Bob McManus

Bob McManus

Opinion

Guns blazing in NYC thanks to de Blasio’s lax policies

The butcher’s bill reads like it was mailed from Chicago: at least 27 people shot in New York City over the weekend, four of them fatally — with the carnage starting early Saturday and continuing through mid-day Monday across all five boroughs.

So. Whatever happened to the “safest big city in America?”

Well, that still holds — for now — but one thing is clear: It’s past time to quit pretending that the de Blasio administration’s permissive anti-gun policies are working.

Because they aren’t. And it doesn’t take a police-science major to figure out why: Gun thugs are no longer afraid of the NYPD — and that’s because the NYPD no longer pays meaningful attention to gun thugs.

Police Commissioner Bill Bratton had his hands full yesterday, but going into the weekend he was pretty sanguine about the NYPD’s record over the past six months.

“If you look at this year’s stats so far compared to over the last 10 years, we are actually doing pretty good,” he said on June 10 — even as shootings in May were up more than 40 percent from a year ago.

By last week, it had become clear that shootings overall were up significantly from 2013, prompting the commissioner to promise that a new NYPD study would clarify whether the department’s abandonment of aggressive anti-gun practices — specifically, its “stop and frisk” tactics — is a factor in the increase.

“At this juncture, we really don’t know,” Bratton said. “Once the study is completed over the next several weeks, we’ll have a better idea.”

Which is disingenuous nonsense. All Bratton needs to do is tally the blood puddles on the sidewalks and in the parks, and he’ll have his answer.

For he knows the ratio, crude but real: More illegal guns on the street mean more blood on the street. Fewer illegal guns, less blood.

Everything else is detail.

Bratton, as Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s first police commissioner, was present at the advent of serious stop-and-frisk two decades ago.

The policy was simple and intuitive: Train cops to recognize the signs of illegal gun possession, empower them to be as aggressive as reason permits, and send them into neighborhoods where gun violence is out of control.

Back then, that was a lot of neighborhoods. Today, not so many — which speaks to the intelligence, foresight and courage of Bratton and his colleagues back in the day, and to the value of stop-and-frisk.

But the program has gone by the boards now, the victim of an activist federal judge and a claque of feckless politicians. Together, they conspired to kill stop-and-frisk on the grounds that it singled out young black and Hispanic males.

It didn’t matter that — as a group — young black and Hispanic males are disproportionately likely to be carrying illegal guns. And it really didn’t matter that — as a group — blacks and Hispanics of all ages are disproportionately likely to be the victims of illegal guns.

Yet all that is history now. The proponents of stop-and-frisk made their case, and they lost. They lost in court, and — most importantly — they lost at the ballot box.

Now every one of New York City’s 34,500-plus cops goes to work plagued by one paralyzing doubt: “If I see what I think is a kid with a gun, and I stop him, and I’m wrong, does that mean I spend the next 18 months behind a desk without a badge and a gun while some assistant inspector general sorts things out?

“Will I be sued for racial profiling?”

Better to look the other way? You betcha.

Advantage, gun thugs.

But now the ball is in the other side’s court — the anti-stop-and-friskers, the abstraction-obsessed civil-liberties zealots and the politicians who so often pander to the inchoate resentments of people who hate cops simply because they are cops.

Together, they won. They killed stop-and-frisk. They elected a mayor. And a City Council, too.

But now the city has no coherent policy response to this past weekend’s violence. The council hasn’t. Mayor de Blasio hasn’t. The advocates haven’t. And neither does Bill Bratton.
Not beyond the rhetorical, anyway.

But they do have the moral responsibility to make things right. Stop-and-frisk is beyond the pale? OK. Come up with something better.

Let’s be frank: The anti-stop-and-frisk coalition, naïvely or by malign intent, has dug a very deep hole here.

Bratton and de Blasio need to fill it. Fast.