Clueless Cop-Bashers

The cop-bashers just won’t be happy until the NYPD quits fighting crime altogether. They rallied at City Hall last week against police crackdowns on violent gangs. That’s right: gangs.

The demonstrators called on NYPD Inspector General Philip Eure to probe the department’s antigang tactics and its criteria for adding names to its databases.

In a letter, some two dozen groups — including the Legal Aid Society, Black Lives Matter and NYC Shut It Down — particularly complain about “military-style gang raids” at public-housing sites.

The raids regularly nab suspects already indicted by prosecutors or wanted by cops. Why would anyone object to their arrest?

Sadly, such nonsense sometimes winds up imposing new restrictions on policing: The IG (and a court-appointed monitor) don’t answer to any democratic institution, and much of the City Council is always up for new laws limiting the NYPD.

Indeed, court rulings have already hamstrung cops in patrolling public housing.

All this, when the NYPD has abandoned stop-andfrisk, with stops down some 98 percent from their peak in 2011.

And when decades of innovative policing have massively reduced the number of New Yorkers sent to jail and prison — by preventing crimes from being committed in the first place.

One core NYPD crime-reduction strategy is Broken Windows policing — focusing on addressing low-level disorder in order to create an environment where major crime becomes less likely. Fewer crimes has meant fewer convicted criminals and far fewer prisoners — yet the critics still ignorantly tie Broken Windows to “mass incarceration.”

Much of New York’s remaining violent crime is linked to gangs: An NYPD spokesman says more than half of all city shootings are gang-related.

And gangs are a particular problem in the projects. As then-Commissioner Bill Bratton noted in 2015, many shootings come in “conflicts between groups of young men who happen to live in different New York City Housing Authority developments.”

By targeting gangs (police cite 100 major takedowns last year, netting some 1,000 thugs), the NYPD has driven shootings to a record low, 998 in 2016 and likely lower yet this year.

And the public supports the cops. “Finally, we’re going to be able to sit outside with our children . . . without having to worry,” said local resident Donna Fischer after a huge gang bust last year at a public-housing site in The Bronx. “We’re getting our development back from these criminals.”

If anyone’s out of touch with the community, it’s the cop-bashers.