#De Blasio reveals anti-violence plan in Brooklyn, but omits NYPD officials

Mayor Bill de Blasio rolled out his plan to curb soaring gun violence in the hardest-hit areas of Brooklyn — while purposely leaving out police officials from the press conference Wednesday in favor of community leaders.

The “central Brooklyn violence prevention plan” — which the mayor said was hatched by Police Commissioner Dermot Shea — goes into effect Friday and calls for a deployment of more cops in Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

“This weekend in Brooklyn, we’ll be taking action to stop the violence,” de Blasio said.

He later explained, “This is the concept the commissioner came up with and I emphasize this is not something he was thinking about in the last few weeks but thinking about over months and years.”

That note from the mayor made Shea’s absence all the more glaring. He and other top brass have been noticeably absent from de Blasio’s daily press briefings, where the city’s surge in shootings has increasingly become the topic du jour.

Meanwhile, police officials like Chief of Department Terrence Monahan and Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller have instead taken to the airwaves to get out the message from the NYPD side of things.

“There is a feeling on the street that the police are handcuffed, that they are not out there as aggressively as we were in the past,” Monahan told 1010 WINS radio Tuesday. “The new law that was passed by the City Council has cops hesitant. They are fearful that they may be arrested if they take some proactive-type enforcement.”

“All the rhetoric of Defund the Police, get rid of the police, abolish the police, that’s got to end, that has to stop. We need to find a middle ground of cops and communities, working together to handle a lot of these issues here.”

Miller, meanwhile, appeared in a lengthy panel segment on Don Lemon’s CNN show Tuesday night and decried the push to defund police by the mayor and the City Council.

“This is the deal with police,” Miller said. “Society has a series of safety nets. There’s health, youth services, mental health services, but throughout history whenever those safety nets have become broken or had holes in them, when people start to fall through them, at the bottom there’s always a cop.

“Those safety nets need to have those holes fixed,” Miller said. “The problem we’re facing right now is we have a crime surge, which requires more cops and we’re about to have less, and requires better deployments and more deployments.

“And our overtime budget has been cut by 60 percent — not the kind of thing that works logistically in a surge — and it was largely kind of in the politics of all of the protest movement to say, ‘We’re doing something to punish the NYPD by defunding.’ That’s also not what you do during a crime surge.”

Asked Wednesday about the continued absence of police officials on his daily briefings amid the wave of street bloodshed, Hizzoner said, “This is a purposeful effort on my part to show the people of New York City there are so many community leaders, so many organizations out there doing this work.”

He then promised he and Shea would soon “have a lot more to say on new strategies going forward.”

The city has been plagued by an increase in gun violence in recent weeks. Shots rang out in 10 incidents, including in Brooklyn, on Tuesday alone, cops said.

A 30-year-old man was killed and five others were injured early Wednesday in a shooting in Crown Heights. And a 1-year-old boy was gunned down during a melee in Bedford-Stuyvesant late Sunday.

The latest NYPD data shows that gun arrests have plummeted 67 percent over the past 28 days — following the scrapping of the anti-crime unit on June 15.

The plan announced by de Blasio also calls for “community mobilization” as part of an initiative called “Occupy the Hotspots.”

“We have seen this in recent days the power of this approach — residents,” Hizzoner explained. “Leaders of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn save our streets, out there leading people, showing them there was a better way.”

Mobile trauma units will also be on hand to “provide mental health support to people who need it,” he said.

City Councilman Robert Cornegy Jr., who represents Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy, was on the briefing panel and cheered the plan.

“We intend to where those hot spots are located provide long-term sustainable services, like jobs, affordable housing,” he said at the briefing. “We plan on deploying those simultaneously while NYPD is doing their job.”

He added, “This uptick right now — we can handle this as a community, as a city if we come together.”

Later Wednesday, de Blasio will sign the anti-chokehold bill, which has been slammed by top cops as “dangerous.”

Additional reporting by Tina Moore