Thrown to the Wolves: Paterson Yanks Valuable Crimefighting Tool from NYPD

Thrown to the wolves: Paterson yanks valuable crimefighting tool from NYPD

Saturday, July 17, 2010, 4:00 AM Gov. Paterson took a horrendous and dangerous step in signing legislation that bars the NYPD from using a computerized record of contacts between cops and the public to investigate crimes.

Rather than join forces with civil liberties advocates who have spun fanciful and false notions of potential police abuses, Paterson should have concentrated on what's real. Real assaults. Real robberies. Real shootings. Real murders. Real blood.

Bravo to Commissioner Ray Kelly for letting Paterson and everyone who backed this bill have it, point blank and in public:

"Albany has robbed us of a great crimefighting tool, one that saved lives. Without it, there will be, inevitably, killers and other criminals who won't be captured as quickly, or perhaps ever."

Kelly made that case to Paterson in private as well, complete with documentation that the database had helped detectives make at least 170 arrests over the past 18 months, including 17 murders, 36 robberies, 11 shootings and seven rapes.

And still Paterson cavalierly disregarded the pleas of an internationally recognized law and order expert who knows better than anyone that New York faces rising threats to public safety.

Many years of declining crime have lulled the governor and fellow Democratic politicians into believing the war is won. It's not. In fact, with the NYPD's ranks depleted by thousands of officers, the tide shows the start of a terrifying reversal.

Murder is up 12% this year. Rape is up 13%. Robberies, assaults and burglaries are each up 2%. Now is decidedly not the time to enhance the trend by barring cops from using absolutely lawful, absolutely constitutional crimefighting tactics.

Said Paterson: "I would never want it on my conscience that I contributed to such a rise in crime." Well, get down on your knees and pray, governor, because that's the direction you and your colleagues are pushing New York. Toward ruin.

This time, the issue was an electronic database that tracks every instance in which a cop stops an individual for questioning or frisks someone based on concern about the presence of a gun.

The stop-and-inquire, stop-and-frisk program has been key to driving crime down in high-felony communities. The New York Civil Liberties Union and officials like Brooklyn's Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries and state Sen. Eric Adams rail that cops let go without charges the vast majority of the people stopped - as if that invalidates the stops.

It doesn't, because police need only a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing to ask someone his or her business. More importantly, what will never be measured but what is certainly true is that worry about being stopped while carrying a weapon or drugs is a powerful deterrent on the street.

Jeffries, Adams and the NYCLU want desperately to kill the stop-and-inquire program. Short of that, with Paterson's blessing, they are ordering Kelly to purge from electronic files the names of everyone who is stopped and let go. Preventing detectives from, say, identifying people who were in the area of a crime as witnesses or perpetrators.

The mindset is widely shared among top New York Democrats, including, unbelievably, by the five running for attorney general. It holds that cops should back off from lawful enforcement measures and that penal laws should lighten up.

The go-easy brigade applauded when the state's highest court barred police from using GPS tracking without a warrant, a standard far stricter than that imposed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

And the bunch got foursquare behind virtually decriminalizing street-level narcotics dealing in the so-called Rockefeller drug law reform. Paterson signed on as well for that supposed milestone in social justice. He's risking lives. They all are.