NEW YORK IS NOT CHICAGO, BUT IT'S CAREERING IN THAT DIRECTION

What it’s going to take to reverse New York City’s crime spike

 

By Bob McManus

 

New York Post

July 6. 2020

You say you didn’t like stop-and-frisk? Well, how do you like duck-and-cover?

Stop-and-frisk was a front-line NYPD safe-streets policy for two decades. So was broken-windows policing. As were the flying squads of anti-crime cops. They’re all gone now. Perhaps you think New York is better off without them?

If so, you’re complicit in the calamity that descended on Gotham over the holiday weekend: at least 11 people shot dead and 45 injured, including two cops whose patrol car came under fire in The Bronx. And all of this on top of the bloodiest June since 1996.

Not impressed? Maybe you should go out and help hose the gore off the sidewalks, if not today, then next weekend, or the next. This isn’t going to stop soon.

This new darkness isn’t a random, natural malevolence — unpredictable, unavoidable and thus demanding no accountability. It’s the result of a deliberate unstitching of arguably the most sophisticated and successful anti-crime strategy ever implemented in this nation.

Was it controversial? Yes. Imperfect and prone to overzealous application? Certainly. Might some other approach work just as well? Perhaps, but nobody has proposed one.

This can’t be repeated too often: Stop-and-frisk, broken-windows and anti-crime policing had a salutary effect in their own right. But as components of a textured strategy, those policies also did what toothless whining about “illegal guns” will never do: They made bringing those weapons onto the streets too risky a proposition for turnstile jumpers and petty pot dealers. Who wanted to get caught with one, when that meant mandatory hard time?

All that is history now. The de Blasio administration dismantled a winning strategy, one element at a time, and the results are clear: New York is not Chicago — 77 shot, 14 dead over the holiday — but it’s careering in that direction.

New York, city and state, has been hard at work disassociating crime and punishment for some time now — and bragging on it.

That’s what bail “reform” and “raise the age” of criminal culpability was all about. Remember when Gov. Cuomo and the Legislature’s leaders proclaimed the wisdom of those policies? Not so much now, since the shooting started.

The disassociation is also the prime motivator behind the #DefundthePolice demands so warmly embraced by city Comptroller Scott Stringer, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson and a solid majority of the council itself.

All this has sent a pernicious, two-pronged message to both cops and criminals: to the cops, stay in your patrol cars, it isn’t worth the risk to get out; to the criminals, do your damnedest, no one’s paying attention.

Cuomo says Gotham’s sanguinary weekend has left him “very concerned.” No doubt. Mayor de Blasio, his eyes deer-in-the-headlights wide as usual, promised Monday to “double down” on something, but that’s no answer. He did enough damage when he single-downed on the Giuliani-Bloomberg safety policies.

Everybody else has been fence-post dumb.

Except for de Blasio’s current police commissioner, Dermot Shea, who clearly gets it — and did from the start.

“[This] will be felt immediately in the communities that we protect,” said Shea last month when he disbanded the city’s ­anti-crime units, and was he ever right.

Monday, he had this to add: “You heard me say a storm was coming. And we’re in the middle of it right now. We can’t have a system where we have thousands of people with open gun cases out on the street with no repercussions,” the reference being to Cuomo’s bail “reform.”

“And, you know, to the elected officials, let’s start listening to the public and stop listening to advocates with agendas” — this, apparently, to the police ­defunders. “We have to do a better job of keeping people safe in this city,” concluded the commissioner.

Alas, words into the wind. For the truth is that the city needs to do a better job of keeping itself safe. That is to say, New York’s endless patience with its feckless, often downright cowardly political class has led directly from the relative safety of the post-David Dinkins era to de Blasio’s blood-spattered sidewalks.

Shea gets it, but his views have no weight. How he lives with this impotence is a curiosity. But ultimately, it’s his personal business.

His responsibility to New York, however, is something else. A principled protest resignation would send a message the political class couldn’t ignore. Extreme? Yes. Honorable, also. And, given the circumstances, necessary.