Posted on 06/10/2007 5:51:40 AM PDT by knighthawk
Judging by the sustained and ill-informed criticism of it in recent months, the New York City Police Department appears to be the victim of its own success.
In the nearly six years since the destruction of the World Trade Center, multiple terrorist plots against the city have been thwarted, while conventional crime has been driven down to historic lows. As a result of our own recruitment efforts, the Police Department has never been more ethnically or racially diverse.
One-fifth of our recent police recruits are foreign-born American citizens with impressive language skills. And despite the controversial Sean Bell shooting, fatal police-involved shootings are a fraction of what they once were, and far lower than that in other large cities.
Frustrated, perhaps, by an era of post-9/11 goodwill toward the police, some of the usual critics have come back with a vengeance recently to smear the NYPD with unfounded charges of racism and unconstitutional overreaching.
The New York Civil Liberties Union is perhaps the worst offender, using uncorroborated student accounts to publish a specious March report, "Criminalizing the Classroom," about police in public schools. A year earlier, it offered a $1,000 prize on its Web site for student essays - and then quoted from five of them in the anti-police report.
In what it claimed was an objective survey, the NYCLU poisoned the well by soliciting participation with material that said, "Every day students around New York City are mistreated by police officers in their schools. Whether in the hallways, at lunch, or going through metal detectors, students' rights are violated regularly."
The same report disingenuously blurred the distinction between police officer and civilian school safety agent to create the illusion that many more armed officers are in schools than actually are. It described a "massive" police presence - without disclosing that police, in fact, are assigned to fewer than 10% of public schools, with just one police officer in nine of 10 of those schools.
Our critics are less inclined to talk about how public safety improved markedly in the schools since the NYPD assumed responsibility. By last year, major crimes had dropped by more than 33%, possession of weapons and other dangerous instruments by 40% and sexual assaults by 50%. Since this past September, we have confiscated hundreds of knives, 23 real firearms and 111 pellet and imitation guns.
Distorted accounts of police conduct in Bushwick recently also led to criticism. City Council and community board members there had called police to warn of brewing gang violence as a large group of youths gathered to attend the wake of a murdered Bloods member. When police arrested some of the young people for unlawful assembly and disorderly conduct, our critics claimed they had done nothing wrong.
No mention was made of those who walked on top of parked cars along the way, or of those who flashed gang signs and colors in a tinderbox atmosphere that had already cost a 17-year-old gang member his life at the hands of a 16-year-old killer.
The critics also claimed the arrest of these minority youth was racially motivated, while conveniently neglecting to point out that the police captain who ordered them happened also to be African-American.
Our critics have resorted to historical revisionism as well. Because of the NYPD's policing of the 2004 Republican National Convention, New York was spared the havoc wreaked on Seattle, Montreal and Genoa, as well as the injuries to nearly a thousand police and protesters that accumulated last week in Germany, even before the G-8 summit got underway.
We were universally applauded for our handling of the convention. In the immediate aftermath of the largest protest in the history of American political conventions, The New York Times praised the NYPD for "showing that protest tactics designed to create chaos and attract the world's attention can be effectively countered with intense planning and a well-disciplined use of force."
But in the intervening years, plaintiffs' lawyers for the relatively few arrested during the convention have attempted to rewrite this success, with fanciful accounts of mistreatment. These complaints emanate from a new pampered class of protesters who often seek the status of a civil disobedience arrest but complain bitterly about the inconvenience it entails.
However superbly they have performed in keeping New York safe from terrorists and common criminals in recent years, New York City police officers never solicited the universal praise they received after 9/11. And they don't deserve the onslaught of criticism orchestrated by familiar critics as the tide of 9/11 gratitude begins to recede.
Kelly is commissioner of the New York City Police Department.
Ping
And the NYPD does this while paying recruits less than $24k. You can’t rent a basement in Queens and have a life on that pittance.
YOU ARE SOOOO RIGHT & WHAT A DISGRACE.
NYPD SHOULD BE PAID TOP $$$$$$$$$$$$$
THEY EARN IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
---laaa-de---daaahhh---
Is that figure correct or is it what you read somewhere? I find it hard to believe when smaller less dangerous cities start at around 40K a year for recruits.
Too many LE officials throughout this country are cowed by the ACLU.
The greatest gift and protection this country could ever receive would be for the gubmint to declare the ACLU a terrorist organization on an equal footing with other terrorst organizations such as Al Queda and the Hillary Boiler Room operation.
Leni
Meanwhile 29,000 candidates took the Suffolk County LI test yesterday. There are 400 spots over the next four years.
Read your own link, the $25,100 includes benefits, not just pay.
What did you expect from the ACLU. They hate anyone who enforces American values, they hate good order and they hate American democracy. They work like termites from within to destroy the system that they claim to protect. You have to fight them at ever step or they will find sympathetic judges to do their dirty work and further weaken our institutions. They are scum, nothing more, nothing less.
Correct. That’s why I looked it up. The pay increases rapidly though.
Add the fact that the ACLU will crucify you for doing your job and what was once a truly great gig has become far less than attractive.
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