Commissioner of the New York Police Department is a brutal job these days, so it’s a credit to James O’Neill that he made it three years. Cross your fingers that his successor, Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea, can rise to the challenge.
O’Neill says he’s seizing “another opportunity, something I couldn’t pass up.” But he’s leaving a job that, as O’Neill said Monday, “consumes you.”
That’s especially true under Mayor Bill de Blasio, who won office campaigning against the NYPD as racially oppressive. Yes, he’s been less bad than feared, because he knows his career is over if the Police Department ceases to function — but that doesn’t stop him from periodically kneecapping his commissioner to appease the growing anti-cop movement.
In recent months, the city has seen a wave of “water bucket” assaults on police officers, which last weekend escalated to a near-riot of a protest with vandals defacing NYPD cruisers with graffiti and garbage.
Many cops are furious over the firing of former Officer Daniel Panteleo — and doubt the brass will back them up if they get caught up in a tragically fatal arrest. The wave of cop suicides suggests a deepening despair.
And things are about to get worse thanks to the Legislature and Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The Raise the Age law is already making it harder to handle under-18 criminals — a feature criminal gangs are exploiting ruthlessly.
And come Jan. 1 (at the latest), a new state law will prevent judges from sending all but the most dangerous criminal suspects to jail, and also put new burdens on prosecutors, further weakening the justice system — even as the city’s DAs themselves move left for fear of being voted out of office.
The entire city political establishment is committed to reducing the jail population even more in the name of “decarceration.” They can’t close Rikers any other way — and, once they do, there’ll be no room to jail more perps if crime spikes back up.
Yes, nearly all crime is still down — the NYPD has been working miracles for decades now, even as the politicians pile new limits on it. But every pendulum turns eventually, and the cop-haters (and naïve “reformers”) are pushing hard on this one.
Shea has a fine record that would normally promise a first-rate commissionership. Happily, he’s also more than a decade younger than O’Neill — and he’ll need every ounce of his relative youth to handle a rock-and-a-hard-place job.