New York’s cowardly retreat from effective policing

Good cops confront criminals. This generates friction, which is regrettable, but it’s no reason to ignore crime and, thus, its victims.

But avoiding friction even as deadly crime rises is what Mayor Bill de Blasio’s New York Police Department, and the city’s political culture, are all about these days. It’s a coward’s approach to order, and it never works for long: Criminals sense weakness and exploit it.

One by one, the strategies that transformed Gotham from the murder capital of America into the safest big city in the land have been stripped away, and the latest to go is the NYPD’s enormously successful anti-crime initiative.

The initiative deployed specially trained teams to high-crime hot spots to tamp down lawbreaking, which usually involved guns; when the bad guys moved on, the anti-crime cops followed — wash, rinse, repeat.

It was a highly effective undertaking — though controversial, because it generated friction. In no small way, it kept New York from turning into sanguinary Chicago, as even Police Commissioner Dermot Shea was too embarrassed to deny as he announced the unit’s dismantlement Monday. “Its [loss] will be felt immediately in the communities that we protect,” said Shea.

So why do it?

“We must [proceed] in a manner that builds trust between officers and the community,” the commissioner added. In other words, City Hall has made a choice between necessary friction and temporary tranquility, damning the ­future to live with the consequences.

That is, again, a coward’s risk-free exit —– or perhaps more accurately, the cowardly politician’s way out. For sure, de Blasio is now a little less likely to be booed at the next Black Lives Matter rally.

A win for him; for the city, not so much.

Murder is up 25 percent for the first six months of 2020 — too long a period for the dramatic increase to be dismissed as a statistical blip. Shootings, woundings, burglary and auto theft have also seen sharp and sustained increases.

If it’s beginning to feel as if the city is under siege, it’s because it most likely is. And such things don’t happen in a vacuum.

As noted, the time-tested techniques that helped transform David Dinkins’ New York into the largely low-crime oasis that it became during the Giuliani and Bloomberg years were systematically stripped away after de Blasio took office.

Those measures were essentially intended to keep guns off the streets, and they were spectacularly effective — especially, again, if a fair frame of reference is Chicago, where multi-murder weekends have been routine for decades.

First to go was stop and frisk, which targeted suspiciously acting young men for special attention. However clumsily it may have been executed, particularly at its peak, few would deny that it reduced the number of illegal guns in play.

Then went broken-windows policing, which targeted various anti-social acts: public drinking and urination, turnstile-jumping and so forth. This made for slightly less aromatic subways, but it also helped persuade a lot of young males to leave their guns at home.

Last year, Albany got into the act, making it far more difficult to detain and prosecute ­potentially dangerous accused criminals. And don’t forget the morale-crushing, vaguely threatening #DefundthePolice rhetoric.

And now the end of the anti-crime initiative.

The unifying theme to all of this is the ­notion that vigorous law enforcement has a disproportionately negative impact on minority communities — which it does, if one discounts that raging crime has a similar ­effect on law-abiding minorities.

The problem, boiled down to its basics, is that minority neighborhoods are disproportionately crime-prone. While this leaves plenty of room for enlightened social work, the new policies make sense only if one considers criminals somehow to be victims themselves — and it is wholly unreasonable to make crime a less risky proposition for criminals and then expect less crime.

And yet this is precisely the course New York’s political culture has set, both formally through legislation and policy changes, and informally by making it clear that aggressively effective policing won’t be encouraged. Or even tolerated, for that matter.

This is the zeitgeist to which Shea surrendered on Monday. It isn’t likely that disbanding the NYPD’s anti-crime unit was his idea. But while he didn’t have to execute City Hall’s order — he could have quit — execute is what he did.

Someday he will regret that decision. As will the city.

Twitter: @RLMac2

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