John Podhoretz

John Podhoretz

Opinion

The numbers add up to one fact: Cops are a blessing to NYC

As the year ends in a divided city whose mayor thought he could lean toward anti-police protesters without offending the Police Department that works for him, it’s long past time for a little perspective. So here it is.

The NYPD has 34,500 officers. The city’s population is 8.4 million — and during the work week, commuters push it to 9.1 million. Now add in a weekly average of 1 million tourists.

All in all, those 34,500 cops are charged with maintaining order and safety for more than 10 million civilians every day.

According to one estimate I’ve seen, the NYPD has approximately 25 million interactions with civilians over the course of a year. The city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board received about 5,500 complaints about excessive force. That would constitute two-tenths of 1 percent of all interactions with police.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the number of complaints is far too low, owing to the difficulty of filing one. So let’s double it. That would mean that four-tenths of 1 percent of all civilian interactions with the NYPD might feature excessive or unjust action.

In 2013, in the course of those 25 million interactions, police officers discharged their guns a total of 81 times.

Let me repeat that: Out of 25 million interactions with civilians, cops found it necessary to pull their weapons and use them on 81 occasions — or one out of every 330,000 interactions. The odds that you’ll be struck by lightning in the course of your life are 1 in 3,000.

In all of 2014, three people — three — died during some form of confrontation with NYPD officers.

Eric Garner was one. The second was Ronald Singleton, who also perished after being forcibly restrained after attacking officers, while dangerously high on PCP. Akai Gurley, who was shot and killed in a dark stairwell by a probationary officer, was the third.

Overall, there were 318,000 arrests in New York City in 2013.

So if we assume the data for 2014 are pretty consistent with last year’s, that means two fatal incidents (Gurley’s death was entirely incidental, a dreadful series of events gone horribly wrong) occurred in the course of those 318,000 confrontational moments with New York’s police officers. That’s two out of 318,000.

No one argues with these data points.

And what they show, all emotion aside, is that the idea Eric Garner’s death was a representative event is simply false.

Now let’s talk about why the city is as crowded as it is.

In 1991, New York had a population of 7.3 million, about 16 percent less than today. The rise isn’t from natural population growth. Chicago’s population is almost exactly the same as in 1991, while Los Angeles’ is only 9 percent larger.

The fact that 1.1 million more people live here now than at the height of the three-decade crime wave isn’t due to natural growth. Nor is the fact that the number of tourists has nearly doubled, from 1991’s 29 million to this year’s 54 million.

These remarkable numbers are entirely due to the extraordinary turnaround in the city’s quality of life, as measured by an overall crime drop nearing 80 percent — the vast majority of which occurred not in the places tourists travel but in the neighborhood where the city’s least affluent and most threatened live.

New York City has repopulated, has revivified, has survived and thrived. The people whose daily work has made all this possible are the 34,500 officers of the NYPD.

They are nothing less than a blessing to us all.

All. Of. Us.

And as for Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, slaughtered for no reason other than that they sought to confer the blessings of life and liberty on the rest of us New Yorkers, let me offer the Hebrew words sometimes spoken after the passing of the righteous.

Zekhutam yagen ’aleinu: May their merit shield us.