New York City’s gunfire-casualty list for the eight-day period ending Monday reads like the butcher’s bill from Iraq before the surge: 112 people shot — 57 over the holiday weekend alone — and a staggering 25 dead.
Among the wounded: two cops.
Did someone turn the clock back to 1990?
More to the point, what’s to be done about it?
Mayor Bloomberg yesterday demanded tough gun-control legislation from Washington — but that’s simply howling into the wind. It’s not going to happen, and even if it did, there are too many guns already on the street to make any difference.
Here’s a sampling of the carnage:
* Two people were killed, including a mother sitting on her stoop with her daughter, and two cops were hit in a gun fight in Crown Heights Monday night.
* An 18-year-old was fatally shot in the early hours Monday in East Flatbush.
* Two men were struck on Eastern Parkway in the afternoon.
* A 17-year-old boy in The Bronx took a bullet in the leg Sunday evening.
And so it went.
Meanwhile, as if to provide some mac-abre relief, a city councilman and an aide to Public Advocate Bill de Blasio spent much of yesterday whining about having been handcuffed after they allegedly disobeyed police orders and tried to push through a closed-off area following the annual West Indian Day parade along Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.
Councilman Jumaane Williams, not surprisingly, credited his brief detention to racism — “If we were white elected officials, this would not have happened,” he whined.
That’s arguable, but it also displays a shockingly selfish and shortsighted take on the week’s violence.
That is:
* Of the 112 victims, 105 were minorities.
* All of the suspected shooters are black or Hispanic.
* And aggressive patrolling of the parade areas led to the confiscation of 15 illegal guns.
All of this suggests that the principal policing problem right now has very little to do with cops paying too much attention to young minority men.
If anything, it has to do with them not paying enough attention to young minority men.
We don’t presume to tell Police Commissioner Ray Kelly how to do his job. But clearly some people need to be reminded just how it was that New York City won its war on street crime back in the bloody ’90s.
That involved tough tactics for a tough time (and never mind the nit-picking pettifoggers at the New York Civil Liberties Union).
They included:
* Vigorous stop-and-frisks in high-crime areas. (The 15 guns cops grabbed Monday are argument enough for that.)
* A crackdown on low-level crimes — fare-beating, public urination, squeegee shakedowns and the like — thus allowing cops to check for old warrants and make arrests when they got hits.
Moreover, there can be no tolerance for soft-touch jurists like Criminal Court Judge Carol Feinman, who turns perps loose faster that cops can arrest them.
Nor for incompetent prosecutors, like the one in the Bronx DA’s office whose missed deadlines sprung an accused cop-shooter.
Violent crime, as the city found out last time around, not only takes a toll on victims and social life, it also strangles the economy — and the very spirit of the city.
It needs to be stopped — now.