New York's mayor-elect Eric Adams has gotten his first taste of the extortion tactics that the city's anti-cop radicals will use against him once he takes office.
Last week, a leader of New York Black Lives Matter threatened 'riots . . . fire . . . and bloodshed' should Adams deliver on a campaign promise to revive a contested undercover unit of the New York Police Department.
Adams brushed off the threat. But the argument that BLM leader Hawk Newsome made against the unit—that it has a disparate impact on blacks—will come up repeatedly if Adams carries through on his anti-crime platform.
Ironically, Adams himself lodged that disparate impact argument against the NYPD in previous years. He now better be prepared to meet and rebuff it.
The most powerful statistic in his arsenal will be the disparate impact of crime on blacks.
In 2020, blacks made up nearly 74% of all shooting victims and 65% of all murder victims, though they are less than 22% of the city's population. Not one of those victims of civilian shootings, including young children, was protested by New York Black Lives Matter.
The now-defunct Anti-Crime Unit was one of the last entities within the NYPD to forthrightly practice proactive policing. Its members were tasked with spotting and intervening in suspicious behavior in gang-plagued neighborhoods before that behavior ripened into a full-fledged crime.
Anti-Crime officers used their lawful powers to stop and question suspects (and possibly to frisk them if the officer had reason to think that a suspect was carrying an illegal weapon). The unit had an exemplary record of getting guns off the street and of deterring crime.
On June 15, 2020, however, NYPD Commissioner Dermott Shea announced that he was disbanding the Anti-Crime Unit.
The announcement came in response to the riots that had erupted in New York after the arrest-related death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in late May 2020.
For days, thugs had crashed SUVs into stores and cleared the businesses out of merchandise; they had firebombed police cars and torched public property. Over 400 officers were injured by bottles, rocks, glass, and cement blocks.
Shea and Mayor Bill de Blasio were desperate to show their sympathy with the anti-cop forces. The Anti-Crime Unit became the sacrificial lamb.
Though stopping and questioning suspects short of making an arrest is a constitutional power, Shea labelled such stops 'brute force.'
The fall-out from Shea's announcement was immediate.
Shootings jumped 205% in the two subsequent weeks, from 38 incidents over that timespan in 2019 to 116 incidents in 2020. Gunshot injuries rose 238%. June 2020 became the most violent month in terms of gunfire in 24 years.
Gangbangers knew that their chances of getting stopped with a gun had dropped enormously.
Police officers had gotten the message as well: whether you are in anti-crime or not, proactive policing is unwelcome.
In the month following the disbanding of the Anti-Crime Unit, narcotics arrests fell 85% city-wide, gang detectives made 90% fewer arrests, subway and housing arrests dropped by comparable amounts, and gun arrests dropped 67%.
Through early December 2020, arrests were down 36%. Gun arrests had started rebounding, but they couldn't keep up with the increase in guns on the street and with the emboldening of criminals. The year ended with a nearly 100% surge in gun violence and a 44% increase in homicides, a surge that continued well into 2021.
The arguments for disbanding the Anti-Crime Unit were specious. It was true, as was widely reported after Shea's decision, that Anti-Crime officers were involved in a disproportionate number of police shootings.
What was not reported was how low that number of shootings was.
In 2019, there were 25 incidents in which NYPD officers—not just from Anti-Crime but from across the entire force -- intentionally shot criminal suspects.
Those 25 incidents represented the second lowest number of officer-involved shootings since records were first kept nearly fifty years ago.
Fifty-four members of the NYPD were involved in those 25 shooting incidents, of which 19, or 35%, were from the Anti-Crime squad. By comparison, the roughly 600 Anti-Crime officers were 1.6% of the total NYPD sworn force.
Those 25 shootings incidents resulted in 11 civilian fatalities—also a historically low number. All the civilians killed by NYPD officers in 2019 appeared to be threatening officers with potentially lethal force; seven had loaded guns.
In 2019, the 36,397 members of the NYPD responded to over 6.4 million calls for service. Over 64,000 of those calls involved weapons. Twenty-five shootings and 11 fatalities are remarkably few, given the size of New York and of the NYPD.
Three percent of Anti-Crime officers discharged their weapons at suspects in 2019; that number, too, suggests restraint rather than brutality. The likelihood of an officer's use of force is a function of how often he interacts with violent suspects. Confronting armed, violent, and resisting suspects was virtually the unit's job description.
There was no evidence, therefore, that the Anti-Crime Unit was trigger-happy or prone to excessive force. The other charge against it—that it (and other members of the NYPD) unfairly singled out minorities for stops--was equally groundless.
That 'racial profiling' charge has bedeviled not just the NYPD but all American policing for decades. It requires a willful ignorance of the reality of crime.
In 2020, black subjects made up 56.6% of all pedestrian stops conducted by the NYPD. (The department does not separate out stops conducted by Anti-Crime or other policing units.) Whites made up 9.1% of all NYPD stops.
By contrast, as mentioned above, blacks were under 22% of the city's population in 2018 and whites nearly 32%. Based on that disparity alone, cop critics allege that NYPD officers discriminate in their policing practices.
But the relevant benchmark for judging police activity is not population data but crime data, since policing today, especially in the NYPD, is data-driven.
Officers are deployed to where crime is most intense, and that is in minority neighborhoods. Blacks, it turns out, are understopped compared to what their crime rates would predict, and whites greatly overstopped.
In 2020, blacks were over 72% of all shooting suspects; we know that from victim and witness descriptions. Whites were 1.4% of all shooting suspects, again, based on victim and witness descriptions.
A black New Yorker is roughly 50 times as likely to commit a shooting as a white New Yorker. Blacks were 63.4% of murder suspects; whites, 6.3%. (That white share of homicide suspects represents domestic violence incidents, not street crime. It is only the latter that generates street stops for likely gang activity or illegal gun carrying.)
Given these disparities in criminal offending, the police cannot enforce the law without having a disparate impact on blacks, as measured by population ratios.
Eric Adams, a former NYPD sergeant, used to lodge the same demagogic racial profiling charges against the NYPD during his years leading the rabble-rousing organization, 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care.
He gave patently false testimony against NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly in a 2015 lawsuit that aimed to shut down the department's stop practices.
Now Adams has recast himself as a defender of the proactive policing that he denounced for years. Safety-minded New Yorkers are eager to take him at his word.
But if he is to succeed in driving fear from the public square, it will not be enough to reconstitute the Anti-Crime Unit.
New York's next mayor will have to relentlessly beat back the charge that the NYPD is racist for trying to protect black victims. Doing so will mean speaking the uncomfortable truth about black crime.
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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal, and the author of the bestselling War on Cops and The Diversity Delusion. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in Daily Mail UK