Pity The Bronx.
The borough’s longtime DA, Robert Johnson, has announced that his office is refusing to prosecute people arrested for trespassing at public-housing projects.
It’s all part of Johnson’s antipathy to the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk initiative — an undertaking that makes the city safer but bruises the sensibilities of soft-on-crime types like the DA.
Actually, it’s hard to tell whether Johnson is enforcing the trespassing law . . . because he enforces relatively few laws anyway.
As The Post reports today, his office declined to prosecute 23.4 percent of the arrests made in The Bronx last year, hamstringing the cops and letting perps slide.
By comparison, Manhattan DA Cy Vance Jr. rejected fewer than 5 percent of his cases.
So, Vance does the job he was elected to.
And when Johnson was elected 23 years ago, he inherited an office that took on fully 99 percent of its cases.
Perhaps that explains something about the crime rates in Bronx County, and why the NYPD must work so hard to combat it.
Regarding Johnson’s anemic projects-trespassing policy, it must be noted that just 5 percent of New Yorkers live in public housing — but that 18.5 percent of shootings this year occurred in those projects.
So did 10 percent of felony assaults.
And 11 percent of rapes.
Many housing projects are, sadly, hives of crime — and no one suffers from that so much as the residents themselves.
“The NYPD lawfully makes trespassing arrests in New York City public housing as a means of fighting crime and offering some semblance of safety that residents of doormen buildings in New York often take for granted,” said spokesman Paul Browne.
And such work is fraught with peril.
On July 5, Officer Brian Groves was on a pre-dawn “vertical patrol” with his partner on the stairwells in a Lower East Side housing complex, where he encountered an armed man and gave chase. Groves was then shot near the heart — his life saved by his Kevlar vest. The shooter is still at large.
Officer Groves took a bullet so a civilian wouldn’t have to. Would any bleeding heart in the Bronx DA’s office do the same?
We doubt it.
And that’s the point — Johnson’s refusal to prosecute has nothing to do with law, order or respect for borough residents.
First of all, it’s a manifestation of his unwillingness to do his job — which is to keep The Bronx safe from crime.
Then there is the matter of basic competence, more on which below.
Bottom line: Even when he does prosecute, he sends just 31 percent of felony gun convicts to prison; it’s 56 percent in the rest of the city.
Little wonder his office is a shipwreck.
For starters, there’s the mess Johnson & Co. have made of the NYPD ticket-fixing scandal.
Meanwhile, one assistant DA was caught driving drunk for the third time last year — right about the time that another ADA was botching the case of a parolee who allegedly shot at a cop. The ADA missed deadlines, forcing the judge to drop all charges.
“If you want to bring crime back to New York, this is probably a good way to do it,” said Mayor Bloomberg yesterday.
“Our police officers have to make judgments all the time,” he added.
Or, as a cop put it: “How could [Johnson] let someone arrested for the attempted murder of a cop fall through the cracks?”
Easy-peazy.
As long as a district attorney who is more accepting of crime than he is of order is in charge, The Bronx will suffer.