Gun buybacks are a particularly ludicrous suggestion. The idea that the two thugs who shot up the Bronx playground yesterday would have turned in their 9mm and .45-caliber weapons because the NYPD offered them some pocket cash defies reality.
Stop the Killing, Keep "Stop-and-Frisk" by Heather Mac Donald - City Journal
HEATHER MAC DONALD
Stop the Killing, Keep “Stop-and-Frisk”
A senseless child shooting changes one New York politician’s mind.
23 July 2012
It’s encouraging that New York State Assemblyman Eric Stevenson is rethinking his position on New York’s proactive policing. The impetus for his change of heart? The homicide of a four-year-old boy during a shoot-out at a barbecue and basketball game at the Forest Houses in the Bronx on Sunday night. “There is a 4-year-old dead. Now we should really consider not stopping stop-and-frisk,” Stevenson told the New York Post. “I’m going to have to start supporting stop-and-frisk. We need to give the police leverage to use stop-and-frisk. They should be allowed to do it.”
Better late than never, but wasn’t the need for proactive stops obvious long before this latest travesty? Armed thugs continue to hold neighborhoods hostage and to take down innocent victims as well as rival gangbangers: most recently, 77 people shot citywide the week of July 4; a 14-year-old boy shot in the head on June 28 in Bushwick, Brooklyn; ten people shot in drive-bys in Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn the night before Al Sharpton’s anti-stop-and-frisk march on June 17; a 17-year-old football star shot in the spine while trying to protect a 16-year-old from two teen robbers on a playground in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, on June 5; and a 25-year-old member of the Harlem Youth Marines (an anti-gang group) killed in a shooting on a Harlem basketball court on the afternoon of June 3.
In yesterday’s murder, two thugs started shooting at each other during a dispute following a basketball game at a playground in Morrisania. They fatally hit toddler Lloyd Morgan, Jr., and wounded two men in their twenties. It is in part to prevent such spur-of-the-moment shootings that the police stop individuals engaged in suspicious behavior, to induce them to keep guns off their persons, where they can otherwise be quickly grabbed in anger. The killers at the Forest Houses tragically didn’t get the message, but thousands of other potential murderers have. Despite the ongoing outrage of incidents such as Sunday’s killing, New York’s crime rate has dropped to a record low since the onset of New York’s proactive policing in 1994, a levelmagnitudes less than in other big cities with similar demographics. As bad as it can seem in New York, it is worse everywhere else.
The NYPD’s critics refuse to acknowledge that massive difference, continuing to tout alternative policing models from cities with higher crime rates.
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