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New York’s Intelligence Suffers the Unintelligent
On June 30th New York’s city council voted to cut nearly $484 million from the NYPD’s annual $6 billion budget and shift funding to other agencies as well as youth and social services programming.
According to a USA Today summary, “the changes will cancel a nearly 1,200-person police recruiting class set for next month (though another class in October is scheduled to go forward), curtail overtime spending and shift school safety, crossing guards and homeless outreach away from the NYPD.” (emphasis mine)
Locations where the New York City Police Department has embedded officers. (N.Y. Times)
On cue, the addled mayor released a statement saying in part, “This budget prioritizes our communities most in need while keeping New Yorkers safe.” About as safe as a COVID-era New York nursing home.
The cognitive dissonance of reducing cops in a big city struggling with increased violent crime, a pandemic, and increasingly desperate residents challenges the senses. But set aside for a moment these until recently obvious observations. There is another consideration completely absent from any of this childish talk of defunding the police.
The NYPD operates one of the world’s foremost intelligence bureaus whose primary purpose is to detect and disrupt criminal and terrorist activity in the city and beyond. Its role came immediately to mind when I heard of the council’s vote.
Two summers ago I sat at a professional symposium, riveted listening to one of NYPD’s foreign liaison officers present an unclassified overview of a particular program the intel bureau maintains with law enforcement entities worldwide. They actively thwart plots and track criminals. At any given time the bureau posts more than a dozen exchange officers to make intelligence analysis sharing work effectively. It carries on similar agreements with state and federal agencies.
I have not read whether or how much the intel bureau’s resources are to be diminished. But I contemplate the coming blow to the yeoman’s work the NYPD intelligence bureau does on behalf of public safety. Safety indeed Mr. Mayor.
I feel a dystopian novel’s dread as I witness unthinkable events repeatedly crashing through the Overton Window into reality. New York is headed for trouble. Its historical, cultural, and economic role in our nation means we all, to different extents, are too.
I am interested in other consequences, unintended or otherwise, that members have seen in the rush to defund the police. What are you seeing and anticipating out there?
Published in Policing
The disaster that is Bill de Blaiso will outlast Bill de Blasio, just as the sins of John Lindsay extended past his watch and hit home less than halfway through the term of his successor, Abe Beame — who, as NYC Comptroller in Lindsay’s second term shared some of the blame for the financial collapse and descent in the 1970s hellhole the city became, due to near bankruptcy and the budget cuts, including to the police, that followed.
Even then, the city’s progressive voters still partially bought into the idea that Washington was responsible for New York’s problems, blaming Gerald Ford for not giving the city free bailout money. They did elect the most conservative Democrat in the field, Ed Koch, to replace Beame in ’77, but the voters weren’t ready for truly radical change for another 16 years, until Giuliani was put in office, and the murder rate was up to six per day (even right now, de Blasio’s only got the rate up in the past couple of months from a little over one to about 2 1/2 per day, if current trends continue).
How much change city voters will demand is going to be the question for 2021, when de Blaiso goes into mandatory retirement. If Trump wins re-election in November, do city voters elect a mayor who’s a radical break from de Blasio and willing to do a series of 180 degree turns to fix the problem, or do they elect the candidate who campaigns the loudest against Trump and Washington being the cause of the city’s problems, and who plans to continue most of what de Blasio’s currently doing (where the mayor’s wife, who’s already accused of squandering/stashing a billion dollars on her pet social justice program, reportedly is looking at replacing her husband in City Hall). My guess is she doesn’t win, but voters still end up electing an Abe Beame-status quo style Democrat as mayor, and the rot continues.
From Kipling, The Gods of the Copybook Headings:
People don’t learn, because they die. It is very difficult to hand down wisdom. So, every generation or so, the same lessons have to be learned all over again.
That’s what’s going on in New York, and elsewhere. Leftist foolishness made the city unlivable, so they finally turned to conservatives, who fixed it. Now crime is low, so the new crop of sophomoric Leftists think that the policies that solved the problem are too harsh, and end them. The problems will come back, and the cycle will start again.
Kipling did not have some brilliant insight on this, though I think he expressed it well. The lesson is as old as the books of Judges and Kings.
So then if people don’t learn and always cycle back to the same ignorant behavior, then this behavior is hard wired in.
The main difference between now and the 1966-93 period is the progressives were claiming the problems were systemic to modern society and nothing could be done to fix them. Giullani fixed them, and so de Blasio and his allies also have spent the past few years changing laws to make sure no future Giuliani can use the same tools to fix NYC.
It’s doubly hard to hand down wisdom in a culture that deifies youth. When was the last time you saw a politician called “wise,” other than Sotomayor, the “wise latina”? I don’t remember even Ronald Reagan being given that compliment, though wise he definitely was.
If wisdom is denigrated, it will be forgotten.
Interesting information.
Well then, “wise” really is the opposite tag-name of “woke”.
Defund means defund. They need to shutdown the police force entirely. Save the money and return it as reduced taxes.
I suspect what is actually happening is a giant Democrat fundraising effort. With money going to high graft programs and taxes in the future will be raised to bring police back.
It would be cheaper to eliminate the police and buy every citizen a gun . . .
Well if the cops are being stood down and returning to the coffee shops then I want my gun.
That’s a trick question, right?
How many politicians have ever really been wise?
The cops won’t be able to afford the coffee shops if they’re not employed.
Especially if they are buying liberal coffee
You might learn from your own mistakes, but rarely will you learn from someone else’s mistakes.
True that.
My point is that in a culture that respects wisdom, politicians and their supporters would be claiming to be wise at every opportunity. Instead, we get “compassionate conservatism”, “kinder, gentler nation”, “I feel your pain”, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for”, etc.
Now that I think about it, maybe we deify emotion more than youth.
Bismarck disagreed. Some will learn from others’ mistakes. The pain is less.
We don’t learn for this kind of insanity. It grows because the issues in question get worse so they always require still more effort from those who have shown such concern. It’s why civilizations crash and don’t come back.
The needs of the terrorist community have been ignored too long.
I would hardly label Giuliani as a conservative. More like the most right wing Centrist person who was electable.
Shifting the burden to the intervener.
City Journal has a great podcast about this.
https://www.city-journal.org/gun-violence-policing