All summer long, then-candidate Bill de Blasio pulled no punches in his opposition to aggressive policing — in particular, to stop-and-frisk — and so the principal question going into his mayoralty was this: When it comes to public safety, did he believe his own rhetoric?
Turns out, Bill’s a believer.
He made that clear enough last week, standing super-tall with all the usual suspects — plus, ominously, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton — to announce not only that the city is rescinding its appeal of last year’s discredited federal-court stop-and-frisk ruling, but that it’s unilaterally adopting policies that over time stand to make the city much less safe.
That’s fair enough, as far as it goes: De Blasio made his case, there was an election — and, as Ed Koch once said in a different context: “The people have spoken, and [now] they must be punished.”
Regarding public safety, though, the mayor gets it wrong on several levels — as did US District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin in her original ruling (the latter so egregiously arrived at that an appeals court subsequently removed her from the case).
Stop-and-frisk is a shorthand identifier for a remarkably successful strategy that matched police resources to high-violent-crime city neighborhoods. “You got crime, you got cops” might have been a better way to put it — and the results speak for themselves. New York, once wracked by violent crime, is now the safest big city in America.
This meant nothing to Scheindlin, and it clearly means nothing to de Blasio. While it is statistically undeniable that virtually all violent crime in the city is committed by young African-American or Hispanic males — most often against other African-Americans or Hispanics — they say that it is racist to concentrate police attention in such a way.
This was the thrust of the discredited judge’s ruling, and it informs the city’s new policies, according to de Blasio.
“Our young people of color are our future leaders . . . and we need to respect them as such,” said the mayor Thursday. “For decades they have not experienced that kind of respect.”
And here’s the nub: “We’ve said everyone’s equal, everyone has opportunity, but we haven’t treated people that way from our official government organizations.”
Translation: This administration will not base its policies on empirical evidence, but on skin color — or, rather, on race-driven assumptions and sensitivities, irrespective of the consequences. Or the truth.
That is, say hello to Bill de Blasio — quota king.
But that’s for the future. Right now, consider this: De Blasio’s words tar the NYPD as blatantly racist, an organization that has spent “decades” denying “young people of color” their basic liberties.
This is a pernicious lie, of course, and the notion no doubt would amuse those thousands of New Yorkers alive today who wouldn’t be if the city had been suffering Detroit’s murder rate all these years — if they only knew who they were.
But it is also the new order, and in practical terms it means that:
l The NYPD shortly will be under the supervision of a court-appointed federal monitor; this will last at least three years, and probably much longer — with all that implies for the command integrity and personnel accountability central to the Giuliani-Bloomberg anti-crime successes.
l The department also will soon be answering to a municipal inspector general, thanks to the City Council.
l And cops are being targeted for personal liability, in court, for so-called “racial profiling” transgressions — whatever that term even means.
Taken together, this constitutes a most toxic broth, and it beggars belief that a police commander of Bratton’s experience and intelligence doesn’t understand it. That he has signed off is disconcerting, to say the least.
How long it takes the gunslingers and other mutts to figure out what the new deal means remains to be seen — not many of them follow the news, after all — but it’ll be soon enough.
And history predicts that law-abiding African-Americans and Hispanics will pay a disproportionately heavy price.
Beyond stop-and-frisk, de Blasio’s disparate-impact strictures almost certainly mean a swift end to the NYPD’s effective, if expansive, anti-terrorism programs. (Just ask Bostonians how well relying for protection solely on the FBI worked out for them.)
And one needn’t walk too far out on a limb to predict the demise of merit-driven practices and policies — in favor of quota-driven regimes — elsewhere in city government, especially in the Department of Education. Filling seats in Stuyvesant High School on the basis of “respect,” rather than by competitive examination, might not mean the end of the world — but it almost certainly would be the end of Stuyvesant in any currently recognizable form.
Yet what else can de Blasio’s assertion that “our official government organizations” have been institutionally disrespectful — that is, racist — mean?
Taken another way, if the administration can’t get public safety right, what else is at risk?
Everything. Believe it.