NYC Needs a Crime-Fighting Mayor
‘As you look down the road, as far as crime-reduction in New York City, it’s a very bleak picture,” ex-NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly recently told radio host John Catsimatidis. “There’s no light at the end of the tunnel, as far as I can see.”
That was one bleak assessment by the city’s former top cop — lamenting that none of the leading mayoral candidates has shown an interest in cracking down on crime. Yet the facts bear him out.
Case in point: Andrew Yang was heckled and called “pro-cop” by demonstrators during a bike ride protesting the police-involved shooting death of Daunte Wright on Tuesday night.
Apparently, the anti-cop fanatics took offense at the candidate’s mild call for more funding for the NYPD’s Asian Hate Crimes Task Force amid a spate of violent attacks.
Yang’s remarks are in-sync with most New Yorkers, who want police follow-up to both solve crimes and prevent future ones — with the perps arrested, tried and imprisoned. But speaking common sense out loud will get candidates heckled, shamed and run out of events, as the radicals did to Yang.
In fact, the bullies have most of the Democratic mayoral wannabes at least nodding to “Defund the police” nonsense.
Progressive favorite Maya Wiley would cut the headcount at 1 Police Plaza and city jails and use the savings to fund one-stop community centers and so on.
Establishment Democrat Scott Stringer strives to appease the radicals by taking various responsibilities (and funding) from the NYPD and giving the Civilian Complaint Review Board final say over police discipline — kneecapping the department’s commissioner, whoever he’d manage to talk into taking the job with such conditions.
Eric Adams, a retired police captain, vows to . . . name the first woman police commissioner. He’s anti-“defund” but promises to find $1 billion in “savings” in the NYPD budget.
Another dodge: Rather than disbanding the NYPD’s anti-crime unit, he says he’d have turned it into an anti-gun unit — which is what it actually was anyway. But Adams would much rather talk about his big plans for . . . wind power.
Yang and Ray McGuire talk about naming a deputy mayor just to bird-dog the department. Yang also wants a civilian, not a career cop, to head the department, while McGuire (like Stringer) vows to find “savings” in the NYPD budget.
Absent is any forthright vow to get New York off the path to being an open city for criminals and violent street crazies, any clear recognition that subways, buses and other public spaces won’t become safer on their own.
City Hall needs straight-talking leadership with a laser focus on reducing crime and disorder — someone who’ll face down the radicals who demand police scalps and stand with a public that desperately wants the “good old days” of ever-increasing public safety to return.