Metro

Bold ‘frisk’ alternative

More than a few New Yorkers are worried that the next mayor and police commissioner won’t be as tough on crime as Mayor Bloomberg and Ray Kelly. Those fears are growing because of the relentless attacks by liberals on stop-and-frisk, a tactic that Bloomberg and Kelly credit as being key to their historic success in preventing crime.

The argument is binary — either you support the widespread use of stop-and-frisk, or you view it as racial profiling and demand it be sharply curtailed. The middle ground is hard to find.

Bill Thompson thinks he’s standing on it. The former city comptroller is one of those liberal critics, as well as a Democratic mayoral candidate, and he wants to signal that he takes crime seriously and would not tolerate any backsliding.

His answer is twofold: Use stop- and-frisk less, and hire more cops. He doesn’t think the NYPD is large enough to combat a recent spike in crime.

“More police means more people on the street,” Thompson told me. “There is a direct correlation between numbers that are out there and the work that gets done.”

He said the force “should be above 37,000 officers.” He notes that the reported current number, 34,413, is one of the lowest in two decades.

The Dem nominee against Bloomberg in 2009, Thompson, who is black, also believes that stop-and-frisk “is being misused and abused” as an anti-gun tactic. He says the nearly 700,000 stops last year “don’t make sense” given that the number of shootings in 2011 was almost exactly the same as in 2002, when there were fewer than 100,000 stops.

However, it is also true that homicides fell from 587 in 2002 to 515 in 2011.

“It’s a tool,” Thompson says of stop-and-frisk. “You don’t want to eliminate it, but you want to use it correctly.”

He’s not sure how many stops there should be, only that “when communities feel victimized or singled out, you know something is wrong.”

Part of Thompson’s goal is to find a new angle on a sterile debate. “The way the argument is being framed is that if you’re not in favor of stop-and-frisk, you’re pro-crime,” he tells me. He believes there are other ways to get guns off the street.

He doesn’t directly claim that police are doing more stops to compensate for a smaller force, but he certainly suggests a link. At any rate, he wants safe streets without so many complaints, and says more cops are part of the answer.

“I want to be mayor and I want to make sure this city is safe,” he says. “The thing that has helped to transform the city the most in my lifetime is the reduction of crime. It is important that we stay vigilant.”

Thompson’s call follows one by City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr., who wrote in The Post that he wants a force of 38,000 officers. The Queens Democrat thinks the city is playing with fire by letting the numbers decline.

The city started to add cops under Mayor David Dinkins and reached the peak of nearly 41,000 under Rudy Giuliani in 2000, including the 6,500 housing and transit officers he folded into the NYPD. The force is now about 10 percent smaller than when Bloomberg took office, hitting a reported low of 33,777 in June 2011.

Yet crime has fallen much faster, with the major-felony index down 75 percent during the Giuliani-Bloomberg years.

In that context, Thompson’s call for a minimum of 37,000 is not a guarantee of better results. The question is how additional cops would be deployed, and under what orders. It also matters whether the commissioner and mayor are on the same page.

The real significance of Thompson’s promise is political — he is the first 2013 candidate to lay down a serious marker about crime. The public supports stop-and-frisk because the streets are safer than they’ve been in half-a-century. If the next mayor can achieve better results in different ways, public support would follow.

The challenge now is for other candidates to begin to outline their ideas. Voters could do worse than having the candidates battle over who would deliver the safest city.

No. 1 in wins, but big loser

When Joe Paterno passed away last January, it was said that the Penn State football coach died of a broken heart. Now it seems he is lucky he died when he did.

No college coach ever won more games than Paterno, and none has ever fallen so hard in disgrace. Instead of a legendary career, he leaves behind an earthquake of damage. Paterno’s name will never be said again without reference to his role in the coverup of a decades-long pedophile scandal. If he were alive, he might be facing indictment because of new information about what he knew and when he knew it.

The NCAA sanctions announced Monday, including a $60 million fine and a reduction in athletic scholarships, are harsh, but university leaders accepted them in a bid to move the institution away from the sordid saga.

As someone who grew up in the shadow of Penn State, I can attest that Paterno was a demi-god in central Pennsylvania. His teams won, and they won the right way.

Or so we thought. For what happened on the field has now been destroyed by what happened off the field. In turning away as young boys were molested by a former assistant, Paterno and others failed the test of decency.

That failure is hard to square with the Paterno legend, but we don’t have to bother trying. By vacating his victories from 1998 to 2011, the NCAA has erased his singular achievement of having the most wins.

It’s a punishment that fits the crime.

Congress’ gun ‘silencers’

No right is absolute — you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater when there is none. But you can fire 100 shots in a crowded theater, and not fire up Congress.

It is a measure of Washington’s dysfunction that the slaughter in Colorado has not created a stir for a ban on semi-automatic assault weapons.

America has no appetite for a knock-down fight over gun restrictions. But the Second Amendment is not absolute, and a finely tailored bill that aims to prevent mass murder makes perfect sense.

Except in Congress, where the silence says it all.

Tiki tipped to drop the ball

Count reader Leslye Kohl as a skeptic about Tiki Barber’s new marriage. Citing his affair with Traci Lynn Johnson when his former wife was pregnant with twins, Kohl writes: “Let’s see how long he stays with Traci Lynn when she’s pregnant and has lost her Maxim pin-up figure!”

Owe-bama!

President Obama loves red ink. After four years of exploding the national debt, his campaign is now spending more money than it’s raising. Hey, at least he’s consistent.