He often seems bored and no one accuses him of having thick skin. He enjoys telling New Yorkers how to live, but the nanny rules never interfere with his personal choices, as when he had a City Hall aide hook up a portable air conditioner in his SUV so it would be cool for him without breaking idling laws.
But Mayor Bloomberg is far more than the sum of his imperial parts, and the twilight of his tenure is revealing his most important accomplishment. He is fighting the good fight so cops can do their jobs and not be handcuffed by the dreamers and wack jobs, including some judges, who apparently think carrying a concealed gun is a civil right.
Even before the reports that a state appellate court had overturned the conviction of a 14-year-old for carrying a loaded gun, and that the teen promptly got another gun and allegedly shot a man, Bloomy has been barnstorming the city to forcefully defend the benefits of stop-and-frisk. A less dramatic version of Churchill’s magnificent stand against both Europe’s appeasers and Hitler, this is Bloomberg’s finest hour in more than 10 years in office.
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Ticking off the much higher murder rates of other cities, he asked radio man John Gambling, “Do you really want to go back to that? That’s what we used to be — murder central.”
Saying there must be a “balance between all of our different civil rights,” he added: “One of the basic civil rights is to be able to walk down the street without getting blown away.”
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That he even needs to make the argument is an indication of how far off the deep end some critics have gone. Through Thursday, Gotham, with 8.3 million people, had 189 homicides. Philadelphia, with 1.5 million people, had at least 185.
Chicago is the new murder capital, with 2.7 million people and about 250 homicides. The slaughter list goes on. Detroit has almost as many murders as New York with less than 10 percent of our population.
These are astounding facts, and unless you believe that New Yorkers miraculously mutated into a super-peaceful human species, there must be other reasons why the city is so much safer. Any halfway honest conclusion has to give credit to the NYPD.
Stop-and-frisk is not the only tool in the anti-crime kit. But as Police Commissioner Ray Kelly says to those who insist there are other ways to get guns off the street, “OK, what are your ideas?”
The silence is deafening because preventing crime isn’t for amateurs. It’s a tough business, and thank God New York has the people willing to do it so the critics are safe to bitch about how they do it.
Part of the problem is that New Yorkers are spoiled by success. Handed a city that was much safer than a decade earlier, Bloomberg took Rudy Giuliani’s incredible gains and built on them. Giuliani’s force cut the murder rate in more than half, and Bloomberg and Kelly have cut it by 34 percent more.
In another context, the NYPD would be up for sainthood.
But the success is not an accident. It’s the result of hard, smart, dangerous work by flesh-and-blood men and women. Eight officers have been shot this year alone, yet still the critics act as though cops are the big problem.
Bloomberg has had enough. Railing against the court decision involving the gun-toting 14-year-old, he ran out of logic and into sarcasm.
“I don’t know what you’re supposed to do,” he said in defending the police. “Just send the kid, give ’em a flower and say go out and kill somebody?”
Careful there, Mayor. You don’t want to give the dopey judges any more bad ideas
