#Everyone needs to get behind the NYPD and let it restore order #OpinionNews

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Police take one of several people into custody outside the Goyard store on 63 St. and Madison Avenue in Manhattan on Monday night.
Robert Mecea

Enough: Lock up the looters. Crush the anarchists. Take back the city’s streets from the forces of destruction.

As Monday bled into the wee hours of Tuesday, open looting and violence were rampant in Lower Manhattan, Midtown and The Bronx.

The looters — gangs from across the five boroughs, a high-ranking police source told The Post — followed up a protest over George Floyd’s death by bashing in the windows of high-end stores and grabbing whatever goods they fancied. They breached Macy’s flagship store in Herald Square, a Best Buy, Nike Flatiron, Aldo, Microsoft, Michael Kors, and the Nintendo store in Rockefeller Center, to name a few.

Some toted crowbars and other tools to aid in their crimes, all the while violating an 11 p.m. curfew and attacking cops trying to make arrests.

Meanwhile, the anarchists assaulted officers wherever they found them vulnerable. Someone even ran down a cop exiting his car in The Bronx — merely because he was a cop.

What is the state’s reaction to this? Let most of the looters go because no one can be given bail anymore. Gov. Andrew Cuomo blaming the NYPD for not doing enough, when he and a host of liberal lawmakers would blast any cop who dared use an ounce of force to stop the mayhem. Mayor Bill de Blasio dismissing legitimate questions as not being about “reality.”

This is the bed New York has made for itself.

Stop. It’s time for a dose of common sense.

• The details of strategy and tactics should be entirely up to Police Commissioner Dermot Shea — without de Blasio jogging his elbow. The city’s district attorneys need to give the cops the assistance they need.
• The hard cases the cops arrest must stay in custody. Cy Vance and other DAs need to find charges that won’t have looters and rioters released the next day. If they can’t, then call in the feds to charge the perps with insurrection.
• State lawmakers should go into emergency session to pass at least temporary exemptions to New York’s godforsaken no-bail laws: Criminal-justice reform never should have opened the door to what the city is seeing right now — but it did.
• Call up the National Guard. The prides of de Blasio and Cuomo won’t allow it for no other reason than President Trump suggested it. That’s no reason. The NYPD is a world-class organization, but it can use the help right now.
• Shea must have de facto command: He knows what the Guard can usefully do — cordon off particular areas, perhaps, or guard precincts. For these purposes, they’re just less well-trained than the NYPD; they need to be backup.
• No more protests at night. De Blasio should require demonstrations to be daylight-only. If organizers are serious about disavowing the looters, they will support this and schedule accordingly. Marches that go into the dusk allow for groups to break off and begin smash-and-grabs.

Every night of looting wipes out more of New York’s future — already, many of these stores are sure not to reopen. That’s millions in tax revenue gone and thousands of jobs (many held by blacks and Hispanics) wiped out.

Every antifa-or-whoever assault on cops degrades the forces the NYPD has available to contain the chaos — wounding officers, distracting them, exhausting them.

And having to handle even the most peaceful, well-intentioned protesters further saps the forces of order, because the anarchists and the looters alike are using them as shields — and sometimes turning them into weapons.

The pandemic alone was a major threat to the city’s viability. This chaos is worse. If it’s not ended soon, New York will lose the last four decades of progress.