FILE – Law enforcement officials and Nationwide Guard members at a subway station
Picture by Dean Moses
Cities throughout America have fought crime for many years with nice success. They’ve additionally dealt with protests adeptly, and solely a handful of instances have needed to name within the Nationwide Guard when actual dysfunction arose within the type of mass looting and violence.
However nothing immediately even comes near a few of the worst crises any American metropolis has ever confronted. New York Metropolis exemplifies that.
We’re nicely past the post-pandemic crime spike, with murders and shootings reaching historic lows. The NYPD says town is on observe for about 325 homicides this 12 months; to place issues in perspective, in 1990, New York averaged greater than 2,000 homicides a 12 months.
Over the previous 35 years, the NYPD has accomplished a yeoman’s job preventing crime, proving past a shadow of a doubt that the Huge Apple can overcome its issues with out resorting to armed troops.
We’re “the safest big city in America,” as Mayor Eric Adams typically proclaims, and the NYPD knowledge backs it up. That’s a testomony additionally to the good management of Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a confirmed chief who has shaken up the division management, infused new crime-fighting insurance policies and is working exhausting to carry extra officers into the ranks.
But the Trump administration continues to saber-rattle in opposition to town and flirt with the thought of calling within the Nationwide Guard in opposition to New York and different American cities as a result of, the president purports, crime is uncontrolled. Why?
Are Trump and his administration significantly suggesting that the NYPD and different police departments across the nation aren’t doing their jobs?
On Tuesday, Metropolis Corridor joined dozens of cities throughout America in a authorized temporary supporting Portland, OR, of their authorities’s federal case searching for to maintain Trump from sending Nationwide Guard troops into their metropolis. It’s unhappy that it has come to this, but it’s obligatory in these fragile instances.
At present, New York has Nationwide Guard troops within the subways, on standing order from Gov. Kathy Hochul, who deployed them final 12 months to help the NYPD in combating crime in transit. Hochul made that call with the consent and request of town and the MTA; it was not a unilateral choice made with no clear cause.
New York doesn’t want the militarization of its streets with out related consent and request from our elected officers. If there’s a real disaster past the management of town and state governments — a catastrophe, pure or man-made, or actual civil unrest by which complete neighborhoods are literally burning to the bottom — we now have each confidence that Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul will make that request.
We don’t want armed troops on the streets or probably helping ICE in its operations to detain immigrants who don’t have felony information. Our metropolis is protected and peaceable. Let it stay so.
