Our current mayor got into office on the strength of his Liberal platform, a prominent plank of which is his reform of the prior administration’s use of stop and frisk. Bill De Blasio’s campaign position was that the old implementation was abusive towards young men of color.
There has been a 13% increase in shootings in the city overall, since the beginning of the year while at the same time 10% fewer illegal guns have been confiscated. May alone has had almost 130 shootings, an increase of 43% over last year for that month. In the year of 2012 over 700 illegal handguns were taken off the streets. Critics of stop and frisk point out that 90% of Ray Kelly’s (our former police commissioner) stop and frisk detainments resulted in non-arrests; the flip side of which is that 10% actually did result in arrests! If your home was robbed I’m sure that you’d want police to stop 10 suspects if they could actually arrest one of them on probable cause of suspicion of robbing your home! Where in the Constitution does it prohibit such a practice? Common sense dictates that police science is not 100%.
The spike in shootings, up 32% in NYCHA (NY City Housing Administration) developments is cited by some (including our Councilman, Rory Lancman) as a major factor in the overall statistics. De Blasio’s answer is to hire 1,000 more police officers and City Advocate Latitia James says that 1,900 cops are not enough for those developments. A thousand more cops would cost the city another 100 million dollars but our new mayor doesn’t mind spending money he doesn’t have. Besides, these cops won’t be able to be effective until a year from now anyway due to the process of hiring and training new personnel. Meanwhile, gang members who are victimizing the poor inhabitants of the city projects will eventually victimize the rest of NY City as well. If they are successful in robbing members of Bedford Stuyvesant they will then focus on more lucrative prospects in upscale neighborhoods such as ours.
Furthermore, where is the compassion of our city government to allow thugs to hurt or kill those in poor neighborhoods? Is this the compassion that the Liberals have shown for decades in allowing black on black crime and no one coming to their rescue? Is this the same compassion that Liberals show its minority constituents when they force parents to send their children to failing government schools? Is this the same compassion that our current mayor showed when he declared a war on charter schools - demanding that they pay the city rent for public school space, even though charter schools are funded by taxpayer dollars also?
Rory Lancman, at a recent civic meeting, when I reminded him of the more than 700 illegal guns confiscated by police in the year of 2012 which he had previously characterized as “very few”, doubled down on the defense of the de Blasio anti stop and frisk policy, by saying that its practice under Ray Kelly was “unconstitutional”. This, he cited from U.S. District Court Judge Shira Sheindlin’s ruling of Ray Kelly’s program. But in fact Judge Sheindlin was subsequently removed from the case by a panel on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, saying that she came to the decision through bias and her ruling was thrown out as well. While it’s true that later a Federal Appeals Court overrode the Circuit Court’s decision of invalidating Shiendlin’s ruling, the new mayor did not have the integrity to allow the Bloomberg’s case to advance to a further appeal. However, even the Federal Appeals Court did not overturn the removal of Judge Sheindlin from the case, by the Circuit Court of Appeals. That being the case, is the ruling from a removed judge something that Rory Lancman should want to cite?
Our community did not vote for de Blasio and rightfully so. The new mayor thinks that horses are tortured when they are harnessed and leisurely carry riders. Perhaps he doesn’t realize that animals as well as humans are fulfilled by work. Humans are also fulfilled when they are free to engage in activity without being harassed, threatened and hurt by predatory criminals. Humans are also fulfilled when they get to send their kids to the schools of their choice. Humans are also fulfilled when they don’t have to pay more in taxes from their earnings. There are a lot of things that our new Uber Liberal mayor doesn’t understand about human fulfillment and the successful operation of a city. Local politicians should separate themselves from what, at this point, looks like a one-term mayor.
It took Guiliani years to recify what damage the Liberal establishments of city government had inflicted on the city from the 60’s on through to the 80’s. People should be ever so vigilant to deterioration when it starts as it is so difficult to correct once it takes hold. It is easier to lock the barn in the first place than chasing a horse once it has bolted from the barn.