The Issue: A bill that would require police to fill out paperwork after every interaction with New Yorkers.
The City Council is set to drive more nails into the NYPD’s coffin, but it will be New Yorkers who will pay the real price (“A New Scheme To Sideline Cops,” Editorial, July 5).
The pro-criminal council wants cops to fill out paperwork for any and all encounters with the public.
So if a civilian speaks to a cop for any reason, the officer must fill out a form? Why would a cop want to voluntarily engage in a conversation with a civilian if it’s all to be documented?
Moreover, all this inane paperwork lessens patrol time — in a city flush with crime.
This is just another boneheaded idea, one that will only serve to make more cops retire or quit. And, by the way, I served 35 years in the NYPD.
Joseph Valente
Staten Island
As one of Councilman Oswald Felix’s constituents, I am hoping he opposes the City Council’s proposals to drown the rank-and-file NYPD in paperwork.
As an employee, I have been on the receiving end of requests like these. As a boss, I regretfully confess to having used this so-called management tool myself. It was a crappy experience on both sides.
It is a juvenile tool meant to demoralize, dishearten and intimidate.
Whatever the gripes of the council’s Progressive Caucus, can’t it find another target for these resentments? Maybe Mayor Adams?
Gene Roman
The Bronx
The City Council continues to lobby for criminals’ rights.
Unsuccessful in their efforts to defund the police, council members now seek to harass the police by requiring them to keep unnecessary records of all encounters with civilians.
If there is a study somewhere which ties mundane record-keeping to effective crime-fighting, I’d like to see it.
Police are not clerks or public scribes. They are supposed to enforce the law, and of course the council wants to make sure they can’t do that.
Robert Mangi
Westbury
So I guess that patrolmen and their superiors must return to their respective precincts before the end of their tours to allow them time to complete this nonsensical reporting?
This socialist overreach is shortsighted and is the height of stupidity, instituted by the most imbecilic City Council I’ve seen in my lifetime.
Jerry Chiappetta
Monticello
The Issue: Mayor Adams’ refusal to apologize for comparing an elderly woman to a plantation owner.
So Mayor Adams says he was raised to not accept disrespect from anyone (“Adams won’t quit his Hizzy fit,” July 1).
Yet he can disrespect an 84-year-old white lady who was just trying to represent renters.
Basically, he tried to bully her into silence. In fact, I find his “plantation” remark to be very racist, especially because he said it to someone who arrived in this country in the late 1940s.
Kevin Mullen
Holtsville
Adams talks about how he isn’t going to be spoken to in a certain way, and that his mother made it clear to not allow someone to be disrespectful to you.
But it’s somehow OK for him to call white police officers “crackers”?
Lance Lovejoy
Queens
Former Big Apple mayors of various political stripes all weathered their fair share of public criticism without crying foul about being “disrespected.”
But when an octogenarian female tenant activist dares to challenge Hizzoner, Adams lashes out. Such a fragile, inflated ego is hardly conducive to effective big-city governance.
Charles Winokoor
Fall River, Mass.
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