Crimes against New York
The protection of life, limb and property is squarely on the line with the City Council’s move to force the NYPD to apply racial and ethnic yardsticks to arrests. With Speaker Christine Quinn’s misguided approval, a Council majority voted out of committee a measure that would require judges to figure out whether cops are busting too many people of particular backgrounds.
Those would include, in the bill’s language, “race, national origin, color, creed, age, alienage or citizenship status, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or housing status.” A lopsided count would be evidence of profiling and oblige the NYPD to prove there’s a good reason why cops have arrested, for example, blacks or gays in numbers exceeding their population percentage.
Drafted by Brooklyn’s Jumaane Williams, the bill arises from mania over the NYPD’s program of stopping and questioning individuals suspected of criminality and frisking when cops fear the presence of weapons.
Most of those stopped have been blacks and Hispanics, giving rise to false accusations that police are targeting large numbers of minoritygroup members solely on the basis of their backgrounds. Actually, the stops align with the race and ethnicity of crime suspects and victims.
Certain that the numbers alone prove bias and bad faith on the part of cops, the sponsors have devised fixes that are dangerous and divisive.
First, they would bar police from relying on any of the listed categories as “the determinative fac- tor in initiating law enforcement action.” Here’s how that plays out:
A woman reports that a white male teen wearing a Yankees jersey had snatched her pocketbook outside the Stadium after a game. A police officer sees five people wearing jerseys. Three are white and two are black. Two of the whites are men and one is a woman. One of the whites is a teenager; the other is middle-aged.
By process of elimination, the cop zeroes in on the white teen, but that means considering forbidden characteristics: his race, gender and age.
Beyond hobbling officers in the exercise of duties, the law grants citizens and activists the right to sue if they believe the Police Department or units of the department are applying the law more heavily against one group than against another.
The activists can march into state Supreme Court and ask justices to bar the NYPD from continuing allegedly offending practices, thus placing the department under the scrutiny of courts in this, that or the other borough using a convoluted, hard to understand, agenda-driven law.
The bill is one of two damaging measures to be voted on by the Council this week. The other would create an inspector general for the NYPD. Quinn cleared both for a vote over the objection of committee Chairman Peter Vallone of Queens.
Give credit to Councilmen Lew Fidler, Jim Gennaro, Vinny Ignizio, Peter Koo, Mike Nelson, Eric Ulrich and Jimmy Oddo for siding with Vallone against the bills. And pray that more members see that in their fury they are about to jeopardize the long, successful fight against crime.