New ammo in PBA fight

PATRICK LYNCH, the head of the city’s largest police union, said the rise in shootings and murders is easy to explain: The city needs more cops and less second-guessing.

“There are not enough police officers on patrol, so management has to steal from one area of policing to shore up another,” said Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. “There are also multiple levels of intense oversight and constant second-guessing of officers enforcing the law that is counterproductive.”

The number of people shot this year is up 9% and murders have ballooned nearly 20%.

Mayor de Blasio did not fund additional officers in his preliminary budget proposal, despite calls by NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton and the City Council to add as many as 1,000 cops.

Brian Fusco, a challenger in the upcoming PBA election, said more cops are only part of the solution. Police need the power to stop and question people more often so that criminals don’t feel they can carry guns without fear they will be arrested.

“If you’re just going to let everybody, every bad guy in the world, feel that he can go unmolested in the city, with weapons, thinking there’s no one who’s going to stop them, then there’s no way you’re going to be able to keep a cap on the assaults, the murders,” he said.

The other challenger, Ronald Wilson, agreed.

“It’s quite evident that people don’t think there are going to be searches,” he said. “That’s why people are getting shot all the time — and it’s not even summer.”

Cops performed 7,125 stops during the first quarter of the year. During the same time period last year, cops stopped about twice that number of people. rparascandola@nydailynews.com