Cuomo’s despair is showing

Last Tuesday, with all the rhetorical bling of one of his once popular Covid-19-update television shows, Gov. Andrew Cuomo intimated to a sympathetic New York City audience that his political career is in a dangerous state of emergency and that he’s desperately looking to latch on to anything to turn it around.

Granted, while that’s what he really meant, the words that came of his mouth related to an uptick in gun violence in the state’s inner cities. He claimed this deserved to be declared a state public health emergency and called it an epidemic, comparable to the COVID-19 pandemic. And he knows how to deal with an epidemic.

Well, no, no and no. While gun violence is a grave concern to the communities affected and should get the respectful attention it deserves from all of us, it is not epidemic. All 18 million plus New Yorkers were at risk with the COVID-19 virus, while the vast majority of New Yorkers are unaffected by gun violence and never will be, for all the ink it gets. As for public approval of Cuomo’s handling of the COVID epidemic — which he was trying to capitalize on with this event — there will always be how he handled nursing home deaths as well. So, a mixed bag.

Cuomo delivered a sevenpoint program for dealing with our new emergency public health threat that didn’t feature much of anything new and sounded in general like a sociology class taking on a war zone. Then again, the venue for this presentation was the John Jay School of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. The first point was “treat gun violence like the emergency public health issue it is,” and at the very bottom was “rebuild police-community relations.” To be taken seriously, those two should be reversed, I would think. Number three was “positive engagement for at -risk youth,” which would include victims and shooters, gang members too, I guess, and “positive engagement” doesn’t include cuffs.

So the larger question raised by this slapdash testament to the state’s failure to quell gun violence in the cities over the last 10 years of Cuomo’s reign is, why now? Why did Cuomo decide this was the right time for one of his three-legged pony shows?

The answer is simple enough. Look above at the first paragraph. He’s desperate.

The latest Siena poll shows crime is far and away the issue of most concern to New Yorkers, and guess what, gun violence for most of us counts as a crime. Cuomo is quite vulnerable on the issue since he endorsed controversial bail reform a couple of years ago that remains deeply galling to law enforcement. Last month,

Rochester’s police chief met with federal prosecutors to find ways around reform provisions that allow those with gun violence records to walk away after arrests. State judges’ hands are tied, and that’s just wrong. Judicial discretion needs to be returned to the bail process. New York City police have voiced similar concerns as Rochester.

Now, maybe reform is getting a bad rap. The truth is we know very little about the real-life consequences of those reforms and no one seems in a big hurry to educate us.

Cuomo has an urgent incentive to get out front now. We are less than a year from the Democratic primary for governor. The same poll has only a third of likely New York voters supporting his efforts to stay governor. Most voters want somebody else. The rub, of course, is finding an acceptable alternative.

Whether a Republican stands a snowball’s chance of winning, or whether a credible Democrat suddenly emerges as a challenger, depend entirely on how bad various investigations of the governor that are very much in play turn out for him. We’re all waiting.

But back to Cuomo’s pony show. You could tell he was threading a needle when it came to talking about police and their role in what’s ahead according to this particular plan for dealing with gun violence. The audience was mostly from the minority community and probably not hugely propolice. But how can you even begin to talk about reclaiming neighborhoods and curbing gun violence without the police being front and center?

I heard a lot of carrots from Cuomo and his plan that made his audience happy, but those carrots are no good without the sticks provided by the men and women in blue.

Which brings us to a final question whose answer remains unclear to me. What do we want from our police in this new age of racial justice in tension with maintaining public safety for all? What do we want to “reform” police to?

Hold them accountable for misdeeds, make their disciplinary records public, provide better education, training, resources, have them spend more time learning the communities they serve.

All good.

But police by definition are paramilitary. They are most effective when properly trained, have a clear mission and the resources required.

So please, don’t mess with the mission to keep the peace, enforce the law and put bad guys in jail, which we need now more than ever.