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Commissioner William J. Bratton said he hoped to change officers’ attitudes about their jobs and, in the process, their attitudes about those they serve.Credit Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

After years of aggressive, centralized enforcement of its most minor rules, the New York Police Department is changing the way it disciplines its officers.

Police Commissioner William J. Bratton is giving his commanders in the field far more authority in deciding how — or whether — to punish minor infractions, like misplacing a memo book or being late for court.

Mr. Bratton still comes down hard in politically combustible cases, as he did this month in placing a plainclothes officer on desk duty for mistakenly arresting the retired tennis star James Blake with the kind of aggression that many black New Yorkers, particularly young men, say they endure frequently, and with far less attention.

But on day-to-day internal disciplinary issues, Mr. Bratton is seeking to alter departmental culture: He disbanded a so-called tow-away squad that had been giving tickets to and towing department cars on official business but parked improperly. He also ordered the Internal Affairs Bureau to stop sending investigators into Traffic Court waiting to pounce on officers’ errors, an effort that grew out of a ticket-fixing scandal in the Bronx.

The changes are evident in the number of vacation days officers have been docked, a common sanction for low-level violations. Officers were docked about 10,000 days last year, down from about 20,000 in each of the previous two years, under Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, officials said.

For Mr. Bratton, who popularized the “broken windows” approach to fighting crime — attacking low-level infractions to prevent serious, violent offenses — the idea of easing up on internal rule-breaking might seem at odds with the policing philosophy that helped burnish his reputation.

Yet, his aides argue, the effort mirrors one being deployed on the streets, a departure from some of the blunt tactics of the past that represents a new incarnation of a more neighborhood-oriented style of policing.

While arrests, summonses and street stops made by officers had all been declining in recent years, they dropped markedly from 2013, Mr. Kelly’s last year as commissioner, to 2014, when Mr. Bratton took charge.

According to the Police Department, arrests dropped to 388,368 in 2014 from 394,537 in 2013; summonses fell to 359,202, from 424,850; and street stops plunged to 46,235, from 191,558.

Mr. Bratton described the shift in internal discipline as part of a broader push to change police culture. By breaking with his predecessor’s harder line on low-level misbehavior, he said, he hopes to change officers’ attitudes about their jobs and, in the process, their attitudes about the people and neighborhoods they serve.

“I’m practicing community policing on the cops,” he said in an interview about his effort to reshape how the department polices itself.

For Mr. Bratton, the new approach is a key test of his second stint as New York’s police commissioner, which began in the shadow of the stop-and-frisk practices employed during the Bloomberg administration. It comes at a time when police departments across the country are under pressure to address the anger and frustration that have fueled antipolice protests for more than a year, feelings that were stirred again by the arrest of Mr. Blake, who is biracial, by a white plainclothes officer, James Frascatore.

But treating officers differently does not guarantee that they will treat civilians differently, and shifting to a more discretionary system of discipline presents risks. Many past police corruption scandals grew out of a culture that was more tolerant of officers’ misdeeds, and some students of that history say strict supervision and consistent enforcement are essential to deterring serious graft.

“If the rule makes sense, then the rule should be there and be applied to everyone,” said Milton Mollen, a former state appellate judge who led a commission that investigated police corruption in New York in the 1990s.

Like police commissioners before him, Mr. Bratton is facing high-profile, high-stakes disciplinary matters. Before Mr. Blake’s arrest, by an officer with a history of civilian complaints, the commissioner was already weighing the actions of officers and supervisors involved in the fatal encounter with Eric Garner on Staten Island in July 2014. And this summer, 19 officers in the Bronx were accused of downgrading criminal complaints, to make crime levels in their precinct appear lower than they actually were.

History has shown Mr. Bratton to be a tough disciplinarian in serious cases. Many officers still recall his retiring of the badge numbers of officers swept up in the “Dirty 30” scandal of the early 1990s.

In the more serious cases of misconduct, the Police Department said the number of officers suspended without pay each year hovers around 200. A total of 172 were suspended last year and 117 have been suspended this year, through Friday. Those put on desk duty, or “modified,” reached 134 last year and number 98 this year.

Last year, 96 officers were arrested, mirroring an average of about 100 each year, a majority of them on drunken driving and domestic violence charges, the department said. (An arrest automatically leads to a suspension, so all of the arrested officers are among those counted as suspended.)

But the re-engineering now underway involves a different class of rule violations, the kind that Roy T. Richter, president of the Captains Endowment Association, referred to as “classic white socks” transgressions — a term from a time when officers were sanctioned for wearing socks that clashed with their dress blues.

Increasing Trust

Mr. Bratton’s effort comes as the Police Department is contending with a degree of official scrutiny rarely seen in its history. As a result of the federal court case on stop-and-frisk tactics, the department is dealing with a newly appointed court monitor, a newly created inspector general’s office and a reinvigorated Civilian Complaint Review Board.

Mr. Bratton has worked to forge close ties with those entities in hopes of obtaining the best treatment for officers. As an example, the review board, an independent oversight agency, is disciplining more officers than ever but recommending less severe charges in many cases than in the past and giving the department more opportunity to negotiate punishment. It has also cut to 79 days, from 280, the average time it takes to investigate allegations against officers and issue findings, Richard D. Emery, the board’s chairman, said.

One of Mr. Bratton’s goals is to increase the trust in commanders of officers being asked to change the way they do their jobs. Officers in pockets of the city, including Far Rockaway, Queens, are not just answering 911 calls and enforcing the law, but are also expected to connect with members of the public and use the insights they develop to better police the streets.

And as Mr. Bratton gives his commanders new powers to deploy personnel and tailor strategies, those commanders are also playing a bigger role in deciding how to handle officers who run afoul of the rules that govern how they dress, when they take meal breaks and where they park their cars.

“If you want us to buy into community policing, and you want us to buy into treating each individual on the street as an individual, not the stereotype, then you have to do the same within your own organization,” said Lou Turco, president of the Lieutenants Benevolent Association, who worked as a community-policing officer in the early 1990s during the administration of Mayor David N. Dinkins.

“That is what Bratton is trying to do,” Mr. Turco said.

Sanctions Hurt Morale

When Mr. Bratton began his second tour as commissioner in January 2014, he was succeeding Mr. Kelly, who had held the job for 12 years under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Mr. Bratton surveyed his officers and heard grievances about punishments being too heavy and meted out from a desk in Police Headquarters.

Some commanders said the rigid, distant hand of discipline sapped them of authority over their officers. The one-size-fits-all approach often broke the spirit of hardworking officers who erred, one commander who served through the recent years said.

“You would be told what the penalty was,” said the commander, who, like several officers and supervisors interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to talk to reporters. “You were neutered. Maybe you want to slap him, but now you’ve got to hit him hard.”

Low morale led to poor police services, the commander said, describing a common chain of events: “Chief got kicked; chief kicked inspector; inspector kicked captain; captain kicked lieutenant; lieutenant kicked sergeant; sergeant kicked cop; cop kicked civilian. This is what Bratton has to undo.”

Joseph J. Reznick, deputy commissioner of internal affairs, “is now running an operation that is focused, primarily, on serious offenses, both in the ability to react to identified trends as well as to proactively do stings,” Mr. Bratton said. “Internal Affairs had become ‘white socks’ focused; we’ve taken all the ‘white socks’ offenses out of there.”

Mr. Bratton said the work with the review board, and a city effort to analyze and fight lawsuits against officers, were part of addressing the dissatisfaction officers had expressed about the disciplinary processes in the department.

Still, analysts said there was a balance to be struck between keeping a paramilitary force in line and giving it the freedom to work effectively. Major corruption tends to surface in New York every two decades or so, often as the lessons of past scandals fade and minor wrongdoing begins to turn into serious malfeasance.

Memorably, the New York Police Department once made a training film, “The Erosion Factor,” which showed how, for example, condoning officers’ acceptance of free cups of coffee opened gateways to more serious corruption.

One supervisor said a zero-tolerance policy was often all that most officers understood.

Several years ago, the supervisor said, officers in patrol cars would “cut their seatbelts” or buckle them in behind them, feeling they interfered with bullet-resistant vests and gun belts. It was not until inspection teams confronted officers on the issue and stripped them of vacation days, he said, that officers began buckling up.

One detective said a recent disciplinary case against him, for a minor offense, was “too severe,” dragging on for three years and tainting his record.

“My move for grade was held up,” the detective said, referring to a potential promotion. “It put a mark on my career.”

Echoing others, the detective said the move to give commanders more discretion was encouraging. The supervisor, however, warned that it also put bosses in a tough spot.

“The commander needs to be a nice guy to his cops, because he wants them to work,” the supervisor said. “If you discipline them or write them up, they won’t do anything for you.”

A Test of Leadership

Mr. Bratton said he was checking commanders’ work and holding them accountable. “I’m decentralizing, but I’m still holding a lot of power in my hands,” he said. “If I find a commander is not behaving appropriately in his disciplinary matters, he’s going to hear from us.”

Mr. Bratton is, of course, the commissioner who ushered in CompStat, a computerized method of tracking crime. He said he was now applying the same data-driven approach to identifying troublesome trends in the ranks — and, with “broken windows” in mind, he has no intention of ignoring lesser offenses.

“I’m very conscious of corruption and corruption tendencies,” he said. “We’ll watch for that officer that is repeatedly racking up the minor violations to see ‘Is that minor violation growth now leading to more significant problems?’ ”

He said history showed that the department could not operate from a sense of fear, creating ways to keep officers out of situations considered possible corruption hazards. After the findings of the Knapp Commission in the 1970s, uniformed officers were prevented from making drug arrests that might tempt them into wrongdoing.

“Remember how crazy that was,” Mr. Bratton said. “That was to thwart the potential for corruption. But everybody thought they were corrupt because they weren’t doing anything about the drug deals going on right in front of them.”

As officers try to build close ties to residents, merchants and others in neighborhoods, that free cup of coffee — and the risks that it carries — looms. After all, the fear of pervasive graft worked against the immersion of officers in neighborhoods decades ago.

Ultimately, Mr. Bratton’s policing strategies must be rooted in trust.

It is a “major leadership question,” said Walter Mack, a former federal prosecutor who has worked to root out police corruption.

“Cops are smart, they respond to good training, they respond to good leadership,” he said. “Discipline is part of the enforcement mechanism, of seeing that your cops are functioning. You’ve got to make a decision: ‘What is most important?’ And make clear that there are certain things you’re just not going to tolerate.”