The riots that roiled East Flatbush this week in the wake of the police shooting of an armed 16-year-old constitute a time of testing — and not for the NYPD.
First, they are a test for community leaders in Brooklyn, who must choose between standing with the shopkeepers whose lives and livelihoods are being threatened or with the thugs who are using Kimani Gray’s death as an excuse to shake off civilized restraints and go wild.
There’s no telling when the rage may rise again — and if local voices of reason don’t work to calm tensions, they’ll bear some responsibility if there is another eruption.
As always with riots, the economic damage is done not to the rich and powerful but to hard-working small-business people. And except for those disgusting cases when the rioters hurt the cops — the other night an officer was smashed in the head with a brick — the menace and violence end up being sprayed about in random and nihilistic ways.
The temptation is to focus on victimization-by-cop — that was the take of City Councilman Jumaane Williams, who went after Police Commissioner Ray Kelly on the matter (as Bob McManus detailed in his sobering Post column on the case yesterday).
But Kimani Gray was not your average 16-year-old boy out for fun on a Saturday night. He was stopped by police after he adjusted his waistband in a suspicious manner — and it was indeed suspicious, since he then pulled out a gun.
Responsible leadership must be able to make distinctions between incidents that raise genuine questions and ones that are pretty open and shut. We’re not even talking here about the “stop and frisk” policies that, while controversial, have nonetheless continued to make New York the safest large city in America even as the streets of Chicago run red.
Three witnesses reported that the officers said, “Don’t move,” or, “Freeze,” before shooting, as they were right to do when they came under threat from a firearm. And they aimed for the torso, as their training requires them to do (it’s called “shoot to stop”) so that the bullets don’t end up spraying about.
The gun was recovered at the scene. There’s no serious contrary report of the incident. Gray acted in a manner that triggered an officer’s concern, and the concern proved to be merited.
This was a confrontation between a gun wielder and police, not a tragic misunderstanding, as in the Amadou Diallo case in 1999. If politicians like Williams can’t draw even that simple distinction, they’re objectively providing cover for thuggery. (They’re also weakening their case against stop-and-frisk by tying it to a case in which a gun was actually involved.)
The incident is also a test for the city’s activist fringe — voices that have been been largely quiet during the Bloomberg years.
That quiet was due in part to the amazing sense of community that helped the city recover from 9/11. But the mayor also wisely bought himself some policy peace. His personal largesse (distributed through the Carnegie Corporation and other philanthropies) led to the distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars to local organizations of many stripes that had raged and screamed and threatened to tear the city asunder during the Giuliani era.
With Bloomberg’s tenure ending this year, these groups and their leaders no longer have any incentive to keep quiet. Quite the opposite, in fact. They’ll be competing for attention and resources and power, just as they did before he took over City Hall. Will they take up the cudgels of disorder and decay, as they did in the 1990s?
The final test is of the mayoral candidates. The temptation for them is either to set themselves up against the police to get attention and win liberal approbation or to be wishy-washy — because they recognize the importance of what the NYPD does in preserving public order and saving thousands of lives, but don’t want to become targets of ideological opportunity for race-baiters and race-guilters.
The mayoral primary isn’t until September. There could be many hot months until then if the voices of reason and restraint don’t carry the day.