Young: Crime control at top of the agenda
Times Square got an increased police presence in May after three people were shot there. On Sunday, a Marine was shot in the area. Credit: Marcus Santos
By Cathy YoungOn Sunday, for the second time in two months, a shooting in New York’s Times Square has injured an innocent bystander. Gunfire erupted in daylight after an argument involving six men. A 21-year-old tourist, United States Marine Samuel Poulin, was hit in the back by a stray bullet. In response, Mayor Bill de Blasio has promised to "flood the zone" with more police to deal with the problem. That’s an almost shocking statement from a progressive Democrat in 2021, when "police" has become a dirty word on the left. But maybe the tide is about to turn.
The surge of concern about abuses in law enforcement and the justice system in the past few years has had many positive aspects. Even leaving aside racial biases that often result in harsher treatment of Black— and especially Black male — suspects and defendants, police culture in too many departments has often condoned excessive force and neglected de-escalation.This needs to change. Needlessly aggressive police tactics can hurt good policing by promoting tensions with the community.
But slogans calling to "defund" or "abolish" the police or vilifying all cops are a naive response — one that, for all the talk of racial sensitivity, seems to appeal to affluent white liberals much more than it does to Black and Latino individuals, who are far more likely to be victims of crime. Preliminary results of the Democratic mayoral primary, where former police captain Eric Adams — who is Black, and who talks about the need to combat crime as well as racism and police abuse — was a strong favorite in minority communities.
It’s hard to say to what extent the spike in murders and aggravated assaults across urban areas last year — and, in New York, in robberies as well — resulted from the anti-cop climate (whether because of deliberate shirking by cops, excessive caution or demoralization). But whatever the causal relationship, this is a bad time for knee-jerk police-bashing and for idealistic experiments in "alternative ways" of violence reduction — especially if those experiments take money away from old-fashioned policing. On Monday, Oakland, California Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong made an emotional plea decrying city officials’ move to reallocate about $18 million away from proposed police spending over the next two years. Armstrong, who is Black, stressed that "marginalized communities" would suffer most.
Such debates are likely to dominate the mayoral race in New York. The proactive policing associated with Rudy Giuliani’s tenure as mayor poses its own problems: It can result in police harassment of people who are merely thought to look suspicious, often based on racial profiling. But a proactive (and hopefully improved) approach can also be an invaluable way to curb crime.
For those of us old enough to remember the old days of rampant crime, the Times Square shootings are a disturbing echo. Then as now, a contingent of progressive idealists insisted that the way to address crime was to curb the social problems that led to it, while many Black politicians and their constituents supported tough anti-crime measures. History may not fully repeat itself, but it may teach progressives the same lesson.
Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a contributing editor at Reason magazine, are her own.
Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.
