Imagine a world in which criminals control our streets, police officers can’t act for fear of being sanctioned by judges, murders skyrocket back to the levels of the early 1990s and schools and libraries are closed because so much of the city’s money is going for lawsuits against the NYPD.
No, it’s not a trailer for the latest bad Tom Cruise movie — it’s the reality New York will face if the City Council passes Introduction 800 of the Community Safety Act.
The better name for it is The Criminal Safety Act — and I believe it’s the most dangerous piece of legislation ever proposed in our city.
I have no problem with parts of it — like the expansion of the categories of protected status, altering the anti-racial-profiling law that I co-wrote with the late Council Member Phil Reed, a civil-rights activist.
But the anti-profiling aspect is being used as a smokescreen to obscure the real change the bill would make — blowing a massive hole in New York City’s budget, ending police work as we know it and placing the NYPD under the control of the judiciary.
The bill would allow any individual who is subject to an action by a police officer that results in a “disparate impact” to file a civil lawsuit against the city, the NYPD or the police officer.
In other words, any male (because men are the subject of police action far more often than women) would have an immediate right to sue in state court if the NYPD takes any action against him (not just stop, question and frisk).
Disparate impact is one of the most harmful theories in the law today, because it asserts that bias is present even though there’s absolutely no evidence of it — e.g., it assumes that unfair bias is the explanation whenever police stop or arrest more “members of a class.”
So the Criminal Safety Act would let literally hundreds of thousands of people sue the city. The costs just to defend against the lawsuits — before allowing for damages, attorneys’ fees, court costs and fees for expert witnesses — would be hundreds of millions of dollars.
But the higher cost would be the lives of countless New Yorkers.
That’s because the bill is written to empower judges to impose ridiculous sanctions against the NYPD — such as issuing orders of protection for gangs against the police department, or telling cops where and when they can patrol. In short, it effectively takes control of the NYPD away from Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
It also practically forces individual cops not to do their jobs — since each could personally be sued under the insane “disparate impact” theory. Multiple officers have already told me that, if this becomes law, they “won’t get out of the car” to avoid being subjected to the whims of judges.
Thanks to the tremendous work of Commissioner Kelly and the NYPD, New York City is the safest big city in America, with murders at the lowest level in recorded history. The Criminal Safety Act would undo all the efforts to improve public safety in the city over the last two decades, prevent the NYPD from doing its job and give New York back over to violent offenders.
So if law-abiding citizens don’t want to end up living in the city depicted in “Escape from New York,” they need to make sure their elected officials vote against Intro. 800. Otherwise, not even Kurt Russell will keep us safe.
Peter F. Vallone (D-Queens) chairs the City Council’s Public Safety Committee.