If only Bronx politics were more like professional football.
This week the Jets finally released backup quarterback Tim Tebow, ending a one-year experiment that proved embarrassing to all. With just 77 offensive plays to his credit, Tebow wasn’t earning his $4.5 million pay.
So the Jets let him go.
What a different story we have in The Bronx. At almost the same time the Jets were getting ready to cut Tebow loose, Democratic leaders were discussing a plan to nudge Robert Johnson out of his job as Bronx district attorney.
Like the Jets, these Democrats were reacting to sorry stats. As a recent editorial on these pages underscored with a stark chart, Johnson’s felony conviction rate was just 46 percent in 2011 — trailing not only the 68 percent rate in the other boroughs but also the figure for the rest of the state.
It’s not only convictions. His prosecution record also compares unfavorably to that of his peers in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and Staten Island. Johnson fails to prosecute 23 percent of arrests — nearly three times the average for the other DAs.
To put it another way, Johnson’s stats are even worse than Tebow’s.
But the consequences for poor performance are very different for sports and politics. Unlike the NFL, New York’s political class doesn’t cut under-performing players. To the contrary, news reports say that Assemblyman Carl Heastie, leader of the Bronx Democratic Party, intends to get Johnson out of the DA’s office by getting him onto the ballot for a nice judgeship in the heavily Democratic Bronx.
And then we wonder at the quality of New York courts.
Apparently even the Jets set higher standards for performance.