Here’s the way progressives reassure police that City Hall stands behind them: The new head of the Civilian Complaint Review Board has called for tracking cops the way we do criminals.
Just to make sure you can’t miss the implication, the board’s chairman, Richard Emery, is proposing a new program he calls “Cop-Stat,” which he calls an early warning system of improper police behavior.
That, of course, is meant to immediately bring to mind CompStat, the groundbreaking system that sparked the historic downturn in crime here by tracking precinct-level statistics.
Emery says his Cop-Stat will cull information from the thousands of complaints (the vast majority unjustified) filed against cops each year and “make judgments that will enable the police department to be forewarned about things that are developing” and spot trends of abusive behavior.
His message is unmistakable: Just like sky-high crime a quarter-century ago, there is a systemic problem of bad policing that must be carefully tracked and monitored.
Emery, a former New York Civil Liberties Union lawyer who’s filed numerous lawsuits against the NYPD, also sent another message: He intends to have the CCRB get more aggressive with cops.
Unfortunately, in this he apparently has the full support of Mayor de Blasio, who says that under Emery “for the first time we’re actually going to get to see a CCRB function properly.”
Count us opposed. We’re all for fair investigations of police abuse.
But we’re not sure how the mayor expects police to keep New York the nation’s safest big city when he gives his blessing to a highly politicized effort meant to imply cops are just like criminals.