Blas’ Crime Cluelessness
Why he doesn’t calm NY’s fears
LAST week, 30-year-old Karina Vetrano left her house for a jog in her Howard Beach neighborhood and never returned. She was, according to police, possibly sexually assaulted before being brutally murdered.
A beautiful woman and devoted daughter, she made the mistake of believing she lived in a New York where this kind of thing could never happen.
Around New York in the days following the killing, it seemed everyone was talking about it. We only see murders like this on old “Law & Order” episodes, not in seemingly safe areas like Howard Beach. How could such a thing happen? Wasn’t New York safe now?
After all, that’s what Mayor de Blasio told us.
But his reaction to Vetrano’s gruesome killing shows he still doesn’t get it when it comes to crime and public safety.
De Blasio only mentioned Vetrano in passing, ironically during his monthly press conference about crime levels last Thursday. He was proud of the numbers. Overall index crimes down 1 percent. Homicides down 4 percent. “Something profound has happened,” he boasted. The mention of Vetrano came in the 40th minute of the conference, in response to a press question.
Last summer, de Blasio brushed off a spike in murders by saying, “I’d say look at the facts and stop the hysteria. At this point, overall crime is down approximately 6 percent from last year.” He failed to mention that while, yes, at that point some crime had been down in some boroughs (Manhattan and Bronx had had an increase in overall crime), homicides had been up 9 percent.
Let’s face it, getting your iPhone stolen or your car broken into is terrible, but when those crimes are down and murders are up, no one feels too good about the situation. The mayor doesn’t seem to get the difference in the public’s perception of various crimes. Burglaries are bad, homicides and rapes are much worse.
And if statistics didn’t matter when homicides were up, surely they don’t matter now that they are slightly down when we have a highprofile murder like Vetrano’s.
What New York City is desperately missing in the mayor is leadership.
He can tell us the numbers matter right up until they don’t, but when NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce said the department believes there’s a “severe community threat” following Vetrano’s murder, we’re getting mixed signals from the administration — and New Yorkers are more likely to believe the NYPD that there’s a threat than de Blasio’s all-is-well spin.
It’s true, Boyce called the murder “extraordinarily rare.” But that isn’t comforting. Some murders resonate with a city, and Vetrano’s is one of those. It’s not because she was pretty or young, or because she was a woman or white. It’s the presumed randomness of her attack that has the city on edge. It could’ve been any of us.
It’s similar to the rash of stabbings (a 20 percent spike, for the mayor keeping score) that gripped our city at the start of this year.
Boyce had said, “The random nature of some of these crimes affect everyone because it’s disturbing when it happens to just regular folks.” The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald told Bloomberg News, “The public feels like the streets are getting out of control, and it’s hard to talk to anyone in the city who doesn’t feel there’s been an increase in street homelessness, litter and a general sense of order breaking down.”
Our mayor had a different take. The stabbings were to be seen as a positive! “I’m not a criminologist, but I can safely say that guns are being taken off the street in an unprecedented way. Some people, unfortunately, are turning to a different weapon,” he said.
And de Blasio doesn’t think the out-of-control feeling across the city matters. Outgoing Police Commissioner Bill Bratton has long been on record that enforcing quality-of-life crimes is important to preventing other crimes and for ensuring the city doesn’t fall into disarray.
But the mayor disagrees. When the City Council passed reforms to curtail punishment for crimes like public urination, the mayor called it “an important step.”
When the NYPD says joggers are at risk, focusing on a 1 percent drop in homicides isn’t going to stop people from being afraid. It would be nice if the mayor took the pulse of the city; he’d notice it was racing.