At first it looks like a glaring contradiction: Thanks to innovative police work, New York has become America’s safest big city. Yet it is in this same city that the police have become the No. 1 political target.
In fact, it’s no contradiction at all. A quick look at who’s doing the attacking — a liberal federal judge, a liberal Democratic candidate for mayor, a liberal rights group and the leading liberal newspaper — suggests that New York’s Finest aren’t under attack despite their success against crime. They’re under attack because of their success.
Particularly grating to critics is that the cops have delivered something to poor and minority neighborhoods their own policies never could: fewer shootings, fewer murders and safer streets. Since the victims of violent crime are overwhelmingly black or Latino, it means the thousands of lives saved by New York’s policing are also mostly black or Latino.
In most corners of America, this would be something to cheer about. You might even call it progressive policing. But not our city’s liberal class.
How galling it is to these people that the institution that has delivered for our city’s poor and marginalized is law enforcement. Worse still, law enforcement headed by a former Marine.
The attitude is by no means confined to New York, of course. Recall when President Obama, ignorant of the facts, declared at a press conference that “the Cambridge police acted stupidly” in the altercation between a black Harvard professor and the white Cambridge cop? The president later regretted his words but you can see the liberal instinct: When it’s professor v. police, surely it’s safe to assume the cops are the idiots.
We heard something similar from the camp of Shira Scheindlin, the federal judge who held a kangaroo trial of stop-and-frisk to justify the opinion everyone knew was coming even before the first witness testified. As a former Scheindlin law clerk told The New Yorker, “What you have to remember about the judge is that she thinks cops lie.”
Now, in one sense liberals grumbling about police tactics is nothing new. It’s also true that liberals do attack cops in places like Chicago, Washington, Detroit, where police aren’t as successful as they are in New York.
But these attacks are nothing like the assault on New York police. Where’s the George Soros-backed initiative against police in cities such as Detroit or New Orleans? Murder rates there are above 50 per 100,000 population; New York’s rate is under 4.
And why is US Attorney General Eric Holder weighing in against New York — instead of all those high-crime cities where police circle the wagons around the better parts and cede whole neighborhoods to the criminals?
The answer is that blue-state America has always had a hard time dealing with the reality of crime. Whether it’s blaming crime on the economy or hailing “solutions” such as midnight basketball, the liberal class just has a hard time doing what police do here: proactively go after bad guys.
In this sense, stop-and-frisk is a gift. It lets these critics claim their opposition is based on the Constitution, not any animus against police. And because most of those stopped (87 percent) are young African-American males, it conjures up familiar tropes about white policemen rounding up black kids.
Never mind that if the stops followed the racial breakdown for murder suspects — 90 percent black — there’d be even more African-Americans stopped.
Or that the rank of police officer in today’s NYPD is majority minority: 16.7 percent African-American, 29.1 percent Hispanic and 6.7 percent Asian.
While we’re on the subject, it would sure be illuminating to know how many of the institutions so loudly accusing the cops of racial bias are, like the police force today, majority minority — from the editorial board of The New York Times and the staff of the New York Civil Liberties Union to the office of Judge Scheindlin and the white-shoe law firm of Covington and Burling.
Probably the cops will lose on stop-and-frisk. Between the federal monitor imposed by Judge Scheindlin, the two new anti-stop bills just passed by the City Council and the likelihood that the next mayor will be the man who has vowed to end stop-and-frisk, it doesn’t look good.
But if the cops do lose, let’s remember their real crime wasn’t that they were too thuggish. It’s that they’ve been progressive in a way that shows up the city’s liberal establishment. And for that, there can be no forgiveness.