A 16-year-old aspiring sociopath pulls a gun, aims it at cops and is shot to death in response.
Actions have consequences.
Then his friends, to mark his passing, go on to trash the neighborhood — looting a pharmacy and beating at least two innocent people in the process.
You’d almost think it was Chicago. But no, it was East Flatbush, Brooklyn. And who was to blame for all the mayhem? Why, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, of course. Silly even to ask.
At least that’s Brooklyn City Councilman Jumaane Wlliams’ take, as expressed during a budget hearing Tuesday at City Hall.
Williams very precisely drilled into Kelly, taking great care to avoid specific accusations, but also leaving no doubt that he holds the commissioner fundamentally responsible for everything. Not the kid with the gun, not the culture that led to the initial confrontation and certainly not the punks who ran riot in its aftermath.
And, no doubt, Williams will explain in great detail today just how it was that Kelly & Co. instigated last night’s rolling anti-cop temper-tantrum along Brooklyn’s Church Avenue. It should be a tiresome tale.
Certainly he was in full throat Tuesday: “”t was more than just one incident” he barked at Kelly — which, from the councilman’s point of view, no doubt seems true.
From the perspective of the two cops suddenly staring down the barrel of a .38-caliber revolver, however, it very much was one incident — with life-and-death implications. And that’s how it turned out: two cops alive; one youthful, but lethally armed, criminal dead.
Better that nobody had died, of course. Even better if 16-year-old Kimani Gray — an apparent gang member with a hefty criminal record — had left his gun at home Saturday night. Or, at the very least, that he’d tossed it in a gutter instead of pointing it at police officers.
Certainly this adds up to a profound personal tragedy — for the kid, obviously; for his family, and certainly for the cops, who must live with the outcome for the rest of their lives.
But as a matter of public policy, the shooting was a textbook vindication of the Bloomberg administration’s aggressive stop-and-frisk anti-illegal-gun practices.
The tactic is every liberal’s bugbear these days — Jumaane Williams most of all. It’s premised on the perfectly reasonable assumption that experienced street cops develop a sixth sense about who’s carrying and who isn’t. Arrest enough of the former, and soon you’ll have a lot more of the latter.
It’s not flawless, by any means. The majority of those stopped turn out to be clean as a whistle.
But then there are the Kimani Grays of the world, who can be lethal beyond imagination — and they trump.
Indeed, the reality of contemporary urban crime speaks to the program’s efficacy — as even a casual glance at the bloody, stop-and-friskless cities of Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Detroit will illustrate.
As Kelly put it last fall: “If we had Chicago’s murder rate, [New York’s homicide] total would be 1,224. If we had Philadelphia’s, 1,483; at Baltimore’s rate, 2,338 — and at Detroit’s, 3,635.”
In the event, New York finished the year with 419.
That’s not good enough for Williams, who’s been chewing on Kelly’s leg over stop-and-frisk for years.
Sad to say, he’s not alone. All of the Democratic mayoral candidates — while walking various rhetorical tightropes — have made it clear that when Mike Bloomberg exits, stop-and-frisk as an effective anti-gun policy won’t linger either.
Clearly, Kimani Gray was oblivious, but thousands of others understand — many from bitter experience — that going out with a gun can bring down upon them a world of hurt. So far fewer of them do it here than elsewhere. Thanks, essentially, to stop-and-frisk.
This won’t last if policy changes effected by a new mayor, or edicts imposed by the federal courts, make packing a gun as intrinsically risk-free here as it is in Chicago and Detroit.
Those are the stakes — Jumaane Williams’ contrary views notwithstanding.