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#Crime, not cops, is by far the largest threat to black lives

#Crime, not cops, is by far the largest threat to black lives

September 3, 2020 | 7:52pm

It’s a truth urban prosecutors like me know well but that the activist fire and fury of our moment threatens to swallow: Incidents of black men ­being killed at the hands of ­police are exceedingly rare. Killing-by-police isn’t even close to a major cause of death of black men. Such incidents are rare in Gotham, rare nationwide.

When they do happen, there is almost always a back story: the victim resisting arrest, attempting to grab the officer’s pistol or ­Taser. Watching the heartbreaking footage, I keep thinking, “Stop fighting the cops!”

There is a real threat to the lives of New Yorkers of color, but it isn’t the men and women in blue — but criminality in­ ­minority communities.

In New York City in 2019, 319 people were murdered. Fully 88 percent of them — 280 people — were black or Hispanic. And 93.2 of them were murdered by other people of color.

Almost 96 percent of all shooters and shooting victims in the Big Apple in 2019 were people of color. People of color also accounted for 73.8 percent of rape victims and 81.3 percent of the rape suspects; 69 percent of robbery victims and 93.3 percent of the robbery suspects; and 79.5 percent of felony ­assault victims and 86 percent of the assault suspects.

People of color, in other words, are disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violent crime in New York City. That is a cold fact. These proportions have remained remarkably consistent over the past 12 years.

Murders in New York are up 30 percent so far this year — 60 more people killed so far than last year. Close to 90 percent of the victims were people of color. There have been 1,095 shooting victims in Gotham so far this year — 514 more than last year. And 95 percent of these additional shooting victims were people of color.

If those 514 additional shooting victims had been residents of the Upper East Side, don’t you think the city would have a far different reaction than slashing $1 billion from the New York Police Department’s budget? Since 2003, more than 1,000 people have been murdered in New York City Housing Authority projects alone. Don’t those black lives matter?

It isn’t just the direct victims of crime who suffer. Increased violence reduces the city’s quality of life. Property values go down. Window gates go up. Long-term neighbors move out. Small businesses close, abandoning storefronts.

Residents of 30-story, door-manned buildings in trendy neighborhoods may not notice it, but homeowners and tenants in low- and middle-class neighborhoods certainly do. It’s these latter who will bear the brunt of anti-law-and-order politicking.

Our elected demagogues stir up passion about a terrible homicide committed by a rogue police officer in Minneapolis — 1,000 miles away. But they say nothing about the bloody carnage in their own city.

Their “cures” will do little to stop the occasional questionable police shooting but will sentence countless innocent New Yorkers — overwhelmingly black and brown people — to death and injury, as criminals are emboldened and police officers abandoned.

Relaxing bail laws, springing thousands of dangerous people from jails, eliminating the anti-crime units and shrinking the NYPD will only hasten the ­demise of a once-great city. ­Rational people predicted that ­violent crime would rise following these foolish moves. And now murder is up 30 percent, shooting victims are up 89 percent, burglary up 43 percent, car theft up 59 percent over last year.

It is shameful.

Why are politicians moving to demoralize and destroy the greatest police department in the country? Because it’s easy.

It means they don’t have to deal with real crises facing the minority community: rising ­violent crime, a failing education system, an inept housing authority, an unchecked and ­often-dangerous mentally ill homeless population.

Perhaps the biggest crisis of all: the moral catastrophe of the black community, where 75 percent of children are born out of wedlock to single mothers.

These are real problems that require real work. But our politicians paint murals and political slogans on Fifth Avenue, thinking they have accomplished something.

President Barack Obama’s ­attorney general, Eric Holder, once said that Americans are cowards when it came to discussing race. He was unquestionably right about that.

Jim Quinn was the senior executive assistant district attorney in the Queens County District Attorney’s Office. He retired in December 2019, after 42 years as a prosecutor.

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