It was already a bad year for the NYPD even before the white flags showed up over the Brooklyn Bridge last week — so bad that some worry about a similar flag over One Police Plaza, marking surrender to the enemies of effective policing.
Even before 9/11, the Brooklyn Bridge was a high priority for terrorists, who love to target landmarks.
This is why the cops have long guarded it heavily — and why the “flag” success will serve to embolden potential terrorists. Whoever hoisted the flags signaled to the world that New York is unable to defend itself.
That’s why the NYPD needs to catch the perpetrators fast.
If they turn out to be pranksters, looking for 15 minutes of fame, I hope a judge won’t simply slap their wrists.
Yet this was only the latest setback for the NYPD. The year began with the department (under orders from a new mayor) throwing bouquets at its longtime critics, meekly agreeing to drastic restrictions on its use of stop-question-and-frisk, a basic tactic of effective policing.
In April, convinced that peace and love now reigned, the NYPD asked for pictures of cops and citizens in blissful poses.
Instead, police headquarters was Twitter-bombed with photos of cops hitting people with clubs, tossing them to the ground, etc.
The critics clearly weren’t done torturing the department.
The next embarrassment was when the City Council offered funds to hire 1,000 more cops. With police strength down by over 5,000 officers from 2001, it would’ve been the sensible thing to accept the offer.
But Commissioner Bill Bratton (no doubt at the mayor’s instruction) turned the council down, saying he had enough officers to do the job.
Unfortunately, there followed a citywide rise in shootings and a rash of serious crimes in public housing projects.
To combat this, the commissioner announced he was raising the number of officers in the housing division from 2,000 to 2,700 and assigning more officers to the precincts that had spikes.
Left unsaid was which neighborhoods would be losing cops, since the overall department strength remained at the same level.
The NYPD’s also wrapped in a dispute with the Brooklyn DA, who announced that he’ll no longer prosecute low-level drug arrests. This in turn has opened a debate over the whole concept of quality-of-life (a k a “Broken Windows”) policing.
The theory, plainly borne out by the last two decades’ experience, warns that doing nothing after one window in a building is broken results in more broken windows — that leaving low-level crime unchecked leads to more serious crimes.
The chorus of department critics has seized on the tragic death of Eric Garner to push the NYPD to abandon quality-of-life enforcement entirely.
Garner died after resisting arrest by Staten Island cops for allegedly selling illegal cigarettes, with video seeming to show one officer using a chokehold.
The DA and the medical examiner have yet to report on exactly what happened, but the situation looks bad for the NYPD.
Worse, Bratton has publicly answered the criticism of quality-of-life enforcement by stating that there’s no need for an arrest when “an admonition — ‘move along, you can’t do that’” will do.
Of course, this has always been the case. But if the critics are right and the police are harassing people, won’t admonishment be the same thing?
And why should the citizen listen to the admonishment and move along, if there’s no penalty attached for not complying?
Make no mistake: Just as the NYPD has already retreated from proactive policing designed to prevent crime before it happens (the policy referred to derisively as “stop and frisk”), low-level enforcement will follow.
Get ready to encounter squeegee men at every intersection and aggressive hustlers on every commercial street.
It’s not too late to avoid surrender to the demands of police critics and a reversion to the pre-’90s philosophy that cops can do nothing about crime except answer 911 calls and apply Band-Aids.
But unless the city rejects this notion, we’ll eventually be back where we were 20 years ago, just before Commissioner Bratton took office the first time.
Thomas Reppetto is the former president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City.