Police commissioner Ray Kelly is right: black and Latino politicians should get over beating the same old racial drum.
They’re quick to castigate the NYPD’s effective stop-and-frisk policy, claiming it unfairly targets minorities, but they’re slow to condemn the violent crime in their own neighborhoods responsible for introducing the vital law enforcement weapon that’s been around since 1968 when the Supreme Court ruled that cops are duty-bound to act on their reasonable suspicions.
The numbers dispel any trumped-up grievances about discrimination: “96 percent of the shooting victims in this city are black or Latino,” according to Commissioner Kelly. In addition, a collation of victim reports reveals that blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crime in the city in 2009, including 80 percent of shootings and 71 percent of robberies, while blacks and Latinos combined accounted for 98 percent of reported gun assaults, states Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and author of “Are Cops Racist?”
That’s of no consequence to vocal stop-and-frisk critics like state Sen. Eric Adams (D–Flatbush), Councilman Jumaane Williams (D–Canarsie), and Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries (D–Fort Greene), all of whom are black, plus Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito (D–East Harlem), who was born in Puerto Rico. Their advancement of an anachronistic racial agenda over a good citizenship one has a long, detrimental reach. It certainly gave a free pass to the insolent students from JHS 292 in East New York, who tossed trash into the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum on a field trip, while another student on the same trip was busted for smuggling in bullets.
Adams and Jeffries also undermined operations in Albany in March when they donned hoodies along with four other lame duck leaders in a ridiculous protest of the Trayvon Martin fatal shooting in Florida, which they blamed on — guess what? — negative race relations in the Big Apple.
Their misplaced outrage and political opportunism made a mockery, too, of the blood-soaked week of July 4, which saw 77 shootings in the city, including that of a 3-year-old in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
It’s time the race card was ditched, but don’t hold your breath: Adams, a former cop, co-founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, and a candidate in the Brooklyn borough president’s race, dragged race into the seating arrangements at a Jan. 2011 Senate confirmation hearing. Williams introduced a bill earlier this year requiring cops to hand their business cards to those they stop-and-frisk when the information needed to track them down is clearly visible on their uniforms. Jeffries, for his part, has termed stop-and-frisk as a “humiliating, degrading experience, and a violation of our civil rights” — more so than the humiliation, degradation, and violation endured by the victims of thugs who aren’t even given a slap on the wrist by their community leaders? And Mark-Viverito wants folks to “demand accountability” from NYPD, but apparently none from the culprits responsible for routinely breaching our good faith and quality of life.
Their effrontery advances the incorrect mind-set — particularly for black youth — that the city is a white supremacist ever aiming for their jugular.
Adams and his cohorts should take heed of the wise person who once said that “children are great imitators, so give them something great to imitate.”
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Read Shavana Abruzzo's column every Friday on BrooklynDaily.com. E-mail her at sabruzzo@cnglocal.com.
