Opinion

Death wish, the sequel

This one will hurt: A federal judge took a powerful whack at New York City’s crime-fighting efforts in ruling against the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policies. If the judge’s ruling is allowed to stand, the price to the city will be incalculable. And the victims of her judicial caprice will overwhelmingly be our city’s poor and minority populations.

In a pair of decisions that ran 234 pages, Judge Shira Scheindlin found the stops of those people police deem suspicious unconstitutional. She blasted the NYPD for racial bias and for its “deliberate indifference to constitutional deprivations” of those who are stopped. Her remedies include a court-appointed monitor to institute the court-decreed reforms she believes necessary.

None of this comes as a surprise. Scheindlin has long been vocal about her opposition to stop-and-frisk. She has always harbored deep misgivings about the police. Even before the trial began, she cited “powerful evidence of a widespread pattern of unlawful stops” and blasted the NYPD’s “deeply troubling apathy toward New Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional rights.”

As Mayor Bloomberg noted, Judge Scheindlin’s tipping of the scales of justice here also include offering “strategic advice” to the plaintiffs to ensure she would get to hear their case. When the trial did begin, she promptly disregarded evidence showing stop-and-frisk to be a life-saving police tool. As she did when the plaintiffs, who were supposed to be victims of stop-and-frisk, gave testimony exonerating the cops.

That’s not all she ignored to get to the decision she wanted. In New York, the percentages of stops by race align squarely with the racial percentages of crime suspects. In addition, a majority of the “racist” cops are themselves minorities. Not to mention that 97 percent of shooting victims are also black or Hispanic.

None of this mattered to Judge Scheindlin. The case, she wrote, was “not primarily about the 19 individual stops” the plaintiffs cited. Of course not. Because if she had to base it on the evidence at trial instead of her own biases, it would have been impossible to rule the way she did.

Frankly, it’s a wonder she even bothered with a trial. At his press conference yesterday, Bloomberg said as much: “Throughout the case, we didn’t believe that we were getting a fair trial. This decision confirms that suspicion.”

It certainly does. In her opinions, the judge asks us to swallow some whoppers. “I am not ordering an end to the practice of stop and frisk,” she says at several points. Elsewhere she claims “the Monitor will save the City time and resources.”

The reality is that Judge Scheindlin wants to gut the program, but she does not have the expertise to know whether the monitor will save the city “time and resources”; and the monitor, despite her assurances to the contrary, will indeed become a rival authority to NYPD staff and officials.

Remember: This is a woman who micromanages to the point of dictating changes in a police training video and ordering up a pilot program requiring cops to wear cameras to video-record stops.

In his press conference, the mayor notes how damaging all this will be. The police stops, he says, have led to the removal of 8,000 guns from city streets over the past 10 years and 80,000 other weapons. As a result, New York — once known the world over for its outrageously high murder rate — is now the safest large city in America, with the fewest yearly murders it’s seen in decades. Stop-and-frisk is a big part of the reason.

The judge, though, has done the city one service. She has provided a litmus test for this year’s race for mayor. With her ruling, the question now becomes: Does anyone running have the spirit and integrity to elevate fighting crime over this political correctness run amok?

The signs are not good. The four leading Democratic mayoral candidates all welcomed the judge’s findings. Some even said they would abolish stop-and-frisk.

The Republicans were better, with all backing Bloomberg’s decision to take this decision to a higher court. “One misguided liberal judge is endangering the safety of all New Yorkers. Appeal. Appeal. Appeal,” says GOP hopeful George McDonald.

He’s right. But what does it tell you about New York’s future that the candidate who gave the most succinct and sensible take on the judge’s ruling is the one least likely to win — in a town where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 6-to-1?

True, just as stop-and-frisk alone did not give us America’s safest big city, so Judge Scheindlin’s ruling by itself will not return us to the days when hoodlums owned our streets. But her decree — and the response to it — underscores our vulnerabilities at a key moment in the city’s history; a lack of seriousness in our courts, a lack of courage among those most likely to be elected mayor and, at least thus far, a lack of anger from citizens who may take today’s safe streets for granted.

Let’s be clear. New York’s Finest found themselves in the dock because our mayor and our police commissioner have made it the city’s policy to protect the citizens of all neighborhoods. If more blacks and Latinos are being stopped, in part it’s because New York has more blacks and Latinos in the most vulnerable neighborhoods. Unlike their counterparts in other big American cities, Bloomberg and Kelly have refused to cede the law-abiding of these communities to the thugs and gangbangers.

Judge Scheindlin obsesses over her belief that the police have been too arbitrary in stopping blacks and Latinos. But in handing down a decision whose outcome everyone knew long before the first witness had even testified, she demonstrates a high-handedness as menacing to the innocent New York citizen as the most tendentious and overbearing cop.