Kudos to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch for standing up and telling the truth at her Tuesday hearing before the City Council — and eternal shame on Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark for continuing to tell the same tired old lies that drive our crime crisis.
Tisch was unequivocal in her stance against quality-of-life crimes as an essential part of policing — aggressive panhandling, open-air drug use and similar offenses that though small in themselves both erode the public’s sense of safety and, by going unaddressed, embolden crooks to commit worse crimes.
“Quality of life enforcement is based on community complaints. It is about listening to the people in our neighborhoods who are calling 311 and pleading for someone to come and help them. Over the past six years, those calls nearly doubled,” she said.
She’s creating a brand new division to deal with just these issues.
Tisch’ testimony distinguished between this approach and broken-windows policing, the theory that drove the transformation of New York from a crime-ridden hellhole to a largely safe city.
But whatever you call it, it’s beyond necessary.
After all, you’d have to be a resident of Cloud Cuckoo Land (or a Gotham Democrat) to believe that fighting against crimes large and small when everyday New Yorkers are begging you to is bad.
Never stop fighting the good fight!
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Cue Darcel Clark.
In her testimony, the Bronx DA spouted the usual blather about addressing the alleged “root causes” of crime, like poverty (as if all poor people in New York are on the verge of becoming sociopathic killers and rapists) and a bog-standard condemnation of quality-of-life policing.
The data, however, prove Clark wrong.
Her borough leads the city with a 140% increase since 2018 in 311 complaints; her office (per Clark’s own published data) regularly declines close to a third of prosecutions for all arrests and more than a fifth — a fifth! — for violent felony offenses.
Crime has also risen there year after year after year since 2019, per NYPD data.
In other words, it’s not poverty causing crime and social decay in the Bronx.
It’s Clark.
And as long as pro-crime leftists like her have any sway in New York city and state, our crime problem will not go away.