Murder took a break last week — New York enjoyed a 10-day stretch without a single homicide, a span that ended Saturday with a shooting in Queens at 6:03 p.m.
Many chalked it up to the frigid temperatures that descended on the city. But it was even icier in the Midwest. And yet that didn’t stop Chicago from seeing 12 people murdered with guns over the same 10-day stretch, including six men on Saturday night alone.
So far this January, Chicago has suffered 41 murders to New York’s 21, even though the Second City has less than a third of New York’s population.
Clearly, it’s not Old Man Winter who’s deterring killings in New York. It’s Ray Kelly and the policies he has pursued as police commissioner.
Fact is, 10 murder-free days on Kelly’s watch is stunning but not a total aberration: Homicides dropped to a record low in New York last year — 418, the fewest since the city began recording the data in 1963.
That good news comes thanks to great work by the nation’s finest police force, but again, this success is not just a matter of more feet on the ground. Chicago has just about as many cops per resident as New York, yet that hasn’t done anything to reduce that city’s alarming murder rate.
Which suggests that the NYPD’s style of policing has something to teach other cities about fighting crime. It begins with political will. From the start, Mayor Bloomberg has given Kelly the backing he needs for his aggressive program of clearing guns from New York’s streets.
In Chicago, by contrast, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has focused his fire on gunmakers instead of criminals. Last Friday he wrote to two major banks urging them to stop lending money to firearms manufacturers.
The grandstanding didn’t do anything, of course, to stop crime. The same day, a man was shot to death in Chicago. The day after, six more.
The point is that the best police cannot function without strong political backing for the often unpopular policies that save lives — including the much-criticized practice of stop-question-frisk used to great effect by the NYPD. For effective policing is always under assault: Just look at what federal Judge Shira Scheindlin is doing to render stop-and-frisk illegal.
That is pure folly. New Yorkers should celebrate the fruits of Kelly’s labors: not just 10 days of relative peace in a bustling city, but untold lives saved all year round.
And pity poor Chicago, which cannot.