Bill de Blasio is absolutely right.
No, I’m not being sarcastic! The mayor actually made the right call, under a little bit of pressure, when he said last week he rejected the view propounded by his fellow liberal Democrat, City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, that the city should decriminalize low-level offenses such as public urination and turnstile-jumping.
“I want to emphasize my vision of quality-of-life policing and my vision related to the ‘Broken Windows’ strategy is the same as Commissioner [William] Bratton’s — we’re very much unified on this point,” de Blasio said.
“The fundamental notion that we have to address quality-of-life crimes head-on is one I believe in.”
Well, at least up to a point.
De Blasio’s tough talk on crime undercuts his apparent opposition to Bratton’s request for 1,000 more police officers on the streets. The cost of that would be some $68 million and would reduce overtime for police, upon which the city spent a staggering $672 million last year. Even Mark-Viverito supports the idea of hiring more cops.
De Blasio has been hinting he will not hire the additional officers, even though the city currently has 6,000 fewer cops than it did in 2001. New York has added roughly 350,000 new residents since then, a city the size of Honolulu being added to the existing city.
The Post reported that Bratton and a de Blasio aide had a heated argument about the additional cops, with multiple witnesses reporting they heard Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris forcefully telling Bratton he wouldn’t get his wish and Bratton shouting that he would go around the mayor and obtain the OK from the City Council.
De Blasio’s softness on hiring more cops complements his Age of Aquarius view on marijuana. The mayor’s move last year to deal with possession of small amounts of pot with a summons instead of arrest has been linked to an uptick in violent crime by Bratton.
“We just see marijuana everywhere when we make these arrests, when we get these guns off the street,” Bratton said at a February news conference.
Weed, he said, is “an influence in almost everything that we do here.” The happy talk on pot we all heard from Bratton last year was apparently just a bid to ingratiate himself with the boss.
Through the first week of April, murders were up 16 percent this year compared to 2014. True, the rate of murder is still low — that 16 percent rise represents 11 people — but the trend is worth noting. The marijuana trade was a motive in at least seven murders this year, Bratton has said.
Meanwhile, the number of arrests for marijuana possession plummeted more than 60 percent in the first two months of the year. Were those arrests being displaced by tickets being written? No. The number of summonses for pot possession dropped as well, by a small margin.
De Blasio’s liberal urges pull him in one direction, but common sense (and the desire not to unleash a crime wave that could cost him his job) yanks him the opposite way.
Police think that looking into some of the commonest and least disruptive crimes can yield huge dividends: Get the ID of the guy drinking a beer in public and it turns out he’s wanted for several felonies.
Cops aren’t really interested in turnstile jumping. They’re interested in turnstile jumpers. Of the 67,000 people stopped and questioned for fare-beating last year, fewer than one-third were actually arrested.
Social scientist James Q. Wilson and George Kelling coined the “broken windows” theory after observing that, if one broken window in a building went unrepaired, every other window would soon get broken as well because of a sense that lawlessness prevailed.
Moreover, Bratton predicts, a general air of orderliness tends to be self-propagating. Some 1 million fewer summonses will be handed out to New Yorkers this year as compared to last year, Bratton says, because people have gotten used to obeying the laws.
The increasingly common odor of weed on the streets, though, is one signal that laws aren’t being taken seriously. So are homeless encampments such as the one that until recently occupied a stretch of tunnel connecting the PATH train to the subway system on 34th Street. (After The Post and other outlets publicized the incipient shantytown, cops rousted the homeless in late March.)
De Blasio’s hiring of Bratton to be his top cop is still the smartest move he ever made, even if it completely contradicts his opposition to the policies of the similarly-minded Ray Kelly.
De Blasio’s liberal urges pull him in one direction, but common sense (and the desire not to unleash a crime wave that could cost him his job) yanks him the opposite way.
De Blasio made the right call last week. But his increasingly fractious clashes with Bratton are an alarming sign that ideology is starting to blind him to reality.