Count us tentatively in favor of the drive to bolster the NYPD force by 1,000 cops.
Many of those pushing this are in the anti-cop camp, and simply looking for political cover. But Commissioner Bill Bratton plainly wants the reinforcements so he can keep crime down.
We’re not unsympathetic to Mayor de Blasio for being reluctant here. The move commits the city to spending millions of dollars in future years — dollars that can’t go to feed the hungry, house the homeless or just fix the roads.
Yet the NYPD plainly needs some kind of help — because not a week passes without cops being hamstrung in some new way.
The latest lunacy landed this month, and will harm the city’s poor and minorities the most.
The brass have had to gut the quarter-century-old “Clean Halls” program designed to increase security in public-housing buildings. It encouraged cops to clear out or detain loiterers who qualified as trespassers.
But de Blasio settled another case where stop-and-frisk Judge Shira Scheindlin opted for injustice. Now cops must have a demonstrable “reasonable suspicion” that loiterers are in a building illegally before approaching them.
This, when the most significant uptick in violent crime over the last year has come in public-housing projects. Just last weekend, a man was fatally shot outside the Gowanus Houses in Brooklyn.
Ironically, even as the cops are forced to pull back on face-to-face surveillance, stop-and-frisk critics like Councilmen Jumaane Williams and Ritchie Torres have been some of the loudest calling for more cameras in public housing.
Instead of letting cops do their jobs, scaring off bad guys before any crime is committed, the councilmen want enhanced electronic surveillance that might possibly lead to an arrest after a crime — possibly a fatal one.
Of course, the NYCLU is thrilled with the new policy. Executive Director Donna Lieberman said that clearing out the loiterers “placed New Yorkers, mostly black and Latino, under siege in their own homes.”
Wonder what the NYCLU will be doing when other New Yorkers, “mostly black and Latino,” find themselves under siege — or worse — at the hands of gangs?
We pray Commissioner Bratton has a trick in his bag to continue protecting these most vulnerable New York citizens — and if more cops will help, he should get them.