Name: De Blasio’s leadership masquerade: The mayor’s State of the City and his police ‘reform’
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De Blasio’s leadership masquerade: The mayor’s State of the City and his police ‘reform’

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AdvertisementBy New York Daily NewsJan 31, 2021 at 5:00 amA couple of weeks ago, a half-baked memo from City Hall landed on the desks of the NYPD’s top brass.It opened with the baffling “Top line: Gun violence is different from crime and, as a data [sic] shows, many incidents involve interpersonal conflicts that, combined with the wide availability of guns, result in changes in shooting dynamics. We offer our recommended plan for a new under 800 shootings/300 murders/year plan for CY2021.”AdvertisementSomewhere in that word salad is the idea of getting gun violence back down to pre-2020 levels before the numbers started to, well, shoot up after the city locked down in March so that last year ended with 1,531 shootings and 468 murder.As to how this plan would bring shootings down, I don’t know. It declares that “(t)he COVID pandemic has made it clear that gun violence, not crime (not even violent crime), is the current public safety challenge in NYC and nationwide” and that “(o)ne prominent feature of the current murder wave is that most major urban areas (with few exceptions), both cities run by Democratic and Republican majors [sic], had similar sharp increases in shootings and murders.”AdvertisementAnd that locking people up doesn’t help, but also that people getting out of lock up with guns blazing don’t help:“Locking people up in jail and prison for long detention provides limited results. Incarceration incapacities [sic] convicted people for a time period but doesn’t address the root issue — we are seeing increasing numbers of people returning from prison involved in shootings.”After all that throat clearing, the plan ticks off a hodge-podge of proposals long on and short on particulars, about “Activating Community Resources,” how the NYPD should lead a new multi-agency “Gun Violence Command Center” focused on the “very small group of individuals” who do the shootings, the need to “Re-energize Ceasefire” and to “Utilize effective interventions as appropriate.”WeekdaysCatch up on the day’s top five stories every weekday afternoon. &gt; At one point it declares that “We should create a squad/unit of contact tracers immediately,” to deal with 2020′s historically low gun-violence clearance rate and presumably to go along with the mayor’s much hyped and mostly useless And it calls on the NYPD to “create a tech-based version of hot spot policing” involving drones at crime and active shooting scenes along with more AI “designed to protect individual liberties” to monitor the social media accounts of potential hate criminals and suspected gang members.The NYPD, I’m told, responded with a memo back to City Hall agreeing with some of this, noting what was already happening, and explaining what they thought didn’t entirely make sense and why.And that’s more or less where things stood until de Blasio’s sad, strange, final State of the City speech on Thursday — a video he narrated over shots of the city, without ever showing his face and with his voice heard, to the consternation of TV and radio reporters, above a background of mood music as he made lots of lofty promises he won’t be around to see through.De Blasio vowed, like he does every year, to “deepen trust” and “transform the relationship between our police and our communities,” and then took a deep breath and said that “To overcome the challenge of violence fostered by the COVID crisis, we’re creating a new joint force to end gun violence and fight back against shootings. This will not just be the NYPD, it’ll be leaders of communities all over New York City… bringing in the Cure Violence Movement and the Crisis Management System, working with district attorneys, ensuring that everyone is working together for a common purpose. We know it is only a very few who commit the violence in New York City. But with this new approach, we will identify, individual by individual, who’s creating the violence that afflicts everyone else, and will bring to bear all the energies of community and law enforcement to end that violence.”About 36 hours later, the City Council that, among other things, would end qualified immunity for officers, put a referendum on the ballot to make the appointment of police commissioners subject to the advice and consent of the Council, and call on state lawmakers to give the Civilian Complaint Review Board, rather than the NYPD, the last word on officer discipline. None of that would help with shootings, of course, but it would help end the long reform stalemate between the NYPD and the city.AdvertisementAnd it’s a real plan. There’s no real planning from de Blasio, just penciled in “plans” that let him give speeches and all but ensure one more wasted year of this guy just trying to bluff his way through. And then, depending on what Democratic voters decide in June, possibly more wasted years to come with more needless shootings and more wasted and damaged lives. Advertisement

AdvertisementBy New York Daily NewsJan 31, 2021 at 5:00 amA couple of weeks ago, a half-baked memo from City Hall landed on the desks of the NYPD’s top brass.It opened with the baffling “Top line: Gun violence is different from crime and, as a data [sic] shows, many incidents involve interpersonal conflicts that, combined with the wide availability of guns, result in changes in shooting dynamics. We offer our recommended plan for a new under 800 shootings/300 murders/year plan for CY2021.”AdvertisementSomewhere in that word salad is the idea of getting gun violence back down to pre-2020...

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Harry Siegel

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De Blasio’s leadership masquerade: The mayor’s State of the City and his police ‘reform’

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