I think it’s fair to say that all reasonable people would be in favor of President Trump’s crackdown on crime in D.C. and his intention to do the same in other danger zones across the country. The left, on the other hand, complete strangers to anything resembling rational dialogue, has been using the same old tired canards that refer to him as a tyrant, a bully, and that thoroughly hackneyed and laughable term, racist. In addition, the radical-left leaders of D.C. and other killing fields hustled quickly to fake news microphones to proclaim that crime is down, and residents are safer than in previous years. Yeah, right, and Biden was mentally fit and fully capable of handling the presidency.
During my twenty years with the NYPD, I learned a lot about attempts by the hierarchy to create perceptions of crime that would make the current mayor, city council, et al. appear to be doing a good job of protecting citizens. The smokescreen would generally begin in earnest about six months before the next election. The word would come down from on high that the police should do a better job of making people feel secure in the street and in their homes. Every veteran cop knew what that meant.
The captain would walk into the muster room as the sergeant was briefing the outgoing platoon. The skipper would take over by stating something like, “Some of you need a course in creative writing. I’ve seen some of the incident reports you’ve turned in, and it’s obvious that you’re taking the job too seriously.” That was code for “too many felonies are being reported, when they could have been reduced to misdemeanors.” He’d mention that he had heard from the borough (where the higher brass hold court), and they want to see a reduction in serious crimes. He would continue with something like, “If felonies are being committed in your sector, maybe we need to replace you with cops that are more knowledgeable on the penal law.”
That was his way of telling us that we shouldn’t be so technical when describing a crime. For example, if a store is broken into and burglarized in the middle of the night, instead of recording it as a felony, which it is, we should refer to it as malicious mischief and larceny, both misdemeanors. When we arrive at a scene on which someone has been bludgeoned with some sort of weapon, known in the penal law as “felonious assault,” we should be imaginative enough to write it up as “simple assault,” a misdemeanor — that is, unless the victim had to be transported to a hospital with severe bleeding from a bullet or knife. I don’t want to make light of this, yet sometimes it added humor to an otherwise dreadful situation.
My partner and I were on patrol one evening in Brooklyn when a man came stumbling into the street and flagged us down. When we stopped, he leaned against the door while complaining loudly about having been stabbed in the back. Realizing that he was almost unconscious and in severe pain, we put him in the back seat with me as my partner drove us toward the hospital. While holding him on my lap, I pulled up his shirt, searching frantically for the wound. There was no sign of a puncture and no blood. He was in obvious agony, repeatedly saying he had been stabbed. It took only a few minutes to arrive at our destination, but he had already stopped breathing.
When a doctor in the emergency room examined him, it took a while before he located a tiny opening in his lower back. He had been stabbed with an ice pick and had bled to death inside, while the outside wound seemed to have closed up.
Now, homicides were not a rare occurrence in that area, and dead bodies were not a statistic easily altered. Nevertheless, my partner and I began jokingly wondering if we could write it up as something other than murder.
“Bob, maybe we could say he was a contortionist and stabbed himself in the back, making it a suicide,” my partner quipped.
“Nah, we can do better than that,” I responded. “We can say he accidently fell backward onto a pile of trash, where an icepick was wedged between some garbage.”
The cynical banter was probably our way of dealing with the violence and inhumanity that was part of the job.
I feel certain that this type of statistical manipulation is going on right now in every city administration that has failed its most important function: keeping people safe.
Once again, Trump is doing the job that feckless Democrats, and their accomplices in the left-wing media have conspired to downplay, demonstrating their contempt for the people who feel terrorized in the streets and in their homes. Also, once again, President Trump has put the left in the precarious position of supporting criminals over law-abiding Americans. Checkmate!
