#De Blasio says he won’t fire NYPD Commissioner Shea despite calls for removal

Mayor Bill de Blasio said Tuesday he won’t fire NYPD Police Commissioner Dermot Shea — despite a city councilman’s calls for the top cop’s ouster amid a weekend pierced by gunfire.

“The answer is no,” de Blasio said when asked if he was considering making changes to NYPD brass. “And the reason is that this leadership group has achieved so much for this city. And again, I worry that sometimes people see things only through the prism of an immediate moment. And I think we have to look at what’s happened over years and years.

“I chose Commissioner Shea, having known him and worked closely with him for six years. He is an extraordinary public servant; we talk all the time,” he continued.

The comments came in the wake of a letter penned by Councilman Rory Lancman Monday calling for Shea’s removal.

In it, Lancman wrote that “Shea’s blaming a violent weekend on no longer jailing people too poor to pay bail and on officers soon no longer being allowed to choke suspects with impunity is a stunning admission of failure and a complete surrender to lawlessness.”

Shootings are up 46 percent for the year, with 528 incidents logged through June 30 versus 362 for the same period of 2019. On Monday, de Blasio was out of step with cops when he blamed the spike on people being cooped up during coronavirus, while police provided a smattering of explanations.

But De Blasio on Tuesday praised Shea, Chief of Department Terence Monahan and First Deputy Commissioner Benjamin Tucker — as well as Chief of Patrol Fausto Pichardo and Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison — as “a group that’s really committed to neighborhood policing, to a transformation department. Under the watch of all of these leaders this is now a majority people-of-color police department, more and more a police department made up of people who live in New York City.”

The NYPD has made about 40,000 fewer overall arrests so far this year, with around 75,000 through June compared to 112,000 by that time last year — though year-to-date gun arrests remain steady year over year at just under 1,700, NYPD data shows.

Calling them “reformers,” he also praised the team for lowering the number of arrests and the number of people being stopped and frisked, a policing tool that disproportionately affected black and Hispanic men.