The 2013 mayoral election isn’t for another year and a half, yet the wannabes are already vying to out-pander each other.
Their irresponsibility was on full display yesterday, as they reacted to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s more-than-reasonable plans to make changes to the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program.
Kelly has faced intense criticism of one of the city’s most valuable crime-fighting tools: stopping suspicious individuals, questioning them — and, when appropriate, frisking them for weapons.
The brickbats have been relentless — even though, as Mayor Bloomberg says, the practice has removed some thousands of illegal guns from city streets in the past eight years and helped save the lives of some 5,600 New Yorkers (mostly minority males).
At a City Council hearing yesterday, Kelly defended the program, and rightly so.
He noted that New York’s murder rate this year has fallen to less than one a day. With luck, 2012 could wind up with the lowest rate on record — and stop-and-frisk would deserve much of the credit.
Nonetheless, he is officially warning cops yet again not to racially profile, and he’ll bolster training for stop-and-frisks. He’s also demanding ongoing precinct-level audits of the program, keying in on problematic cops and expanding community outreach. These are significant concessions.
But they’re not nearly enough for the mayoral pretenders, who seemingly won’t rest until the murder rate skyrockets.
And that includes those who have a realistic chance of being elected mayor next year — Council Speaker Chris Quinn, ex-city Comptroller Bill Thompson and, perhaps, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio.
And those on fantasy trips — Comptroller John Liu and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.
Stringer dismissed Kelly’s reforms outright as a “public relations gambit.” De Blasio wants legislation to gut the program — and Liu wants to scrap it altogether.
Even Quinn (who some see as among the more rational of the likely contenders) insisted that “more must be done to significantly reduce the number of stops.”
They’re playing with fire — all of them.
Indeed, if they do manage to weaken the program, the blood of new crime victims will be on their hands.
So: Will the city once again become the Crime Capital of the World?
Alas, so it seems.