Why can’t the City Council stick to naming streets? At least with that, any damage is minimal. Unlike what happens when it gets involved with policing.
Case in point: The council’s plea for 1,000 new cops, particularly in housing projects, where crime is spiking.
“Based on the additional enforcement needs . . . we need to bring more police into the precincts,” said Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito after a council hearing Tuesday.
As The Post’s Michael Goodwin noted, the council members now asking for more cops are some of the same folks who treated the NYPD as the enemy throughout the Bloomberg years.
The council, for example, passed a law allowing lawsuits against individual officers.
Its anti-cop rhetoric fueled major suits against the department’s stop-and-frisk practices. One suit — Davis v. the City of New York — challenged the cops’ right to stop suspicious characters specifically in city housing projects.
So why are pols like Mark-Viverito and Public Advocate Letitia James suddenly demanding more cops?
Maybe it’s because they now recognize their past actions have emboldened the thugs. As The Post has reported, shootings at city projects are up 32 percent, even as overall crime is down.
Unfortunately, there’s no money for more cops, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton pointed out in his testimony. Bratton says he’ll make do by expanding overtime and shifting officers from, say, anti-terror duty.
Let’s hope Bratton can make that work. And that the City Council sticks to naming streets instead of second-guessing America’s most professional police force.