#Davell Gardner’s horrific fate should have all NY’s leaders hanging heads in shame

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A teddy bear and Elmo sit atop 22 month old Davell Gardner’s tiny coffin adorned with cartoons.
Gregory P. Mango

A teddy bear atop a tiny casket adorned with cartoons: It doesn’t get more heartbreaking — soul-wrenching — than the funeral of tiny Davell Gardner, the youngest victim of New York City’s crime spike.

Davell was killed by someone shooting at people gathered for a barbecue. Monday, his father fought tears as he told the church, “It just hurts. . . . I don’t have somebody to call me ‘daddy, daddy, daddy.’  ”

It hasn’t gotten any more peaceful in the two weeks since that horrific shooting. Another mother lost a 16-year-old son this past Sunday, cut down on a Brooklyn hoops court — one of seven gun killings on the day.

Last week saw 47 shootings, triple the 17 in the same period last year, and 17 homicides vs. five a year ago. And all right on track with what the city’s suffered for two months now.

In answer, Mayor Bill de Blasio offers nothing but the same “violence prevention” babble he’s been burbling for a month now.

The mayor keeps telling everyone that counseling will turn things around. On Monday, he was still insisting “the best way to address” the soaring violence is “community members stepping forward,” including clergy and people from the Cure Violence movement and Crisis Management System, “a whole host of people and organizations occupying the corners . . . making clear that violence won’t be acceptable.”

No, sir: With all due respect to those working hard to counsel peace, it’s the men and women in blue who have to make it clear that the violence will be stopped.

As NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea bluntly warns, it won’t stop soon: “It’s going to take some time to address the significant uptick in violence that we see.” He says that cops are making more gun arrests and closing more homicide cases, but that’s only a start.

Especially since the state’s criminal-justice “reforms” and the pandemic’s impact on the courts mean that unprecedented numbers of the violence-prone simply aren’t getting locked up.

De Blasio’s big new idea is to huddle with the city’s DAs and state Chief Judge Janet DiFiore to get more bad guys locked up. But Shea notes that the reforms leave perps with little reason to take any deal that prosecutors offer.

Brutes like the one who shot 1-year-old Davell have closed hearts; no minister or counselor will make them change their ways. And they now believe — alas, with good reason — that the police and the rest of the law-enforcement system are helpless to stop them.

Until de Blasio — and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson — start standing firmly with the NYPD, bring back anti-gun units and stop trying to let every criminal out of Rikers, all the social workers in the world won’t stop New York from having to cry over yet another tiny coffin all too soon.