Crackdown on killer gangs

Shea: Gotta get punks ‘terrorizing nabes’ off the streets

The city will be a safer place in 2021 as the NYPD sharpens its focus on violent gangs, Police Commissioner Dermot Shea all but predicted Tuesday.

“We’re not looking to throw thousands and thousands of people into prison,” Shea (photo) said at a press briefing at 1 Police Plaza in lower Manhattan. “But we’ve got to get people off the street that are terrorizing neighborhoods. I see better times ahead.”

Right now, the numbers are daunting: the 441 homicides the city has seen so this year are 41% more than the 317 by this time last year.

Shootings are even worse, with 1,855 people shot this year — 103% more than the 914 last year. More than half the shootings have what NYPD Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison called “a gang nexus.”

But even as Shea lamented bail-reform measures he believes have gone too far, he said there is reason to be hopeful.

Shea and Harrison noted the arrest on Monday of more than a dozen gang members linked to 13 acts of violence, including at least one murder, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

Gang-related cases, the NYPD says, take longer to bring to conclusion if witnesses are reluctant to cooperate with police and testify in court. In the end though, the cases often have enough evidence that suspects are held on high bail or held with no bail.

“These cases are very methodical, very time-consuming,” Harrison said.

“Cases like this are going to help us stop the violence that we saw in 2020. We’re grabbing the alpha males of these gangs, the heads of the snakes, the ones carrying the guns and pulling the triggers.”

Shea said the NYPD is emerging from what he called “that dark period” when thousands of cops were sickened with COVID-19 and the city was overflowing with protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. The “defund the police” movement sparked a billion-dollar cut in the NYPD’s budget.

The fallout from the protests is far from over, with the city Department of Investigation earlier this month releasing a report that said the NYPD was not ready to deal with the protests and badly mishandled them, sometimes using “excessive enforcement.”

“The response,” Investigation Department Commissioner Margaret Garnett said, “was really a failure on many levels.”

Shea on Tuesday said no one is more critical of the NYPD than the department itself. While he did not disagree with some of DOI’s findings and many of its recommendations, he claimed the report failed to account fully for the rioters who showed up looking to attack cops and destroy property.

“You can’t ignore that there’s people actually training. Like the police officers train and review their policies, you have groups that are doing that on the opposite side as well, on the anarchist side and the protesters’ side,” Shea said.

“And I’m not talking about peaceful protesters. I’m talking about people that are strategizing, communicating via encrypted apps, that are bringing weapons to protests. It would do everyone well, I think, to comment a little more on that equation.”