Hero cop Peter Figoski lived in Suffolk County but worked in Brooklyn trying to keep that borough’s streets safe.
Early Monday morning, he was again doing his job — only to be murdered by a career criminal named Lamont Pride, who shouldn’t have been free in the first place.
Pride was snagged with 10 bags of crack last month. Bizarrely, Judge Evelyn Laporte ignored a prosecutor’s request for $2,500 bail and released him on his own recognizance.
As Pride’s associates, with lengthy rap sheets of their own, are prosecuted in the coming days, it will be interesting to see if Figoski’s sacrifice will be noticed by New York’s so-called public servants, who in recent weeks have used the NYPD as a punching bag for their parochial agendas.
Take Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries (D-Brooklyn), for example, who’s peddling a bill to require new NYPD members to live in the five boroughs.
In announcing his bill last week, Jeffries declared, “We are sick and tired of officers who do not . . . respect our community.”
Really? How much more respect can a police officer show than to lay down his life for the “community?”
Certainly Figoski wasn’t stopping to see if the folks in the Cypress Hills neighborhood in which he patrolled actually live there. He was just trying to protect them.
Yet Jeffries would demand a residency requirement for heroes like Figoski.
Jeffries found support for his bill from fellow Brooklyn pols Rep. Yvette Clarke and City Councilmembers Letitia James and Jumaane Williams — the latter a truly prime piece of work.
Briefly detained by cops during the violence-marred West Indian Day Parade in September, Williams has elevated that incident into an opportunity to attack the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk anti-gun practices as — what else? — racist.
(If only someone had stopped and frisked Lamont Pride Sunday night.)
New York is most fortunate to be protected by individuals with the integrity and bravery of Officer Peter Figoski.
Would that the same could be said of some of the city’s elected officials.