For more than twenty years, ever since the latter part of David Dinkins’ administration in the early nineties, crime has been declining in New York City. With fewer and fewer real criminals to catch, the New York City Police Department was starting to get nervous. Can things be “too quiet”? You bet your ass!
The danger, alas, was real. In his first administration, Mayor Bloomberg, trying to run the city like a business, noticed that modern-day New York suffered from 40% fewer fires than 40 years before, but had the same number of firefighters. Should 40% fewer fires equal 40% fewer firefighters?
Well, the answer to that one, as Hillary Clinton and every other elected official in the state was glad to tell Big Mike, is “NO!” But would Mike dare to ask the same question about crime?
Luckily for the police, they didn’t have to worry about that one. Bloomberg’s scarcely concealed goal was to turn New York into Singapore West, where money talks and the poor keep their goddamn mouths shut. The city’s notorious “stop and frisk” law gave the police the right to harass anyone they chose. And busting non-criminals for trivial offenses—“public display of marijuana,”1 for example—is a hell of a lot easier, and safer, than busting real ones.
That’s why the election of Bill de Blasio, with his wild talk of ending stop and frisk—something about it being useless, racist, and unconstitutional—so frightened the boys in blue. And then when the mayor actually suggested that the cops maybe should not throttle fat guys with asthma for selling loose cigarettes, and that people should be allowed to protest such behavior without being busted for littering, disturbing the peace, etc., well, you can’t blame the boys for panicking.
The brutal murder of two policemen sent the rhetoric from the policemen’s union into the stratosphere, where it was joined by virtually every New York Republican who could get in front of a microphone, though I must compliment Rudy Giuliani for explicitly rejecting the claim by Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, that “there’s blood on many hands tonight” and “that blood on the hands starts at City Hall in the office of the mayor.” Thanks, Rudy. There is a limit to your demagoguery. Despite my sarcasm, I am impressed.
Afterwords
Reason’s Nick Gillespie, writing in the Daily Beast, gives a nice rundown of the issues involved here. At the National Review, Amity Shlaes, although deeply moved by the plight of the NYC police, who must endure a mayor whose “pandering to race-oriented special-interest groups has appalled many voters,”2 nevertheless reluctantly concludes that the police really ought to, you know, obey the law, so that they’re not, you know, criminals.
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Simple possession of marijuana in small amounts was no longer a crime in New York, but “public display” of the drug was a crime. So you would just ask a likely dude to turn out his pockets, and, voila!, a legitimate bust! ↩︎
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Amity finds the fact that de Blasio, unlike Giuliani and Bloomberg, actually solicits support from black and Hispanic voters, “compelling reason to complain.” Whites only, dude! Whites only! ↩︎
