We’ve not always been reassured by the way Police Commissioner Bill Bratton has tried to dance between his commitment to keeping New York safe and his mayor’s ideological opposition to a tool even Bratton says is necessary: stop-and-frisk.
But we were encouraged last week to see Bratton is at least asking the right question.
That was when the commish said the NYPD was crunching the numbers to see if there is a connection between the rise in shootings and the drop in the police’s use of stop-and-frisk.
The study was provoked by numbers showing shootings up 10 percent over last year, even as murders are down. Bratton rightly warns about extrapolating too much from short-term statistics. Even so, there has been an alarming surge in shootings.
As Bratton told 607 new NYPD graduates Monday: “There are too many young men in the city carrying guns, who have been drawn into the crews and into the gangs. And we need to prevent that from happening. We need to prevent them from going into a life of crime. We can be an essential part of that.”
Two days after announcing the cops were looking at the data, Bratton said he’d be “very surprised” if it showed any relation between “the decline of stop, question and frisk and this sharp, short-term increase in shootings.”
Of course, if it’s too early to claim the new policy is a failure, it’s also too early to conclude otherwise.
What New York needs is honest, hard data on crime — and a mayor and a police commissioner willing to be honest about what the facts tell us.