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Heather Mac Donald has a long overview of the NYPD in “The Mayor Who Slandered the Police.” In place of some of today’s cartoons, we have five pictures of NYC subways before the “broken windows” policing that made the City a livable place. The end result of de Blasio’s foolishness, will be subways that again look like they did in the 1970′s.
New York City mayor Bill de Blasio is “comfortable” with himself. So the city learned during the biggest crisis to hit a New York mayoralty in recent memory. “I’m comfortable with the fact that I’ve always tried to tell the truth and stay true to my values,” de Blasio said in mid January, as police officers across New York City continued a work slowdown that had brought discretionary police activity to a virtual standstill. De Blasio’s breezy self-assurance was revealing but unfortunate, since it was his belief in his own mission as social-justice truth-teller that had pushed the police into revolt in the first place.
William Bratton, New York City police commissioner, has now mobilized the considerable management and disciplinary tools at his disposal to force officers to increase their enforcement activity. But the fault lines that led to the slowdown are still there. Law enforcement in New York may be on the rise for now, but in the long term public safety remains at risk from an activist mayor who sees his base as the anti-police Left.
The New York Police Department slowdown was born of two emotions: fear and anger. And it triggered an outburst of hypocrisy on the part of the political and media elites that was breathtaking to behold.
It began on December 20, 2014, when a thug from Brooklyn assassinated two police officers sitting in their patrol car in a violence-plagued Brooklyn housing project. NYPD cops had been ambushed and assassinated before, but this time felt different, a transit captain observed to me. Those prior assassinations “were carried out by small bands of radicals” who were not operating in a generalized anti-police climate, he said. “Today, the anti-cop atmosphere is at a fever pitch and is fed by elected officials and the media.”
The assassinations of officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu was preceded by months of anti-police agitation in New York and nationwide, all dedicated to the absurd proposition that police officers are the biggest threat facing young black men. Riots had twice broken out in Ferguson, Mo.; activists in New York had been allowed by the mayor and police commissioner to shut down major bridges and highways with impunity, to the dismay of the police and vast swaths of the public. Protesters at one Midtown Manhattan march had chanted, “What do we want? Dead cops!” with no word of condemnation from City Hall; at another march commandeering the BrooklynBridge, protesters tried to hurl trash cans at officers on the level below them. Two public defenders from the Bronx participated in a rap video extolling cop killings. …
… De Blasio’s fawning praise of Al Sharpton as a “blessing for this city [and] a blessing for this nation”; his elevation of Sharpton to City Hall policing adviser; his hiring of Sharpton’s press agent as his wife’s chief of staff, and his stubborn defense of that hire despite her lies on her background check and the “off the pigs” rhetoric spewed by both her convicted-murderer boyfriend and her son — these and other alliances with the anti-police Left convinced officers that the mayor would not support them when they were forced to make controversial split-second decisions on the streets. Better, then, to walk by low-level offenses, especially public-order violations, than to risk their careers and possibly their lives making a discretionary arrest that could be opportunistically turned into a racial flashpoint. …
… But the tentative return toward the status quo ante means that the rank and file has compromised in its feud with de Blasio without the mayor’s taking responsibility for his part in that feud. De Blasio has not only refused to apologize for his remarks after the Eric Garner grand-jury decision, he has portrayed himself as the victim in the dispute. He characterized the “blood on many hands” comment of union head Lynch as “totally inappropriate, totally inaccurate, and totally unfair.” Lynch went too far in the heat of the moment, but the idea that de Blasio’s son is at any significant risk from the NYPD is also “totally” false. If Dante de Blasio is at risk, it is from criminals, not the police. In 2013, criminals in New York City committed 1,103 shootings, wounding or killing 1,299 victims. NYPD officers, by contrast, shot 17 people and killed eight, despite having been dispatched 80,000 times to investigate weapons reports and having encountered guns and other weapons in over 30,000 arrests.
Almost all those victims of police shootings had extensive and serious criminal records; most had threatened the officer with deadly force. Whites were far more likely to be shot by the police than blacks when their crime rates are taken into account. Whites were 5 percent of all suspects shot by the police in 2013 though they committed only 2 percent of the city’s shootings — a 250 percent disparity. Blacks were 75 percent of criminal shooters and 79 percent of police-shooting victims — virtual parity. (To put those crime figures in perspective: Blacks make up 23 percent of the city’s population, and whites 35 percent.) Far from being the main threat faced by minority males, the police have been their savior. Ten thousand more minority males would be dead today had the NYPD not brought New York’s homicide rate down 80 percent since the mid 1990s. The question “Is Dante safe?” has become a bitter joke among officers who would like nothing better than to be dispatched on a gun run and find a white perpetrator. …
Michael Goodwin says de Blasio’s chickens have come home to roost.
For Mayor de Blasio, last week was one he’d like to forget. It started with brickbats over a botched plan for a blizzard that fizzled, and it was all downhill from there.
By the end, he was battling something more pernicious than either Mother Nature or Gov. Cuomo. That would be political allies whose actions point up once again the dangers of his radical anti-police agenda.
In a decision that earned City Hall and its lawyers a rare but justified outburst from top cop Bill Bratton, de Blasio’s team wrote a check to a machete-wielding thug who was shot by cops after he threatened them.
The payoff to Ruhim Ullah to drop his lawsuit was only $5,000 but the principle it represented — that cops who shot him did something wrong — sent Bratton into orbit.
“It’s outrageous that the city Law Department is continuing to not support the men and women of this department as they go about their duties,” he thundered. “Our cops work very hard trying to keep this city safe, and if they’re not going to be backed up by the city law office, we need to do something about this.”
The commish was still fuming when it emerged that lawyers under contract with the city to represent poor defendants had participated in a video calling for the execution of cops — and lied about it to city investigators. …
Good Washington Post article on whether the investment in attending college always pay off.
Earlier this month, after announcing his plan to make community college free, President Obama lauded a college degree as “the surest ticket to the middle class.”
New research in the prolific field of “Is College Worth It?” suggests it’s not that simple.
“‘Ticket’ implies a college degree is something you can just cash in,” said Alan Benson, assistant business professor at the University of Minnesota. “But it doesn’t work that way. A college degree is more of a stepping stone, one ingredient to consider when you’re cooking up your career. … It’s not always the best investment for everyone.” …
… Benson’s conclusion: The investment of a college education is generally better for those who graduate — and on time — from a school with healthier resources.
“Students have some control over if they graduate and when,” Benson said, so, knowing this, America’s youth is better equipped to weigh the risks before making educational plans after high school.