When confronted by reporters with the revelation that the murder rate in the city is on the rise, Mayor Bill de Blasio brushed it off as gang violence that meant nothing about the broader trend in public safety.
He’s right about gang violence; unfortunately, he’s absolutely wrong about its implications.
“In the bad old days, when we had 2,000 murders or more a year, a lot of everyday citizens were getting caught in those crossfires,” the mayor said. “This is equally troubling when, you know, individual gang members shoot other gang members, but it’s a different reality than what we used to face.”
The truth is, gang violence — especially among city youth — has been a leading indicator of crime waves that aren’t confined to gang neighborhoods.
When the de Blasio administration took office, many people expected that his vigorous attacks on such anti-crime tactics as stop-and-frisk would lead to these programs being abandoned followed by a return to the Wild West days of the 1980s and early ’90s.
When crime didn’t go up, Commissioner Bill Bratton described those who had predicted it would as “Chicken Littles.”
But as an old gang-squad cop, I learned that the first sign of a crime increase will come from the youth gangs, who are bullish when cops are passive and bearish when cops are active.
So what are the gangs telling us now?
Crime has become a national issue. A shooting in Missouri can trigger protests all over the United States. In the recent Baltimore riots, two prominent national youth gangs, the Crips and the Bloods, famously bitter enemies, got together and proposed assassinating police officers.
Anything that unifies and emboldens gangs is a very serious threat to public safety.
Chicago learned this the hard way when one gang, the Gangster Disciples, rose to a strength of over 30,000 members and became a powerful political force in the city.
Though federal drug agents eventually nailed the top echelon of the gang, the city is still suffering from the aftermath, with murderous youths running wild in certain sections of the city.
So far this year, shootings in New York City, about half of which are linked to youth gang violence, are up nearly 9 percent and murders 13 percent over 2014.
Last year, the police thought they had the gang problem contained in a few Brooklyn housing projects, and in the summer they flooded those areas with officers.
In 2015, however, gang shootings seem to be spreading to areas like The Bronx.
Older gangs like the Crips and the Bloods were assumed to have moved on from street violence to drug dealing. This is why their declaration on the police in Baltimore was alarming. The worst thing that could happen would be for these groups to be directing street violence.
The fact that gangs are starting to operate outside their strongholds, and that others are committing violent acts in broad daylight in previously safe areas like Central Park, is a sign that criminals see the cops as weak.
This demands a strong police counterattack.
However, in a city where a large portion of the population is ready to jump down a cop’s throat on the slightest pretext and the police commissioner himself is booed so loudly at a City Council hearing that the chamber has to be cleared, it is going to be hard to mount a major law enforcement offensive that would also have the overwhelming support of the public — which it would need to be successful.
In the next few years, therefore, crime is likely to rise in New York until it reaches a tipping point, as it did when murders rose from less than 1,400 annually in 1986 to more than 2,200 in 1990.
When that happens, no longer will police be threatened with disciplinary action because they stop and frisk some known gang members sashaying through high-violence areas with bulges under their jackets that even a 10-year-old knows is a gun.
Unfortunately, in the interval between now and the time the city comes to its senses, lives will be lost and great damage will be done to the social fabric of the city.
Thomas A. Reppetto is the past president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City and a former commander of detectives in the Chicago PD.
