Condemn, Then Complain

New York City continues to experience a ghastly increase in criminal violence. Shootings and homicides, mostly gang-related or sparked by obscure beefs, rack neighborhoods across the five boroughs. Homicides are up 30 percent over last year at this time, and even more troublingly, shooting incidents have almost doubled and appear to be accelerating.

In response to the escalating violence, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams has identified police diffidence, in the form of a “deliberate slowdown,” as the culprit. In a letter to police commissioner Dermot Shea, Williams takes the NYPD to task for dragging its feet amid “a horrific rise in shootings . . . with the vast majority of victims being black and brown New Yorkers.” Williams upbraids the NYPD and reminds Commissioner Shea that “community trust” in the police can “degrade from underenforcement.”

No public official in New York City has expended more energy than Williams to limit the power of the police, undermine their credibility, and promote the release of criminals. Since his election to the city council in 2009, Williams has fought vigorously against Broken Windows policing—universally credited with bringing the city’s murder rate down by 90 percent over 25 years—which he invariably cast as racist. “Upwards of 75 million dollars have been used to arrest NYC residents for marijuana possession,” said Williams in 2011, and “86% of those arrests are young children of more color. . . . Had this been 86% of our young children of a lighter shade, there would be uproar.” As part of his campaign against marijuana arrests, Williams protested outside then-mayor Michael Bloomberg’s house, calling for “a stop to the unjust stop and frisk policy that is endangering the young black and Latino men of this city. Stop and frisk is a racist practice, plain and simple, and it is an abuse of power.”