Running for mayor last year in crime-besieged New York City, former police captain Eric Adams promised that if elected he would restore the plainclothes anti-crime unit shut down by his predecessor Mayor de Bill Blasio. This was quite a gamble, even for a black man running for Mayor in the bright red big apple, which is the national headquarters for the woke media and race-baiting activists. But practically every day for the past two years Americans have watched news video of New Yorkers being sucker-punched, attacked with clubs, knives and guns on crowded streets in broad daylight. The rapes and beatings in subway cars, stairwells and parks…commuters pushed in front of subway trains….and folks being carjacked and occasionally killed by groups of thugs, including teenagers, must have helped tip the scales in favor of Adams. But after he took office, while crime continued to escalate in his city, Adams waited two and a half months to actually put a watered-down version of the promised unit back on the streets. This time the officers would be in uniform, and there would be no stop, question and frisking of suspects. In today’s environment, gang members will spot these officers and tweet their location to their colleagues. Probably on stolen smartphones.
It was almost as if Adams were forced to keep his promise, albeit weakly, because he was beginning to look bad in the media. Now, a couple of weeks later, after 29 New Yorkers were shot last weekend, Adams has decided to return to a modified version of Mayor Giuliani’s pro-active “broken windows” policing…..sort of. Rocco Parascandola of the New York Daily News reports that last Wednesday, Adams announced his plan to implement “precision-policing” which would focus on quality of life offenses like public drunkeness, going to the bathroom in public and disturbing the peace. The city’s Police Commissioner, Keechant Sewell made it clear ‘this is not a return to stop, question and frisk – nor is it policing by the numbers.”
In the mid 1990s, when New York City started holding its precinct captains responsible for the crime in their districts, and providing the tools to aggressively police high crime neighborhoods with the plainclothes unit stopping gang members and taking their guns, crime dropped dramatically. The high crime neighborhoods were mostly black and Hispanic. So when crime dropped those populations benefited the most. Most of the people arrested for carrying illegal firearms and drugs, stealing cars and committing burglaries, robberies and assaults in those neighborhoods were black and Hispanic, as were most of the victims. But because of who was getting arrested, race-baiting activists at government-funded non-profits like the Legal Aid Society and the New York Civil Liberties Union filed lawsuits claiming racial bias, and the New York media endlessly pushed that narrative. There was, and their remains little mention of the thousands of New York minorities who were disproportionately spared from becoming victims of theft, assault or murder under these policies. In general, the activists and the media care far more about the political narrative that “police are racists,” than about black and brown crime victims.
“Let’s be clear, this plan reinstates broken-windows policing, and it will undoubtedly send more Black and Latinex (non-Hispanic liberal term for Latino) New Yorkers to Rikers Island….” said Legal Aid Society attorney Jennvine Wong.
“Locking up people caught drinking a beer in public or shoplifting food will only ensnare more Black and brown New Yorkers in a regressive and abusive criminal legal system — not address violent crime,” according the the New York Civil Liberties Union.
It’s as if these people are completely divorced from reality.
Like his toothless effort to clear the homeless out of the subways, I suspect that Mayor Adams’ half-hearted restoration of the anti-crime unit and “precision policing” plan, while a step in the right direction, will not have much impact on crime in his city, until he dumps his woke BS and starts aggressively enforcing the law.
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