Mr. de Blasio, the public advocate, raced back to a chaotic scene, where he found agitated officers, irate paradegoers and perplexed local officials. At a nearby synagogue where the two men were being held, Mr. de Blasio, his concern evident, spoke to a police commander.
“I remember he, in particular, had a lot more fervor over what had happened and making sure that everybody understands that this is problematic,” Jumaane D. Williams, the councilman who was detained, said of the episode, which turned into a damning spectacle for the Police Department and led to disciplinary action against three police officers.
Next week, Mr. de Blasio, now the mayor-elect, is expected to choose a successor to Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, and William J. Bratton, who held the post in the mid-1990s, appears to be the leading candidate for what is arguably the most important appointment any mayor makes.
It is all the more so for Mr. de Blasio, whose forceful criticism of police tactics became a centerpiece of his mayoral campaign this year. He must now ready himself to oversee a department that has chafed at his faultfinding but that he will want, and perhaps need, at his side.
The very public encounter in Brooklyn two years ago left a lasting impression on Mr. de Blasio, he said in an interview last week. While he cautioned against reading too much into any single event, he agreed the parade was an indelible moment.
“When it’s someone in your own life,” he said, “it’s different than the stories you hear.”
Whomever Mr. de Blasio chooses as commissioner, the appointment will begin to answer questions about the role he sees for the 34,000-member Police Department, particularly as he moves to change the stop-and-frisk tactics Mr. Kelly has so vigorously defended and Mr. de Blasio has so assiduously denounced.
Until relatively recently, Mr. de Blasio did not devote considerable attention to the Police Department’s most contentious undertakings — including the expansion of the police intelligence apparatus and the explosion of stop-and-frisk policing.
Civil rights lawyers have been criticizing stop-and-frisk tactics for more than a decade, and the practice has received extensive media attention over the years. But before early 2012, Mr. de Blasio had left few traces of his thinking on the matter in his public statements. His pointed criticisms of the tactic since then have helped give Mr. de Blasio, who is white, near universal support among black voters.
An examination of his political career shows that while he was periodically involved in law enforcement policy, he was more likely to deal with the Police Department on neighborhood concerns that came up in the affluent Brooklyn district he represented for two terms on the City Council.
He worked hard, by many accounts, to build productive relationships with local police commanders, keeping in contact with them and appearing at awards ceremonies at local precincts.
“If he heard an issue about crimes in the neighborhood from a constituent, he would call me up,” said Thomas J. Harris, who commanded precincts around Prospect Park in the 2000s before retiring in 2010.
As mayor, Mr. de Blasio will have a far more complicated and consequential relationship with the Police Department.
He will also have to stand before the news cameras, with his police commissioner at his side, if there is a natural disaster or attempted terrorist attack, and reassure the city — and the world.
If the crime rate climbs or if or a particular murder stirs up memories of decades past, Mr. de Blasio will be expected to answer for his Police Department. He “obviously is going to have to make good on his promise of reform,” said Michael P. Jacobson, the director of the City University of New York Institute for State and Local Governance and a former city correction commissioner. “But that doesn’t lessen any of the general pressure to keep crime down.”
More than one mayor has seen his political fortune, and sometimes his legacy, turn on the performance of the Police Department. Rudolph W. Giuliani prevailed over incumbent David N. Dinkins in the 1993 mayoral race in what was widely viewed as a reaction to the Crown Heights riots. Mr. Giuliani won praise for historic reductions in crime during his mayoralty, but he is also remembered for New Yorkers’ deepening distrust of the police.
Mr. de Blasio will take office on Jan. 1 with a record that may offer comfort but could also cause concern for the police, according to interviews and a review of his public positions.
Mr. Bratton would bring a reputation for credibility and success, but also a name for employing aggressive police tactics, in New York and in Los Angeles, that might be at odds with the criticisms Mr. de Blasio has voiced.
The mayor-elect said last week that besides Mr. Bratton, he has also met with two high-ranking Police Department officials, First Deputy Commissioner Rafael Pineiro and Chief of Department Philip Banks III.
Patrick J. Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, expressed concern at Mr. de Blasio’s plan to drop the city’s appeal of a federal-court’s decision that found racial profiling in many police stops and ordered a federal monitor to oversee changes.
Mr. Lynch’s union, which represents about 23,600 officers, is seeking to continue the appeal in the case, and is challenging a new law on police profiling that is supported by Mr. de Blasio.
“It’s going to make it difficult to do our job,” Mr. Lynch said, referring to the new law and the federal monitor.
Michael J. Palladino, the president of the detectives’ union, was more blunt about how his members felt. “There’s a diminished, demoralized police force to deal with,” he said.
Asked about his views on policing, Mr. de Blasio suggested that he would not deviate far from what he called an “extraordinary two decades of progress.”
He offered a ringing endorsement of the preventive, rather than reactive, approach that has been a hallmark of the Bloomberg administration. “That is one of the underlying principles of the success we’ve had,” he said, “and we have to deepen that.”
But Mr. de Blasio also noted that he has felt strongly, ever since he was a junior aide in the Dinkins administration, that “substantial reform was needed in the relationship between police and community.”
As far back as his 2001 City Council campaign, Mr. de Blasio urged strengthening the Civilian Complaint Review Board. Thanks in part to his advocacy, the board was given greater powers last year to prosecute police officers in misconduct cases.
Although he has been critical, as many Democrats have been, of the department’s surveillance of Muslims, Mr. de Blasio has generally supported the Police Department’s counterterrorism efforts. And though last week he promised a review, he did not sound like a man bent on change.
“We’d keep the same alignment, the same force levels, the same approach in place,” he said.
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