Unfortunately, police defunding is alive and well in New York City even if it is largely hidden from view.
The “Defund the Police” movement that swept the nation following the police killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officers on May 25, 2020, wasn’t born that day. It had long been the mantra of the left that local governments spent far too much on police and not nearly enough on other vital municipal responsibilities that tend to militate against criminality in the long run – like education, public health, the homeless and youth services. But there can be no doubt that on that day it became a cause célèbre and one of the top political issues across the country.
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the NYC Council Speaker soon agreed to cut $1 billion from the NYPD budget by canceling the planned hiring of 1,160 new officer and law enforcement infrastructure spending. With a nod to what this really would look like, they also, as the New York Times reported, cosmetically shifted responsibility away from the NYPD for such relatively peripheral things as illegal vending, homeless people on the streets and school safety. But notwithstanding the packaging, the department’s core criminal law enforcement mission took an unmistakable direct billion dollar hit.
And although Mayor Adams railed against defunding in his successful 2021 mayoral campaign, he never restored the spending cuts once assuming office, although, in all fairness he was faced with massive Covid-related deficits. Predictably, though, crime continues to be out of control in NYC – spurred on by the woke anti-law enforcement agenda. The appreciation of law enforcement, essential to avoid chaos and allow the other parts of the system to work, seems totally lacking in that crowd.
We fear it is now about to get even worse.
Mayor Adams did not exempt the NYPD from his new across the board 5% cut of municipal agency budgets in order to pay for the city’s multi-billion-dollar deficits occasioned by the immigrant crisis. So that things were destined to take a turn for the worse seemed preordained.
And then, just last week, the City Council sent a devastating piece of legislation to the mayor’s desk for his signature which has the potential of either tying up police officers’ time or encouraging them to abandon core police work and prepare report for virtually every investigative encounter they have with members of the public.
Thus the new bill would add to the current “stop report” law that requires officers, in encounters with the public where they have a “reasonable suspicion” of a crime in progress, to prepare a report detailing the race/ethnicity age, and gender of the civilian, the factors that led to the interaction, the suspected crime that prompted it, a description of any searches that may have been conducted in the course of it, and whether the interaction led to a summons or use of force incident.”
The new bill would also expand the report requirement to include instances where officers have an “objective credible reason” to request information from a civilian they believe might have knowledge relevant to an investigation – think, for example, a missing child investigation – even when they do not necessarily suspect criminal activity on the part of the person stopped. Police investigations are both time sensitive and intense and require prompt outreach to large numbers of people.
And since a large part of police work is based upon what would be loosely be described as “experience,” officers would tend to be deterred from making all important judgment calls for fear of finding themselves buried in endless paper work or put to the task of defending them to the many ideologically anti-cop critics out there.
So, it was not for nothing that Mayor Adams – a staunch opponent of the legislation – observed the other day, that you don’t keep the city safe the “the more and more you have police officers handle paperwork.”
Finally, we found particularly revealing, the Council’s required “Impact On Expenditures” statement on the legislation:
It is anticipated that there would be no impact resulting fro the enactment of this legislation as the agency responsible for carrying it out its requirements would be able to use existing resources to fulfill the requirements of this legislation.
So, the NYPD is still very much in the sights of the woke cabal in control of the New York City Council.
