De Blasio’s Next Move
How to keep the city safe now
MARGARET Thatcher said that her biggest victory was the rise of “New Labour” — that is, her businessfriendly approach to governing Britain was so successful that the leftwing opposition had to steal her ideas to win rather than offer their own. Don’t look now, but the same thing may be happening when it comes to Gotham and crime.
We’ve got a mayor who is proud to call himself a leftist — but who, over his first two summers out of a fouryear term, has delivered even lower crime rates than his two predecessors did.
Summer’s over, and 13 more black and Hispanic kids are alive this year who would have been dead if we had just kept up with last year’s summer murder count.
This year, we had 82 summer murders, down from 95 last year — a 14 percent decrease. Shootings, too, were at record lows.
Since the warm summer months see more murders than any other time of year, that’s good news for gang members who’d like to see another Christmas.
And with murders up only 6 percent for all of 2015, the police just have to save a dozen more lives to have a recordlow 2015, just as they did in 2014.
Even if our murder crash doesn’t reach another record, de Blasio’s first half of his term in office is looking good.
During Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s 12 years in office, the murder rate rose four times, including twice by more than 10 percent.
The murder rate fluctuates. And with murders barely nonexistent in many parts of the city, even just one number can make a difference, especially before the summer. When Thomas Gilbert Jr. allegedly shot and killed his hedgefund father in January, he increased Manhattan’s murder rate by 17 percent.
But for now, the trend under de Blasio — as with other crimes — is down, down, down. According to a Quinnipiac poll released before the summer murder stats, 81 percent of New Yorkers thought their neighborhood was safe. They’re right.
De Blasio has been crowing over this success, but he well knows that he’ll be eating crow over a bad summer next year, or the year after.
He probably knows it enough, even, to choose more street stopandfrisks — and more Al Sharpton “outrage” — over a higher murder rate, if he has to.
Candidates will say anything to get elected; mayors do things to stay elected. For more evidence of that, notice that de Blasio appears to have wisely ditched the people who want to ban horse carriages.
De Blasio gets a lot wrong, but he’s got one thing right. The mayor — and nothing else, not poverty, unemployment or poor values among young people today — is responsible for the number of murders on the city’s streets.
The debate of three decades ago is over, at least in New York. The numbers so far make it harder for any 2017 election challenge to mount a lawandorder against de Blasio.
Last time, the mayor’s conservative challengers warned: Elect de Blasio, and we’ll be back to the ’70s.
De Blasio ran a campaign based on inequality instead of law and order. And here’s the thing: Since people are actually afraid of being priced out of the city more than they are about being murdered, that worked.
Raising the specter of 2,000 murders a year when murders were at record lows made the candidates who did that seem irrelevant to today’s problems: housing costs, middleclass jobs, publicschool education, impossibly noisy construction work, traffic deaths and crowded subways.
Unless crime rises, and fast, 2017 candidates will have to deal with these other problems. And on many of them, they could make a good case.
But those problems are also trickier. Almost nobody is in favor of crime. Lots of people are in favor of speeding on city streets, protecting teachers’ salaries and benefits (and those of other union workers) and letting developers flout noise codes in New York’s neighborhoods.
But if the next two de Blasio summers look like the first two, wouldbe mayors will have to figure something out. A primary or generalelection challenger won’t have a chaosinthestreets case to make.