Mayor Bloomberg (Chad Rachman/New York Post)
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Mayor Bloomberg yesterday blasted Bronx DA Robert Johnson for refusing to prosecute some trespassers busted in housing projects — saying the soft-on-crime lawman is dragging the borough back to its bad old days of mayhem.
“If you want to bring crime back to New York, this is probably a good way to do it,” Hizzoner fumed in a rare attack on an elected law-enforcement official.
Johnson’s office will no longer allow cops to simply submit paperwork explaining the arrests — which often are the result of stop-and-frisks — and instead is demanding time-consuming, face-to-face meetings with his assistant district attorneys.
Bloomberg slammed the prosecutor’s rogue stance.
“I think the district attorney should really take another look at what he’s doing,” Bloomberg said at an unrelated press conference on Staten Island.
“Our police officers have to make judgments all the time. They don’t sit in an office and have the benefit of rethinking and doing things at a leisurely pace.”
Johnson defended the practice in a statement yesterday.
“All we are doing is making sure that there are no gaps in the communication of necessary information,” he said. “The officers are answering our questions, and we’re making the judgments that we were hired to make.”
But Hizzoner wasn’t having it.
“In terms of what the district attorney is doing, I think it is going in exactly the wrong direction,” he said.
“We are not going to let crime go up on our watch. I can just tell you that.”
Bronx cops, too, teed off on Johnson, saying the interviews take officers off the streets in a crime-ridden borough that needs as much manpower as possible.
“There’s a lot of drug sales, shootings, rapes that could be prevented by making these arrests,” said one Bronx housing cop.
Assistant District Attorney Jeannette Rucker told the NYPD in a July 18 letter announcing the policy that the office was flooded with complaints over tenants and guests getting arrested in city projects.
The gripes also extended to private apartment buildings where landlords requested that cops patrol.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has denied her claims — and Bloomberg had his back.
“In terms of the allegations [that] in public housing some of the cops have been stopping without having any justification, we’ve been unable to get one example, as I understand it, from any of the people that have complained,” Bloomberg said.
Some cops told The Post that the misguided measure is further proof that Johnson has become ineffective.
“It’s painfully obvious that he is so out of touch with reality that he has forgotten that he is a prosecutor,” said one Bronx cop.
“It will have an adverse affect on crime, because what may just be a trespass can lead to something more, i.e., guns and drugs.
“His policies are upside down. Johnson is more concerned with criminals’ rights than the victims.”
The fury from Bloomberg and his cops came as hundreds of protesters rallied against stop-and-frisk policies near City Hall ahead of a City Council vote on a package of bills related to the controversial police tactic.
The speakers, including rapper Talib Kweli, derided the tactic as racially biased, and called on the council to pass legislation designed to reform the practice.
“In a fair and equal world, stop-and-frisk might make sense. We don’t live in a fair and equal world,” said Kweli, who is from Brooklyn. “We live in a world that was built on the backs of slaves.”
The only 2013 mayoral hopeful in attendance was City Comptroller John Liu, a Democrat considering a run despite his campaign’s legal troubles.
He called stop-and-frisk “racial profiling.”
Additional reporting by Larry Celona, Jamie Schram and Sally Goldenberg