Crime DROPPED during anti-Blaz NYPD slowdown

THE NYPD WORK slowdown after the fatal shootings of Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos did not lead to a jump in crime across the five boroughs, according to a new report.

After turning their backs to Mayor de Blasio following the December 2014 murders, many rankand-file NYPD cops stopped giving out summonses and performed their duties only as laid out in NYPD guidelines, which added more time to responses and arrests.

Yet the departmentwide snub to City Hall never put anyone in danger. Major crimes fell up to 6% during those weeks, according to a recent report published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

The study was based off of CompStat reports requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

It showed that each week during the slowdown, residents reported an estimated 43 fewer assaults, 40 fewer burglaries and 40 fewer grand larcenies, or nonviolent thefts of $1,000 or more.

The drop in crime continued for 14 weeks after the slowdown ended, according to researchers Christopher Sullivan and Zachary O’Keefe, who determined that the slowdown resulted in 2,100 fewer major crimes across the city.

“Our results show that crime complaints decreased, rather than increased, during a slowdown in proactive policing,” the researchers said in their paper.

They contend that shoots down the long-established “broken windows” theory that a proactive focus on low-level violations such as fare-beating and drug possession stops more violent crimes from happening in the future.

“The cessation of proactive policing corresponds roughly to the relative decline in crime that earlier research attributed to the effects of mass incarceration,” the report notes.

The study reviewed the weeks between December 2014 and early 2015, just after a Staten Island grand jury failed to indict Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo over his use of a banned chokehold that killed Eric Garner. De Blasio angered police then by voicing support for protesters.

The division between de Blasio and the police unions continued for several weeks, but culminated in the officers’ public denouncement of de Blasio by turning their back to him at Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn, where Ramos and Liu died on Dec. 20.

During the slowdown, the number of summonses dropped 94% for the week ending Dec. 29, records show. That trend continued with a 92% dip for the week ending Jan. 4. Arrests were down 66% during the last two weeks of 2014.

The slowdown ended by the second week of January 2015.

At the time, then-Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said the slowdown had no impact on public safety, with two fewer murders and four shootings taking place during the slowdown than at the same time a year earlier.

The NYPD did not return a request for comment on the Nature Human Behaviour study.