NYPD top cop suggests getting rid of the one thing that made NYC safe
The NYPD’s top cops just offered draft articles of capitulation to street crime and civic deterioration. There seems little doubt the surrender will be accepted — and New Yorkers will be the worse for it.
NYPD Captains Endowment Association President Chris Monahan yesterday wrote a letter to Commissioner Dermot Shea demanding an end to the city’s CompStat anti-crime program, saying it is “the primary driving force that is undermining police/community relations in New York City.”
Make no mistake: This is a command-level rejection of the accountability strategies that helped conquer crime the last time the city was on the edge of the pit.
CompStat uses real-time numbers to pin-point emerging high-crime locations — providing top brass with the information they need to direct down-the-chain-of-command guidance to cops on the beat.
And the program generates the weekly reports everyday New Yorkers use to keep track of crime in their communities. Lose it, and valuable information disappears as well (not that politicians embarrassed by current jump in shootings will mind.)
CompStat chafes — as the enforcement of accountability usually does. And the burn has been felt in both the department and the community, which often balks at being policed. That’s only human nature.
Or, as Monahan put it in the letter, “When members of the NYPD are pressured from the top to show ‘productivity,’ they become involved in street encounters that they otherwise may not have occurred, thereby driving a wedge between police and the communities we serve.”
Thing is, when Monahan cites “pressure to show productivity,” he is actually revealing resentment of accountability. And when he complains of involvement “in street encounters that otherwise may not have occurred,” he could be describing every arrest the NYPD makes.
Frankly, the practical alternative to “driving a wedge between the police and the communities we serve” is leaving high-crime neighborhoods to the mercies of hardened criminals — and Gotham has been there before. It’s ugly.
For sure, Monahan correctly objects to being deprived by the de Blasio administration of tools commanders need to keep the city safe. Specifically, he cites the 600-member anti-crime flying squads Shea decommissioned last week and, inferentially, the policies that helped save the city in the ’90s — broken-windows policing and so on.
He should complain — the louder the better. Shea and de Blasio deserve blame for the increasingly bloody consequences of their wrong-headed policing policies, not the commanders charged with carrying them out.
But killing CompStat — turning off the lights, choking off the information and just walking away — is no answer either. It might get Monahan’s union off the hook — but it would leave the city squarely in the cross-hairs.
There’s no doubt New York City is headed for a bad place, and it’ll probably get there with or without CompStat. But Monahan is waving a white flag of enormous symbolic significance.
For if the top cops no longer care, who will?
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