New Yorkers remember the summer of 1990. I was headed to college after going to Saint Francis Prep in Queens. I could have gone to one of the universities in “the City,” as we called it. But even at 17, I sensed that New York was in a bad way.
New York City homicides hit 2605 that year. The last week of August and first week of September, as school began, saw the murders of Sean Healy, a Bronx prosecutor, and Brian Watkins, a teenage tourist headed to the U.S. Open, culminating in the New York Post headline “Dave, Do Something” that began the end of David Dinkins’s mayoralty. Settling into my dormitory, I felt confirmed in my decision to leave.
No one predicted what came next. Rudy Giuliani wrestled the annual homicide number down to 649 by 2001. Mike Bloomberg got it down to 335 by 2013. The City experienced a renaissance, during which I returned for seven years. Even Bill de Blasio pushed homicides down to 292 by 2017 — until that number went in the wrong direction, climbing to 468 in 2020. Many attribute the spike to de Blasio’s eliminating plainclothes anti-crime units responsible for both “stop, question, and frisk” searches that cause tension in minority neighborhoods and for getting illegal guns off the street.
Simultaneously, violence by and against New York police has become thankfully much less common. In 1971, the first year for which statistics are available, New York Police Department officers discharged their weapons 810 times, killing 93, in a year that saw 15 police officers killed. In 2019, on-duty NYPD officers fired their weapons just 34 times, killing 10, while sadly losing two of their own, Officer Brian Mulkeen and Detective Brian Simonsen. To give context, NYPD’s 36,000 officers protect 9.7 million souls each workday, plus 67 million tourists annually.
Meanwhile, there is increasing disorder in New York City. Aggressive panhandlers, graffiti, marijuana smoke, rotting garbage, somnolent addicts, and traffic caused by double-parked or box-blocking vehicles, familiar from old New York, again greet visitors. Headlines tell of gang assaults, rapes, and shootouts occurring in broad daylight in Midtown Manhattan. Streets deserted due to the coronavirus pandemic have a 1980s menace about them.
Last week, rather than address crime, New York’s City Council instead passed legislation hamstringing the NYPD. These bills end qualified immunity for allegedly unreasonable searches and seizures or excessive force; take disciplinary authority away from the police commissioner; and support requiring officers to live within the City.
New York City already pays a billion dollars a year in civil settlements while running a $5 billion deficit. NYPD is probed by two U.S. Attorney’s Offices, the state attorney general, the municipal Department of Investigation, five district attorneys, a Civilian Complaint Review Board, and NYPD’s own internal affairs and legal bureaus. Every police use of lethal force is presented to a grand jury. Are more payouts to the plaintiff’s bar what the city needs now? Do we want the police commissioner less empowered? Do we want police less proactive for fear of being sued and, even if indemnified, disciplined?
The residency requirement, reasonable on its face, ignores that an NYPD rookie makes $42,500 in the city with the highest cost of living in the country, where average rents are $3,436. Most understandably commute from the suburbs. No one becomes a police officer to make money, but when police are under great public criticism, do we want to make this dangerous and difficult, but equally important, job less attractive to talented applicants?
This legislation comes after the 2020 death in police custody of George Floyd in Minnesota and the Black Lives Matter movement, which sprang in part from the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Missouri. This period included the controversial death of Eric Garner at the hands of the NYPD and the assassinations of its Officers Wen Jian Liu and Rafael Ramos that year. Any time the state uses force against citizens, it is a serious matter. Anytime force is misused, it’s very serious, and if it’s misused for racial reasons, it’s criminal. Every big police department has brutal, corrupt, or racist members, only because any large organization, from the church to the military, has members who fall prey to the worst of human nature.
But data also matters. Policy-wise, the 89% drop in homicides from 1990-2017 saved thousands of mostly young minority men’s lives, an achievement that belongs to the NYPD.
Each police department, like each individual this Holy Week, is called to self-examination, penitence, and improvement. But to everything, there is a season, and the pendulum of opinion against the NYPD has swung too far. These City Council bills are bad ideas. And this isn’t just a New York story: what begins in big cities, for better or worse, spreads to the rest of the country. It’s time for elected officials, in my old hometown and elsewhere, to support our police.
Kevin Carroll served as senior counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security and the House Homeland Security Committee.
