It was the question of the morning, and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton ducked it.
He was in the friendliest of territory — a Midtown breakfast briefing sponsored by the uber-supportive Manhattan Institute — and so maybe he wasn’t expecting to be put on the spot.
He’d spent most of his hour recounting the challenges he faced during his first tour as commissioner, two decades ago, detailing the progress made since then and laying out in general terms his plans for the next several months and beyond.
Of particular concern, Bratton said, are what he termed “upticks” in deadly violence in and adjacent to housing projects in Brooklyn and The Bronx.
Though crime is down 3 percent citywide compared to a year ago, NYPD stats show that shootings have jumped 7 percent and housing-project crime is up 3 percent.
He blamed project-based gangs — “crews” is the term of art — for the increase in gunplay: One shooting will guarantee a retaliatory shooting, said the commissioner, and the key to controlling mayhem in public housing is a sustained, high-profile policing.
“Society isn’t the issue,” Bratton put it Wednesday, quite correctly. “People are. Criminals.”
Remove the criminals, he said, and flowers will bloom.
There was a murmur of approval, but then the criminologist Heather Mac Donald stood up with a most apt question. Bratton’s boss, Bill de Blasio, she noted, has shown no stomach whatsoever for policing policies of the sort the commissioner had just described. So what happens if City Hall torpedoes them?
Translation: What happens if de Blasio caves in to a bizarrely activist federal judge in ongoing litigation that specifically seeks to prevent aggressive policing in housing projects?
After all, the mayor refused to fight the same judge’s finding in a separate case — that the NYPD’s now-abandoned “stop-and-frisk” policies were so overtly racist that the department needs the oversight of a federal monitor.
Bratton paused, ever so briefly, and said: “I will work with what I have.”
Which is exactly what he should’ve said: Mayors set the parameters of police policy; police commissioners, at least in public, accept them.
But it was not a comforting answer. For Mac Donald’s question, and her concerns, are spot on.
The judge, Shira Scheindlin, has Bratton’s strategy to combat housing-project violence in the palm of her hand. If she says no, and de Blasio buys in, all is effectively over.
Scheindlin’s conduct in the stop-and-frisk case was so egregious that a higher federal court removed her from that matter — without, alas, overturning her finding.
The effect was to sharply scale back the Giuliani- and Bloomberg-era practices that did a great deal to remove illegal guns from the streets.
Now guns are making a comeback, at least in Brooklyn and Bronx projects. And it’s hard not to see a connection — however tenuous it might seem at the moment.
What about later? What about this summer, the heart of the inner-city shooting season? What about a year from now? That could be up to Scheindlin — and de Blasio.
The judge appears to have learned nothing from her pummeling at the hands of the appeals court.
Certainly not humility. She refuses to relinquish the housing-project case, which essentially seeks to bar cops from enforcing laws against loitering in lobbies, corridors and elevators.
The theory, stripped to bare metal, is that cops don’t have a big presence in doorman buildings and the like, where relatively few poor blacks and Hispanics live, and so it’s discriminatory for them to target the projects.
It’s down-the-rabbit-hole reasoning, to be sure: The projects are where the crime is. That is, where the victims are.
But Scheindlin bought it in the stop-and-frisk litigation, as did de Blasio — and there’s nothing to suggest that either of them is more connected to reality today.
Right now, de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito are involved in an odd fiscal fandango — she wants 1,000 added cops; he doesn’t — but that has nothing to do with crime.
Rather, they need something to debate in public as the city’s budgeting process proceeds. (Remember how Mike Bloomberg always proposed shutting firehouses?)
No, the law-and-order question of the moment is whether the two of them are prepared to back Bratton in the face of Scheindlin’s insane activism — much as Bloomberg backed Ray Kelly.
It’s a critical test, and how strange it is that the answer isn’t a slam-dunk “yes.” Kudos to Heather Mac Donald for the reality check.