Another tragic shooting in New York City over the weekend, this one in Times Square, with three people injured, including a 4-year-old girl, confirmed what the statistics already show: The Big Apple has a crime problem, and city officials are making it worse.
Within the first few months of this year, New York City saw 120 murders, a 9.1% increase over the same period in 2020. More than 400 people have been shot in the city since January, an 83.3% increase from 2020 and a 93.5% increase from 2019. Just a couple of weeks ago, the New York Police Department reported that shootings had tripled.
All of this is happening in a city with some of the strictest gun laws in the country. One such law requires New Yorkers who want a pistol permit or a concealed carry permit to prove they have “proper cause,” or an identifiable need for self-protection. Yet police report that there are more firearms on the streets than ever before thanks to increased gang activity.
In other words, New York’s gun regulations aren’t keeping the guns out of the bad guys’ hands. They’re just making it more difficult for the good guys to protect themselves.
On top of that, New York police officers are dealing with a wave of anti-police sentiment that is making it much more difficult to do their jobs. Although Mayor Bill de Blasio largely kept police headcount and operations intact this year, he still cut more than $500 million from the NYPD’s capital budget and did away with a successful plainclothes anti-crime unit. The City Council also voted to remove qualified immunity protections, which means police officers can be personally sued. The result, officers say, has been a spike in retirements. By the end of 2020, more than 5,300 NYPD uniformed officers retired or put in their papers to leave, a 75% increase from the year before.
Luckily, New York City’s mayoral candidates seem to understand that the NYPD isn’t the problem liberals have made it out to be. Former police captain Eric Adams has been a staunch defender of New York’s police officers. And former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who is one of several candidates running to replace de Blasio, rightly came out against the “Defund the Police” movement this weekend, saying New Yorkers are understandably concerned about “rising rates of violent crime, petty crime, street homelessness.”
“Nothing works in our city without public safety, and for public safety, we need the police,” Yang said. “My message to the NYPD is this: New York needs you. Your city needs you. We need you to do your jobs professionally, responsibly, and justly.”
But New York officers need more than just vocal support. They also need to be allowed to do their jobs efficiently if the city’s crime rates are to come back down. That might mean reintroducing some of the aggressive policing policies implemented under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s administration, during which crime dropped dramatically.
Those policies won’t be popular among the liberals running New York City, but this weekend’s Times Square shooting proved they might just be necessary.
