With multiple members complaining about the failure to defund the agency that has done by far the most good for New York City and its citizens over the past quarter-century, and protesters outside all but spitting in police officers’ faces, the City Council on Tuesday voted through a budget that aims to appease the cop-bashers by slashing a billion dollars from the NYPD budget.
At least some of those screaming outside City Hall are alive today because the police department has managed to slash the homicide rate by nearly 90 percent from its early-’90s highs. Others have benefited from a citywide economic boom, stretching into the poorest neighborhoods, made possible only by the unprecedented gains in public safety.
The NYPD uses force less often than any other major city police department and has spent recent years doubling- and tripling-down on its de-escalation training, and in connecting every precinct and every beat cop more deeply with their neighborhoods.
But the kids — and the older radicals among them — don’t care. And the politicians are pandering to them.
And not just councilmembers: City Comptroller Scott Stringer was playing to the mob, too, denouncing the budget deal for not cutting policing enough. (Of course, his NYPD detail isn’t on the chopping block.)
Even elected officials who know better — Mayor Bill de Blasio, Speaker Corey Johnson, Majority Leader Laurie Cumbo and the like — don’t dare tell the protesters they’re simply, wildly wrong, as well as hugely ungrateful.
We suppose it’s a tribute to the NYPD’s success that so many can’t conceive of how dangerous New York City could become (again) or of the other civic problems that follow from that state. It’s maddening, though, that so many are so determined to make sure that the entire city finds out.
