Even as rising violence plagues the city, Mayor de Blasio is still rushing to appease the cop-bashers.
The mayor signed the so-called “NYPD accountability package” Wednesday, and did so at his Black Lives Matter mural in the Bronx to maximize the posturing. No matter that it includes the “chokehold ban” that his own top cops warn is dangerously overbroad; de Blasio insists the NYPD will manage, somehow.
Earlier in the day, he released his plan for addressing Brooklyn gun violence — with no NYPD brass by his side, only some community leaders. Indeed, the department’s top ranks have been notably absent from his press conferences of late, even though crime and COVID-19 are the only big issues in the city right now.
This follows his performance Tuesday, when CBS’s Marcia Kramer challenged him on his repeated empty words on the violence. “Is the same answer good enough day after day?” she asked.
His reply? Basically: Yes.
“It’s the truth,” he said, adding that the NYPD has stepped up to answer numerous crime spikes over the years: It “shifted resources” and used CompStat “to perfect strategies.” It “called upon communities to get involved” and built up “the Cure Violence movement and the Crisis Management System.”
Yet even de Blasio admits this time cops are working “against probably the hardest backdrop” ever. But he pretends the challenge is merely the pandemic and the backlogged courts.
In reality, what’s making the job near-impossible is that police have been handcuffed like never before. Recent years have seen the politicians add more monitors to second-guess cops’ decisions, decriminalize low-level offenses, pass a dangerously flawed no-bail “reform,” release hundreds from Rikers Island and force the disbanding of the NYPD’s anti-crime units.
Last month, de Blasio slashed NYPD funding by 17 percent, and now he’s signed the “chokehold” law that makes it risky for officers to physically interact even with suspects who resist arrest.
If he doesn’t reverse course, expect the bodies to keep piling up.