Metro

Safety first, ask questions later

During a lunch with Mayor Bloomberg early in his first term, the conversation turned to police officers facing life-or-death decisions. When I offered that veteran cops like to say they’d rather be judged by 12 of their peers than carried by six of their friends, the mayor looked up from his lettuce wedge with surprise.

“I’ve never heard that,” he said.

Now I was surprised. How, I thought, could a mayor of New York not have a better understanding of the way cops think about the use of deadly force?

Fortunately, the mayor gets it now, as he has proven time and again, most recently after the Times Square shooting. For two days running, he defended the officers who fired 12 shots Saturday and killed a knife-wielding ex-con amidst throngs of tourists.

Pressed by a reporter about why the police didn’t use a Taser gun on Darrius Kennedy during a seven-block chase down Seventh Avenue, the mayor repeated that the officers “didn’t have much choice.”

“They tried to disarm the guy. He lunged at them with a knife,” Bloomberg said.

“The cops shot to protect their lives and stop the guy from running off and killing other people.”

Noting that they used pepper spray, with little effect, he declined to “second guess everything,” saying the department should be given time to investigate. Until then, the officers deserve the benefit of the doubt.

That is the right stance for a mayor, and by stressing it, Bloomberg is putting on a clinic for his would-be successors. With Kennedy’s family denouncing the shooting, and the usual suspects likely to pile on, it is incumbent on the city’s leader to stand firmly with the police unless and until evidence warrants otherwise.

Police training aims to avoid deadly force, but officers who have no other way to protect themselves or others clearly are right to fire. And when they fire, they are taught to aim for body mass until the threat is neutralized, not try to shoot an arm or a leg. There isn’t time for a Hollywood stunt, which is why the decision properly is called one of life or death.

It is all so basic, and yet the ritual of police shootings rarely varies. After each one, the liberal catechism demands that the cops be denounced as trigger-happy, and reporters from certain news organizations start hectoring under the assumption that a death could have been avoided if only the police were, you know, more sensitive.

Of course, sympathy for the dead and wounded only flows in one direction. Ten city cops have been shot this year, but that carnage has produced mostly a demand for less policing, not more. The vague suggestion is that the cops are responsible for their own injuries, and that criminals with illegal guns wouldn’t use them so much if only the police would leave them alone.

Hence those loaded questions to the mayor. The hoped-for result is that he will put some daylight between himself and the cops. Hanging them out to dry, even with a stray suggestion of doubt or an omission of strong support, would cue a feeding frenzy on the police.

Bloomberg walked into that trap earlier in his tenure, but has become a rock-solid defender of the department. And he continues to remain so, even as the attacks on the NYPD grow more irrational and threaten his legacy among liberals.

Good for him, and good for New York. Given what the 80 percent drop in crime over the last 18 years has meant to the city’s economy and quality of life, it is remarkable that the blame-the-cops-first culture endures. But as long as it does, it remains the duty of any mayor to stand up for the men and women in blue.

GOP can thank Joe’s slip service

That didn’t take long. After only four days, Paul Ryan already is proving himself more fit to be vice president than the incumbent.

Joe Biden was dangerously overheating for much of the summer, and recently disappeared for a week. He also took a week off for his daughter’s wedding.

But he’s baaaccck, and shows signs of being close to the edge again.

At a rally in Virginia, the smears and gibberish were boiling over.

“Look at their budget, and what they are proposing,” Biden said of the GOP ticket.

“Romney wants to let the — he said in the first hundred days he is going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street,” he said as he lowered his hand, as if giving a benediction.

Then the kicker: “They going to put y’all back in chains.”

Biden didn’t appear to be joking as he lapsed into a down-home accent for the “back in chains” line. Some in the audience laughed, some booed, most didn’t know what to do. Can’t blame ’em.

Wait, there was more. He ended his speech to the Virginia audience with a rousing boast that “we can win North Carolina.” Hmmm.

Figuring Biden out gets harder as he seems less and less stable. The idea that he is a heartbeat away from the nuclear button is no laughing matter.

Ryan, meanwhile, has given the GOP ticket a jolt of energy. His life story, of how he found his father dead at 16, went to work at McDonald’s and became class president, has an up-by-the-bootstraps ring that explains his earnest, humble manner.

Most important, the campaign is taking a turn to the future with Ryan as a young, plain-speaking agent for needed fixes to entitlement programs. Even Romney seems to have a new zest.

They’ll need it. With the Obama campaign endorsing Biden’s rancid remarks, the incumbents are responding to the challenge with lies, fear-mongering and race-baiting. And it’s only August.

Booker’s stiff upper flip

Corey Booker is recanting his recantation. The “hostage video,” he now admits, was a “dumb decision.” Bravo.

Newark’s Democratic mayor was a prominent Obama surrogate until a May television bit where he called his party’s attacks on Bain Capital “nauseating.”

Scolded by campaign enforcers, he did a spooky-looking YouTube video to walk back the criticism. His confession, to The Wall Street Journal, that he was wrong to surrender restores some faith in his judgment, especially because he now says he has no regrets about his initial criticism. “I spoke from the heart,” he tells the Journal.

As he always should. But next time, he could save himself a lot of trouble by starting with candor and never wavering.

Be Syrious: Fall is no O triumph

The claim from a Syrian defector that the Assad regime is about to fall can mean only one thing: The White House is getting ready with a statement taking credit. Yep, leading from behind scores again, give or take 20,000 deaths.

Right jab at Mitt

Best line of the day comes from George Will: “For Romney, conservatism is a second language.”