What De Blasio Won’t See: New York’s Mayor Doesn’t Understand How Police Maintain Order.

Posted By on December 30th, 2014

http://www.wsj.com/articles/what-de-blasio-wont-see-1419898929

The scene around midtown Manhattan during the holidays is something of a madhouse—in a good way. Tens of thousands of tourists, including families, descend on Rockefeller Center to see the tree, Radio City to see the shows, and Fifth Avenue to see the department store windows, culminating in the New Year’s Eve balldrop in Times Square.

It’s hard to believe now, but there was a time when the scenes were different. There were tourists, but fewer and far fewer families. Times Square was the squalid home of sex shops and random robberies, not hotels and chain restaurants. Bryant Park on 42nd Street was a drug market, and criminals stalked the subways.

We recalled that era, as recent as the early 1990s, when we read Monday’s headline in the New York Post: “Police Give Arrests a Rest: Wary officers letting minor crooks slide.” The story reported that more of New York’s Finest are refusing to pursue routine violations, or even to take risks to pursue major violators, for fear that they won’t be supported if they run into trouble.

“My guys are writing almost no summonses, and probably only making arrests when they have to—like when a store catches a shoplifter,” one NYPD supervisor told the Post. For those who want to understand the rancorous divide between the police and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio , this is the heart of the matter. And it is ominous for social order in America’s largest city.

This gets to the debate over “broken windows” policing, in which cops don’t ignore small offenses like subway turnstile jumping or “squeegee men” who extort drivers for cash in return for washing their windshields at traffic lights with a dirty cloth. As New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and criminologist George Kelling recently explained on these pages, the point is that prosecuting small offenses rids the streets of those most likely to commit larger crimes. It also makes the streets more livable.

This is the kind of policing that Mr. de Blasio, his running mate Al Sharpton and their fellow progressives have been trying to stop. They scored their first victory in the legal case against the practice of “stop and frisk,” which a federal judge ruled unconstitutional last year.

Former mayor Mike Bloomberg appealed, and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals all but invited the challenge, but Mr. de Blasio made the case a central plank of his mayoral campaign. Upon taking office he dropped the appeal and accepted new judicial restrictions on police conduct.

In the wake of the murder of two cops sitting in their patrol cars this month, Mr. de Blasio and the progressives suddenly realize they have a police problem. At the funeral for patrolman Rafael Ramos on Saturday, thousands of police turned out and many turned their back as the mayor spoke. On NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, Mr. Bratton deplored that gesture but admitted that “morale in the department at this time is low. There is no getting around that.”

Mr. de Blasio tried to make some amends on Monday by speaking at a police cadet graduation and praising their “noble calling.” We’re glad he thinks so, but what the police and the public want is more than appeasing rhetoric. They want to know that the mayor understands the hard-won progress New York has made against public disorder, and how it was accomplished. He could start by letting Mr. Bratton instruct him on the direct connection between “broken windows” and all those happy holiday tourists.

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