And so the circle closes.
It was 20 years ago Friday that then-Mayor David Dinkins — with a healthy shove from then-City Council Speaker Peter Vallone Sr. and a terrified citizenry — welcomed 3,000 new officers into the NYPD.
The new cops were the first hired under the so-called “Safe Streets, Safe City” program — itself a proclamation that New York City was mad as hell about violent crime, and just wasn’t going to take it any more.
Indeed, Safe Streets was as much a political statement as it was an anti-crime program; the fears that inspired it carried over to the election of Rudy Guiliani as mayor three months later — and subsequently to policies and practices that have, over the succeeding two decades, virtually banished violent crime from a once-bloodstained city.
At some cost in treasure, of course — though it was money well spent. The city dedicated specific tax revenues to boost NYPD head-count from 30,000 or so officers in 1992 to 41,000 at the program’s peak in 2001.
There has been slippage since then, with NYPD headcount down to about 35,000 today.
But now comes the real exodus.
More than 80 percent of New York cops retire after 20 years on the job, so the city needs to brace itself for the rapid loss of thousands of experienced, street-smart Safe Streets patrol officers and supervisors. It’s doubtful they’ll be replaced — and if they are, it’ll be by bright-eyed rookies, earnest and eager, no doubt, but rookies nevertheless.
And therein resides a not-so-obvious, but ominous, truth.
Rookies can be trained to high standards — the Safe Streets newcomers were. But that requires leadership of a most singular sort. Coherent, we’ve-got-your-back command leadership.
And, critically, courageous political leadership.
In that respect, the wolf truly is at the door.
The memories of what New York was like during the Age of Dinkins have faded, and with them the Safe Streets consensus. Now the political winds are blowing strongly against aggressive anti-violent-crime policing.
To wit:
* Of the major Democrats now seeking their party’s mayoral nomination, not one is running on an unambiguous, support-your-beat-cop p* atform; quite the opposite, in fact.
And each supports policies that will, intentionally or otherwise, hobble effective law enforcement.
* The federal courts and the City Council are conspiring to fragment command leadership — the court having placed the department into management receivership, and the council imposing its own inspector general while easing the way for “racial profiling” lawsuits against individual cops and commanders.
Small wonder, then, that Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch last week counseled his members now to go strictly by the book in situations with racial implications.
“All officers should be careful not to initiate any law-enforcement action that could be construed as violating the new [race-profiling] legislation and subject the officer to legal action,” Lynch advised in a memo posted on union bulletin boards in precincts all across the city.
Lynch, to be sure, is a master at ginning up controversy to suit his own purposes. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that the PBA, like all municipal unions, has been without a contract for years.
Still, this time it’s necessary to take seriously what Lynch says. He’s the canary in the mineshaft, and he’ll be ignored at the city’s peril.
For two things are going on here:
l One is obvious. No cop wants to be the target of a lawsuit; most will indeed sit on their hands in such situations — and without any PBA encouragement whatsoever.
* The other is more subtle. The irreducible element in the Guiliani/Mike Bloomberg policing strategy has been the so-called COMSTAT program — in brief, a clear accountability chain from the police commissioner down to the beat cop and back up again. The strategy not only put officers back on the beat in the areas where cops were most needed, it pushed those officers to act — not to sit back.
What Lynch is really saying is that the outside overseers and the mayoral candidates’ fecklessness concerning cops will combine to destroy that chain.
And that there is no way he’s going to let any of his members take the fall after the new mayor’s first Chicago-style, multiple-fatality, outer-borough, gang-driven, hand-gun homicide spree. Plus those that will follow.
Who’s to blame him?
It’s not really true that history repeats itself, though it sometimes may seem so. But important lessons can easily be forgotten, often with frightful consequences.
So. Ready for Dinkins Days Redux?
Didn’t think so.