The Jenga-like end of a safe NYC

Betteridge’s law of headlines states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” I hope I’m wrong and Betteridge is right. This piece of mine was in the Daily News.

Violence in New York is up. If you ask the NYPD, the 30-year New York City crime decline is over. Police have been known to cry wolf and can see the even most beautiful blue sky as falling. But what if this time it’s true?
In New York City, violence started increasing in October, before George Floyd was killed, before protests and before “defund police” became a catchphrase.
In the last 28 days (through July 12), compared to last year, shootings have more than tripled (318 vs. 97). Last week was even worse. If the last 28 days become the new normal, 2021 will have more than 4,100 shootings, a level not seen in well over 20 years.
Undoubtedly bail reform, protests, looting, COVID-19, and the release of prisoners because of COVID all play a role, though how much is debate. What’s less known is how the NYPD has been methodically declawed by design.
Years of political advocacy have resulted in the intentional erosion of legal police authority. There is less prosecution. Most miscreant activities have been decriminalized. The city survived and even benefited from many reforms, but now the camel’s back is breaking.
It’s like a game of Jenga in which the wooden blocks of public safety are stacked into a tower. Each player in turn pulls out one block. The tower holds. But as more and more blocks are removed, one too many is pulled — one that may have been removed earlier and without consequence — and now the entire tower is tumbling down.

Read the rest / the whole article here.

Here are some bits I would have kept in, but for length:

And here are some parts I would have kept, but for length:
Enforcing gun laws is key. In 2013 and 2014, 40% of all the “disposed cases” for carrying an illegal gun in NYC ended up with some kind of jail or prison. In 2019 it was just 17%. Near-mandatory jail time for guns was a big reason NYC became less violence in the 90s.
Or take disorder on the subways, nothing legally prevents the NYPD from enforcing quality-of-life rules. But under Mayor deBlasio, enforcement ended. To that extent police are standing down, but not because they want to. They’ve been told to, often in the name of social justice.
Good policing is about changing people’s behavior before they need to be arrested. To do that police need information, leadership, tactics, and the legal right to enforcement. Crime prevention is by nature pro-active. And that, of course, is the root of some police opposition.
Bit by bit the NYPD has seen their legal authority pre-empted by elected officials, primarily the mayor and district attorneys (to a lesser extent city council members) by directives not to detain people pre-trial.
Open container, disorderly behavior, turnstile jumping, smoking weeds, shoplifting, but even theft, assault, and illegal gun possession are now but non-violent crimes to be ticketed and released. There is no detention. There is little prosecution.
The NYPD can’t use their tools. This is a political choice. Precision policing, broken window, stationary posts, quality-of-life, Clean Halls, Borough Specialty Units, Organized Crime Control Bureau, Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit, and most recently, anti-crime. All gone.
By any quantifiable measure–a decline in arrests, a decline in crime, a decline in police use of lethal force, a decline in the number of complaints, plus terrorism prevention–the NYPD has been effective.
But none of this matters. Instead we’re dismantling the NYPD. And for what? Just imagine telling the next generation, after murders top 1,000: “Well, of course we had to dismantle the NYPD, you see, because a cop killed a man in Minnesota.”