Opinion

NYC’s new peril: Cop-bashers versus minorities

Longtime critics of the NYPD are seizing on the death of Eric Garner while in police custody to call for an end to proactive policing — a retreat that would hurt minority communities worst.

Garner died last week after an arrest for illegally selling untaxed cigarettes in Staten Island; when the 350-pound man resisted arrest, an officer brought him to the ground in what appears to be an illegal chokehold.

It’s too soon to say if that tactic caused Garner’s death; his severe asthma and diabetes, among other ailments, could have contributed to his fatal heart attack.

But the anger is understandable. The outcome of the encounter, most certainly unintended by the officers, is grotesquely out of line with the original offense.

And while resisting arrest is a serious matter, to a layman, Garner’s level of noncompliance doesn’t appear to justify force resulting in death.

Initial protests centered on the apparent chokehold, but NYPD critics are now also attacking misdemeanor enforcement — such as against Garner’s illegal cigarette vending — itself.

This development is pure opportunism. There is no connection between quality-of-life enforcement, on the one hand, and Garner’s death, on the other.

The case is properly about the tactics used to subdue Garner after he resisted arrest; the offense for which he was originally accosted is irrelevant.

Nevertheless, the next chapter of anti-NYPD agitation has begun. Having eviscerated the legitimate practice of pedestrian stops, the anti-cop brigades have now set their sights on the enforcement of misdemeanor laws regulating public order, a strategy known as broken-windows policing.

Leading the charge is Brooklyn College sociologist Alex Vitale, with some City Council members close on his heels.

Naturally, Vitale plays the race card: The NYPD disproportionately and unjustifiably targets minority neighborhoods for misdemeanor enforcement, he says, resulting in the “over-policing” of “communities of color.”

The professor should spend more time in poor neighborhoods. No stronger proponents of public-order policing exist than law-abiding residents of high-crime areas.

Go to any police-community meeting in Brooklyn, The Bronx or Harlem, and you’ll hear pleas such as: Teens are congregating on my stoop; can you please arrest them?

Or, SUVs are driving down the street at night with their stereos blaring; can’t you do something? Or, People have been barbecuing on the pedestrian islands of Broadway; that’s illegal!

The targets of these complaints may be black and Hispanic, but the people complaining, themselves black and Hispanic, don’t care. They just want orderly streets.

Vitale charges that the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes is enforced almost exclusively in communities of color. Well, yes: That’s where the trade overwhelmingly occurs.

Vitale claims that “in many courts around the boroughs,” a random spot-check performed by the Police Reform Organizing Project (a group he advises) found that 100 percent of those appearing for minor violations were people of color.

But Compstat sends police to where crime and disorder are highest, and where residents are asking for assistance.

The anti-cop critics also dispute the efficacy of quality-of-life policing. “There just isn’t any evidence that arresting squeegee men and aggressive panhandlers in Midtown Manhattan helps reduce robberies and shootings in the outer boroughs,” Vitale says.

No proponent of misdemeanor enforcement has ever tried to prove so stretched a causal link.

But Michael Jacobson of the Vera Institute and James Austin of the JFA Institute have shown that the city’s misdemeanor enforcement led to a drop in felony arrests and felony incarcerations by getting potential felony offenders off the streets for low-level violations.

Moreover, ending Midtown Manhattan’s low-level lawlessness in the ’90s triggered the urban renaissance there, reviving tourism and producing thousands of jobs for outer-borough New Yorkers. New York’s public-safety revolution was the best anti-poverty program the city ever offered.

Yet even if quality-of-life enforcement had no effect on felony crime, it would still be a moral imperative, for it responds to the demands for order that police commanders in poor neighborhoods hear from their constituents every day.

The biggest threat facing minority New Yorkers now isn’t “over-policing,” and certainly not brutal policing. The NYPD has one of the lowest rates of officer-involved fatalities in the country; it is recognized internationally for its professionalism and training standards.

Deaths such as Garner’s, however horrific, are thankfully an aberration, which the department does everything it can to avoid.

No, the biggest threat to minority New Yorkers today is de-policing.

After years of ungrounded criticism from the press and advocates, after highly publicized litigation and the passage of ill-considered laws, NYPD officers have radically scaled back their discretionary activity. Pedestrian stops are down 80 percent citywide and almost 100 percent in some areas.

Eric Garner’s death was a heartbreaking tragedy, but if the backlash against misdemeanor enforcement takes root and finds a sympathetic audience in Mayor de Blasio, the consequences for all New Yorkers will be even more dire.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and the author of “Are Cops Racist?” Adapted from city-journal.org