Anti-cop pols are anti-NYC
Rep tape would tie up police and let city rot
LET’S be clear about the latest City Council effort to cripple the NYPD: The lawmakers behind it don’t just hate cops — they hate New York. They hate New Yorkers. More precisely, they hate those New Yorkers who want only to get up in the morning and take a subway to work without tripping over sprawling addicts or coping with incoherent madmen.
Who want relatively tranquil public spaces, safe public schools and reasonable public decorum.
Hey, you know: Who are just trying to get by in a city that’s tough enough when it runs well — never mind when tireless activists labor to make life more difficult, and dangerous, than it need be.
‘Paper’ weight
The progressive council’s latest contribution to civic disorder? Legislation intended to wrap the NYPD so tightly in red tape that it can’t function in any reasonable way.
The bill would require street cops to keep meticulous, permanent records of every single one of the millions of contacts they have with the public every year — even casual conversations with directions-seeking Times Square tourists.
(Next up, for sure: Claims that the NYPD is spying on the public — including directions-seeking Times Square tourists. Anything to hobble a cop.)
It’s hard to imagine a more effective way to keep patrol officers in their cars — silently and cynically watching the chaos roll by — while leaving New Yorkers on their own to cope with it.
Not that the council hasn’t already imposed unreasonable restrictions on the department. They range from rules that make crowd control unnecessarily difficult to curbs on widely accepted tactics for taking violent suspects into custody.
The former recklessly jeopardize public safety generally. The latter endanger individual officers, sometimes gravely, because aggressive criminals by definition follow no rules.
Siding with crime
As a package, the constraints broadcast a profound official distrust of a police department with a distinguished record of public service — a message certain to demoralize serving cops, discourage recruitment, cripple effective police work — and, again, needlessly endanger the public.
Of course there are blemishes on the NYPD record. But one would be hard pressed to find professional lapses over the past 30 years that weren’t provoked by one-off circumstances, or the result of individual misjudgment.
Stop-and-frisk, you say? Well, good cops go where the crime is, and when that tactic was abandoned, crime shot up. Broken windows? Same thing. Certainly there isn’t a faint hint of the systemic abuse that would justify NYPD micromanagement of any sort — let alone what has already been imposed. And now comes more nonsense.
None of this is happening in a vacuum, of course.
Specifically, some of the City Council members hating on the NYPD just showed up for work wearing pro-Hamas T-shirts — vaporizing their credibility on matters of peace, justice and public safety at any level. And yet they presume to lead. The winners: Criminals of all sorts — plus sociopaths, subway slashers, addicts, enablers, organized shoplifters and, of course, drug-dealing street gangs. The losers: Everybody else. Need a cop? Call a council member, and see what happens.