On June 15, the New York Police Department announced Mayor Bill de Blasio’s decision to disband the department’s plainclothes anti-crime unit. His decision was one of many taken in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
The New York police commissioner announced on Monday that he was disbanding the Police Department’s anti-crime units: plainclothes teams that target violent crime and have been involved in some of the city’s most notorious police shootings.
Roughly 600 officers serve in the units, which are spread out across the city and work out of the department’s 77 precincts and nine housing commands. They will immediately be reassigned to other duties, including the detective bureau and the department’s neighborhood policing initiative, the commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, said.
That’s the New York Times’ report on de Blasio’s decision.
The New York Post reports on the consequences of that decision.
There have been more shootings so far this year in New York City than in all of 2019.
A 24-year-old man who walked bleeding into Lincoln Hospital in The Bronx on Saturday night has pushed the city’s total number of shootings this year to 777 — topping the 776 recorded in all of last year, NYPD data compiled by The Post reveals.
And it’s only the first days of August, with five more months before the year is over.
Read the rest.
De Blasio’s decision was one of many overreactions to Minneapolis. Floyd’s killing did point to the need for some reforms in that city and some other police departments. Most Americans agreed to take a look and make the necessary changes.
It did not point to any need to “defund” or disband police departments wholesale. It did not point to the need for antifa to go on rampages, set fire to courthouses, and threaten the fabric of the nation.
To date, about two dozen Americans have died in the riots that have followed Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s incompetent reaction when protests in that city quickly turned violent.
In New York, many have died and will die because de Blasio opportunistically hampered the police department’s ability to curb crime.
New Yorker’s hearts were broken when stray bullets ended the life of teen Bronx hoops star Brandon Hendricks on June 28, and 1-year-old Brooklyn boy Davell Gardner, shot dead in his stroller on July 13 at a Brooklyn barbecue.
Weekends in New York are starting to look like weekends in Chicago.
That rampage of violence began around 11 p.m. Friday in the Bronx, when police said a masked shooter gunned down 21-year-old Shaiquan Wilson at a gathering outside of 1741 Randall Avenue in the Bronx neighborhood of Clason Point.
The shooter — who wore a white face mask and all-black clothing, including a hooded sweatshirt pulled low over his eyes — can be seen in harrowing surveillance footage released by police walking up to Wilson, and pulling a silver handgun from his pocket.
The killer escaped, police say.
Returning to the decision to disband the plainclothes anti-crime unit…
“This is a seismic shift in the culture of how the N.Y.P.D. polices this great city,” Mr. Shea said. “It will be felt immediately in the communities that we protect.”
It certainly has been.
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