“A fairer, safer city”

I stumbled across this column by Harry Siegel yesterday in the Daily News while getting my shoes shined. It’s bar far the best thing I’ve read in a while about the current state of crime and New York City. Read the whole thing. But here are some highlights:

Pay no mind to the shrill voices on the left warning of a creeping police state. Or to those on the right shrieking about urban anarchy around the corner.

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Almost everyone lies about crime and cops, because no one knows exactly how the two relate and almost no one cares to admit an obvious truth: that safety and justice are often competing interests.

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Still, former Commissioner Ray Kelly sounded ridiculous insisting hundreds of thousands of stops and frisks of New Yorkers, the vast majority young men of color who had done nothing wrong, were crucial to keeping guns and blood off the streets. And his critics sounded equally ridiculous insisting those stops had no impact on crime, never deterred anyone from taking their guns to town.

But it’s the police unions — who complained bitterly about Kelly’s quotas and numbers-driven approach and now are muttering about a work slowdown in response to Bratton’s calls for cops to exercise “discretion” on pot arrests and more generally — who sound most ridiculous of all.

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How many bad stops are worth a saved life? There’s a reason cops and critics have both ducked that question for a decade now.

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But, as de Blasio has rightly stressed, broken windows is based on officer discretion, and only stopping people suspected of a crime. Stop-and-frisk-based policing, on the other hand, was based on stopping huge numbers of people, mostly black and brown young men, who had done nothing wrong.

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The bottom line: Crime is down. Stops are down. The new mayor — politically accountable in ways his billionaire predecessor was not — and his commissioner are living up to a wonderful, difficult promise to deliver a “fairer, safer” city.