you.

[Applause]