#New York needs leaders who’ll stand up for the NYPD — and against soaring crime

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Police at the scene of a shooting on a Queensbridge Houses playground earlier this week.
G.N. Miller/New York Post

Who will defend the miracle that was the reduction in crime in this city? The saving of so many lives, especially young African American men? Who will have the force’s back?

The city, indeed much of the state, is in crisis, with shootings and homicides soaring — yet political leaders are still focused on burdening or defunding the police, with lawmakers and executives alike obsessed with appeasing the calls for less law enforcement, all across the board.

Cops of all ranks are in despair. Deputy Inspector Richard Brea, commander of The Bronx’s 46th Precinct resigned in protest on Friday: With the last major anti-street-crime units disbanded this month, he doesn’t know how to fight exploding violence — and says his superiors have no answers.

The head of Brea’s union, the Captains Endowment Association, says the NYPD might as well give up: Drop CompStat, the core device for ensuring every precinct keeps crime going down, because that task is becoming impossible as politicians take tool after tool out of law enforcement’s hands.

Meanwhile, the detectives union warned Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark that its members can no longer work with many of her assistant DAs — the ones who, in the wake of the George Floyd protests, signed a missive accusing New York City cops en masse of routinely using excessive force.

Of course, DA’s Offices across the state are themselves in crisis, facing mass resignations because the state’s year-old “no bail” law makes it so hard to protect the public, mandating revolving-door release even of chronic criminals.

The lockdowns have added to that problem — shuttering courts and delaying trials so hundreds more accused gun criminals walk the streets. NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea warns that the entire criminal-justice system is “imploding.”

There’s always room for policing and criminal-justice reform, and we’ve supported a lot of it, from the state Raise the Age law to the federal First Step act. We’ve called for a complete end to cash bail — as long as the change also gives judges the discretion to jail clearly dangerous or persistent offenders.

But what New York is seeing now isn’t criminal-justice reform, it’s a collapse — one that won’t stop even when the pandemic ends.

The city and state need leaders to stand up against the madness.

• Commissioner Shea: Stand up for your officers — tell them what they should do on the streets; introduce new training as needed. Tell the mayor that you may have to reverse your decision to shut down the anti-crime units, and that any fresh appeasement of the cop-bashers will mean disaster.

•  Mayor de Blasio: Stop pandering. You ended stop-and-frisk and oversaw the rise of precision policing and stronger precinct-community relations, directly addressing real grievances — while keeping crime headed down. But now crime is soaring up, and the left still wants more. Stop pretending the NYPD can “adjust” to every new bid to hobble cops. You can’t appease the anti-policing movement and still keep New York safe.

• City Council Speaker Corey Johnson: Show some backbone. You know that the city’s prosperity depends on its safety — and that any meaningful defunding of the NYPD will push New York into a deep downward spiral. You want to become mayor — but at this rate the city’s next mayor will envy Abe Beame.

•  Gov. Cuomo: Why are you missing in action? You’ve been playing coy on this front for years now, going along with the no-bail law when you had to know better — but always finding some excuse to deny the truth in public, or throw the blame to someone else. Stand up for the fundamentals of law and order, sir, or you’ll lose the trust of New York state’s broad center.

New Yorkers of all races and ethnicities want an end to police brutality, but not the end of policing altogether. Black homeowners, New York City Housing Authority residents and small-business owners want safe neighborhoods, too. They want the bad guys off the streets. Just as importantly, they want the lives of black crime victims to matter, as much as the lives of those lost to police brutality. If city pols are going to pander, they ought to respond to these special interests, too.

New York City started a long, grim decline in the 1960s that saw crime rise, the middle class flee and municipal finances collapse. It began a partial turnaround in the Koch years — but started to soar only when the NYPD moved to decisively reduce crime starting in the early ’90s. That turnaround made the biggest difference in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, whose residents paid the biggest price for poor policing.

It would be a tragedy beyond compare if New York’s leaders sacrificed those gains, simply because they were all afraid to stand up for the truth.