City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, in hot pursuit of the mayoralty, jumped aboard the anti-NYPD bandwagon with both feet yesterday — ditching council custom and her own best practices to move a bill meant to slap down conscientious cops across the five boroughs.
The title of the measure says it all: The “Bias-Based Profiling Bill” originally prohibited the mere mention of race in descriptions of criminal suspects or fugitives — an absurdity too far even for Quinn’s terminally unserious council.
And so it was amended to proscribe the “profiling” of virtually every identifiable interest group in New York City — including the disabled.
That’s a break for wheelchair-bound muggers and other unconventional criminals, but the result is a bill that now has no immediate practical point, but plenty of political significance.
Thus it remained too much for one of Quinn’s few adult colleagues, Public Safety Committee Chairman Peter Vallone Jr. of Queens: He refused to clear the measure for consideration by the full council — an arguably undemocratic sequester, but business as usual for Quinn’s councilmembers.
What happened next was anything but usual: Quinn, for the first time in her eight years as speaker, permitted a parliamentary maneuver that saw the bill out of committee and on the way to a full council vote — in this case, tomorrow.
Thus did Quinn complete her devolution from clear-headed paladin of public safety to just another attention-mongering NYPD ankle-biter seeking higher office.
This follows last week’s beyond-condescending public recitation of the conditions Police Commissioner Ray Kelly must meet to join a Quinn administration — not that Kelly has shown the slightest interest in working for her in the first place.
Indeed, the thought of Kelly in harness alongside Quinn’s other big idea — a sure-enough departmental inspector-general — makes for one big belly-laugh.
Not so the notion of the IG itself, though. While it’s not clear exactly what Quinn intends for her agent actually to do, the proposal declares her belief that the department is out of control.
Which is a little bizarre. Not even the months-long anti-NYPD kangaroo-court proceeding just concluded by US District Judge Shira Scheindlin demonstrated that (even if she seems intent on putting the department into federal receivership anyway.)
So, again, Quinn is either deluded. Or posturing.
Bet on the latter.
It’s all the rage these days.
Not one of the major Democrats now running for mayor is fully supportive of the people, the policies and the institutions that dragged New York back from the abyss two decades ago — and have since fashioned the city into a relative public-safety paradise.
That transformation was almost wholly the result of the extraordinary individual accountability shoehorned into NYPD culture by Rudy Giuliani and Bill Bratton, among others, back in the ’90s — and sustained by Mike Bloomberg and Ray Kelly ever since.
The key was, and remains, an unambiguous chain of command: From the mayor to the commissioner and precinct commanders, right down to the cop on the beat via the sergeants who supervise them.
Communication, through the ComStat analysis system, is constant — and the results are clear for all to see: the New York public-safety renaissance.
Perfect? No.
Better than what was before? Obviously.
Vastly superior to what Quinn & Co. are proposing?
Yes, and here’s why: Any break in the chain of authority — Quinn’s IG, a federal receiver, the council’s witless “profiling” bill, whatever — will undercut policy set by the city’s elected leaders and, over time, compromise command accountability. All the way down to the cop on the beat.
Bratton, Giuliani’s first police commissioner, recently told a Manhattan Institute forum that — in his experience — 20 percent of the cops on any given police department will walk through walls to get the job done right and 20 percent can’t be motivated under any circumstances. The challenge, he said, lies in keeping the middle 60 percent focused and productive — and that requires sophisticated accountability of the sort now under political challenge.
Another old officer, back in the day, put it more bluntly: “No cop will touch vagrants unless you make him. Vagrants smell bad, and you can catch diseases from them. That’s why tough sergeants matter.”
That, again, is why clear accountability matters.
New York has had politicized policing before, beginning most recently with John Lindsay.
And it has had professional policing, too, beginning lately with Rudy Giuliani.
Memo to Chris Quinn: Professional is better. Tell your friends.