Big Bill’s biggest achievement

After the video came out in Chicago of a black kid, Laquan McDonald, dying at the hands of a police officer, there were massive anti-police protests. The commissioner was canned, beat cops backed down and things got worse, fast.

The footage was made public in November 2015, about a year and a half after the Daily News put out the video in New York City of a black man, Eric Garner, dying at the hands of a police officer in Staten Island. There were massive anti-police protests. Then, things kept getting better.

There were 762 homicides in Chicago in 2016 — more than New York and Los Angeles combined — up from 465 in 2015 as police there stopped and arrested many fewer people. In New York, where police also stopped and arrested fewer people, there were 335 homicides in 2016, down from 352 in 2015.

Put it another way: The increase in one year in the number of murders in Chicago — 294 — nearly matched the total number of murders here, in a city with three times the population. The 1,124 increase in shootings there — to 3,550 from 2,425 — surpassed the record-low 998 total shootings here.

I don’t mean to pick on Chicago’s cops, and each city has different circumstances — geography, laws and politics, police, prosecutors and populations — but clearly the NYPD has worked out answers to questions other places have not. A lot of credit goes to Bill de Blasio. He ran criticizing the police and alienated many cops since becoming mayor, especially with his initial response to the Garner video. His stagecraft continues to be clumsy, most recently when he presented this year’s final crime numbers at a supposed Brooklyn Museum “exhibit” of gritty photos of the city in the bad old days matched up with photos of it now. That turned out to be a staged backdrop, taken down the moment he walked out.

There’s also a sense among many that disorder is on the rise. If so, that seems alright to me. If cops aren’t shunting troubled people off to Rikers to keep them out of view and the city’s no more dangerous, that’s a fundamentally decent exchange.

Bottom line: De Blasio’s delivered on his big promise of a fairer and safer city. That’s a huge accomplishment, one many New Yorkers doubted he could live up to. And he’s done it with two different commissioners in first Bill Bratton and now Jimmy O’Neill.

Under O’Neill’s watch, the total number of index crimes hit a record low in 2016, with drops in every borough. The city saw fewer murders and manslaughters. Fewer forcible rapes. Fewer robberies, burglaries, larcenies and stolen cars.

Those drops came not only from already low numbers, and not only after ending the overuse of stop-and-frisk dragnets but as the number of arrests, too, has kept falling.

“We’ve dropped from sometimes over 400,000 arrests to about 315,000 this year,” says NYPD Chief of Crime Control Strategies Dermot Shea, who’s spent much of the last three years improving Compstat to ensure that what the department measures closely corresponds to what’s happening around the city so cops can be deployed to the right places, and know what to do there.

“Which is still a lot (of arrests),” he says, “but it’s down about 7% this year and about 25,000 in the last two years as we chop out arrests that in my opinion weren’t getting us any great crime reduction (and) as we increase the type of arrests that we think are going to have a greater impact on crime and quality of life.”

Law enforcement will never be an exact science, but, to use the NYPD’s preferred term, that really is precision policing. And the department has kept to that course despite swirling winds: terror threats and protecting Donald Trump and huge protests and murdered cops and on and on.

This is the way forward at a time when many New Yorkers have come to take safe streets for granted after decades of falling crime. After all, most of us here now weren’t here in the “bad old days” briefly back on display at the Brooklyn Museum.

If we learned one thing from 2016, though, it’s that edifices that appear solid can suddenly collapse. I’ve been warning for two years that the key roadblock to needed justice reform would be rising crime and disorder or even just the perception of a rise. Now Trump — who has vowed to restore stop-and-frisk nationally, falsely claiming murders went up in New York as stops declined — will control the Justice Department.

In fact, de Blasio putting in the work here to build on the gains of his predecessors, and to do so as police stop, arrest and incarcerate ever fewer people, is a huge accomplishment — and by no means a passive one.

If the mayor makes his case in November for a second term, and if he ever finally finds his place on the national stage as a progressive leader, this will be why.