Ganging up on the NYPD
President Trump’s Department of Justice Friday concocted evidence in an attempt to frame the nation’s largest city, in fact innocent of all charges. This was itself a crime. Motive: To deny federal funding to a so-called sanctuary city. Method: By smearing New York City, a place the President of all people is supposed to understand.
“New York City continues to see gang murder after gang murder, the predictable consequence of the city’s ‘soft on crime’ stance,” the agency claiming to lead the nation on law enforcement pronounced, hyping a letter sent to eight cities and counties and the state of California demanding proof they cooperate with information requests by the feds, on penalty of losing aid.
The thuggish talk reflects in a haunted-house mirror the present state of public order.
Fact: Crime in New York City is at its lowest levels since the NYPD began counting comprehensively a quarter century ago, with murders, shootings and all serious crimes at a small fraction of their numbers past, even as the city’s population has grown. The MS-13 gang murders to which the Justice Department seemed to refer to actually took place on Long Island, not in New York City.
On the line for New York are several million dollars a year in federal aid, used to fund criminal justice programs proven to improve public safety.
To add insult to insult to threatened injury, the feds call the funds the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant, honoring the NYPD officer murdered in 1988 while standing watch protecting a witness readying to testify against cocaine kingpins. Talk about “gang murder after gang murder”: That year, New York City set what was then a grim record high, with 1,896 murders in all.
Immigration status proved less than irrelevant, then and now. Byrne’s killers were native-born. The witness Byrne was protecting, preparing bravely to testify? An immigrant.
Which illuminates a crucial reason why the NYPD under three mayors, two of them Republican, and five police commissioners, has refused to inquire about individuals’ immigration status: When otherwise law-abiding immigrants are afraid of authorities, and thus refuse to come forward, public safety suffers.
Those are the facts. Then there’s Trump, who campaigned on a promise to defund sanctuary cities, only to find his immediate power to do so limited.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions grasps at a slim straw by demanding proof that New York and the other cities are abiding by a federal law that demands the free exchange of information on individuals’ immigration status.
Because New York City does not ask, it cannot tell.
And when Immigration and Customs Enforcement sends validated requests for information regarding the release of violent criminals from police custody or jail, New York City readily cooperates.
So nakedly political is the Justice Department’s attack that Sessions felt compelled to clarify that his beef was with Mayor de Blasio alone, not a city that “has done some great things in criminal justice.”
He already stole the city’s honor. Now he aims to take our money.