All too predictably, the Legal Aid Society is attacking the NYPD’s renewed “quality of life” policing.
The direly needed shift targets such violations as selling pot, dice games, public drinking and urination, criminal trespass, fare evasion and other acts that Commissioner Keechant Sewell all too rightly calls “precursors for violence.”
Cue a Legal Aid Society study purporting to show that the effort will be racially discriminatory. It uses 2021 data indicating that the vast majority of those arrested for such offenses were black and Hispanic, and so provided fodder for the usual suspects on the City Council to assail top police brass.
Guess what word is missing from Legal Aid’s study? Victim.
Yet black New Yorkers, about 24% of the city population, make up the vast majority of serious crime victims: 65% of those murdered in 2020, and 74% of shooting victims.
Add in Hispanics (29% of the city, though many are also black): In 2019, 88% of murder victims were black or Hispanic, along with 74% of rape victims, 69% of robbery victims and nearly 80% of felony assault victims. And the breakdowns don’t change much as crime soars.
When crime goes up in New York City, it hits people of color (and the poor) by far the hardest. But self-proclaimed “equity” advocates ignore that bitter truth.
No, farebeating and driving without a license (another violation targeted by the new NYPD effort) aren’t violent crimes, per se. (Though farebeating steals from taxpayers, which again hurts the less well-off, and driving without a license endangers everyone.)
But people don’t just wake up one day as murderers. Look at the data around bail reform: in New York over the 12 months ending in July 2021, 69% of felony arrests had a prior conviction or a pending case.
No surprise that Legal Aid ignores all that: It exists to advocate for accused criminals; institutionally, it practically resents the victims. So it cares far more about pushing left-wing narratives around crime than actually addressing it.
Such is the upside-down thinking that Mayor Eric Adams and Commissioner Sewell have to confront as they work to make New York’s streets safer — especially for those the left claims to care about most.