The NYPD’s recent Twitter embarrassment is a troubling sign that the new command team didn’t realize that the war on New York’s cops is far from over.
The NYPD invited citizens to post pictures of themselves posing with police officers on its official Twitter account. Instead of valentines from the public, it got brickbats — a deluge of photos of police struggling with citizens and swinging clubs.
One NYU professor of media declared that the mistake “shows either a profound misunderstanding of how social media works or a profound misunderstanding about popular perception of the NYPD, or probably both.” People around the country are having a good laugh at the NYPD’s expense. But this is no laughing matter.
To those of us who keep a close eye on police affairs, the fiasco was no surprise. The well-organized and effective campaign against the NYPD has been going on for years. It’s even managed to turn the department’s successes into liabilities.
For example, critics claimed our record crime lows were not a result of the stops and frisks that they deemed unreasonable — which was most of them. In fact, this tactic, which has been approved by the US Supreme Court, was not only effective in taking guns and other weapons away from individuals before they could use them, it deterred thousands of others from carrying illegal guns.
Similarly, effective antiterrorist tactics were condemned for allegedly profiling particular groups, though a federal judge has recently rejected that contention. In this context, recall the post-9/11 criticism of the FBI for failing to follow up on reports about Middle Eastern suspects learning to fly (but not land) airliners. The Bureau had hesitated because it feared that it would be accused of profiling. The NYPD didn’t make that mistake — at least, not yet.
Some expected that, with a new team in City Hall and police headquarters, the attacks on the police would cease. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Even though the NYPD’s spent the last few months embracing its critics, the attacks have intensified. The anti-cop groups intend to see their agendas implemented, and no amount of love and kisses will deter them.
Indeed, critics are now targeting the NYPD’s order-maintenance policing. This is based on the concept of “Broken Windows,” which notes that ignoring low-level offenses encourages more serious crime to flourish.
The new Brooklyn district attorney has announced that his office will stop prosecuting people with “minimal” criminal records for possessing small amounts of marijuana. There will be “a presumption that such cases will be immediately dismissed and the police will be directed to destroy the defendant’s fingerprints.” He’s also looking at changing how his office handles other low-level crimes. Don’t be surprised if other DAs follow suit.
If “Broken Windows” enforcement goes by the boards, the system of proactive policing that reduced crime so dramatically in the city over the last 20 years will have been completely dismantled.
The next assault on cops is already shaping up, with a spate of accusations that some detectives (and prosecutors) falsified evidence against criminal suspects, resulting in innocent people being jailed. If this has happened in some isolated incidents, the answer is to tighten up detective and prosecutorial procedures. But unless we want to return to the days when an average of 800 murders a year went unsolved and the killers continued to walk the streets and murder more people, it should not serve as a basis for onerous restrictions on criminal investigations.
Here’s one more troubling sign: The new administration in City Hall and One Police Plaza has rejected a City Council proposal to add 1,000 officers to the NYPD, as a partial replacement for the 6,000 slots lost in recent years.
Strange: Shootings have been exhibiting an upward trend in recent weeks. For two decades, the NYPD has been able to quickly determine the cause of such crime spikes and deploy its officers to deal with them. To do this, however, the department needs resources.
I hope the administration’s rejection of just such resources won’t last. Rather than look a gift horse in the mouth, the mayor and police commissioner should embrace the council’s proposal. With the critics looking to hamstring policing across the board, New York’s cops need all the help they can get.
Thomas A. Reppetto is former president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City.