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Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s Big Brother plan to micromanage the NYPD with an inspector general could be a death sentence for city cops forced to combat an epic spike in crime, Mayor Bloomberg warned yesterday.
“Make no mistake about it. This bill . . . will put the lives of New Yorkers and our police officers at risk,” Bloomberg said yesterday during a speech to business leaders about the dangers posed by Quinn’s proposal.
Bloomberg said having an inspector general that can do away with effective police tactics like stop-and-frisk would bring crime levels back to the bad old days of the ’70s and ’80s, when the murder rate was through the roof.
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“We have come too far to forget the lessons we’ve learned,” Bloomberg said. “And those who are taking record low levels of crime for granted are making a terrible and tragic mistake.
“We cannot afford to play election-year politics with the safety of our city, and we cannot afford to roll back the progress of the past 20 years.”
Bloomberg said he plans to veto the move for an NYPD inspector general’s office, which would fall within the city Department of Investigation.
Quinn, who said she has the votes to override Bloomberg’s veto, was also blasted by Republican former MTA Chairman Joe Lhota — the early favorite to oppose her in November’s election.
“I think there’s no reason to have an inspector general’s office for the NYPD,” said Lhota, who served as deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani when the city’s crime rate began to plunge dramatically.
“It already has oversight by the five district attorneys, by the two US attorneys, by various other organizations. This is just another level of bureaucracy that is being put upon the city of New York, and it’s just not necessary.”
Bloomberg’s speech against Quinn’s proposal came at the opening of Sabey Corp.’s new data center on Pearl Street.
“The success of our Police Department in driving crime to record lows has allowed us to drive the number of jobs in our city to record highs,” Bloomberg said.
“If you remember, it wasn’t long ago that companies were moving out of New York City — not moving in. And one of the big reasons that they were moving out back in those days was that crime was just out of control.”
He referred to the murder rate in 1990, when “more than 2,200 New Yorkers were murdered in our streets, our parks, our subways and our apartment buildings in one year.
“New York was the murder and crime capital of the nation back then. People did not feel safe going out in the streets at night — no less riding the subways. Kids carried mugging money.”
Bloomberg told the audience how then-Mayor David Dinkins and Council Speaker Peter Vallone hired thousands of new police officers to beef up patrols.
“With that, crime started to come down — and when Rudy Giuliani became mayor and deployed CompStat and adopted a ‘broken windows’ strategy, crime began to fall dramatically,” he said.
“Thanks to the historic leadership of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, we have continued to drive crime down even further.”
Bloomberg cited last year’s record-low murder rate of 418.
“That included targeting criminal hot spots and stopping, questioning and sometimes frisking people who may have been engaged in criminal activity,” he said.
“If New York City had had the murder rate of Washington, DC, last year, 1,189 more New Yorkers would have been murdered. If in 2012 New York had the murder rate of Chicago, 1,489 more New Yorkers would have been murdered in 2012.
“Tampering with the success that we have had in bringing down the murder rates would have been just outrageous, would have been irresponsible and it would have been terribly dangerous.”
The mayor noted the large number of entities that already act as NYPD watchdogs.
“Thanks to Commissioner Kelly, we now devote as many members of the NYPD to the Internal Affairs Bureau as we do to counterterrorism — and we are vigilant about catching the few bad apples and we do hold them accountable,” Bloomberg said.
The mayor also fumed that Quinn’s bill “would create a new bureaucracy,” that would not be an inspector general but would be “a policy supervisor.”
“I don’t think any rational person would say we would need two competing police commissioners,” Bloomberg said.