New York City isn’t yet unsafe enough for the two dozen City Council progressives still pushing to kill the NYPD’s gang database.
Officially the “Criminal Group Database,” it’s a purely investigative tool, helping cops move faster and smarter after, for example, a shooting that looks gang-related — moving fast enough to prevent tit-for-tat rounds of deadly escalation.
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and his council allies claim it’s somehow racial profiling because nearly everyone in it is black or Latino — as if the city’s plagued by white or Asian gangs these days. (Maybe Jumaane recalls seeing the Jets squaring off with the Sharks on Broadway?)
Nor do the progs consider gang victims, as Mayor Eric Adams notes: “There’s a number they leave out — 96% of the victims of shootings in the city are people of color. Let’s keep them in mind.”
At Monday’s hearing, that point led to a heated exchange between a plainly rattled Williams and Chief Michael LiPetri, head of NYPD’s crime-control-strategies bureau.
Reality check: Names get into the database in the wake of some serious crime in a city neighborhood, usually a minority one. Strict protocols require solid evidence of gang association and supervisor approval before any name goes in.
Over a quarter of the people in the database are convicted felons; 45% have firearms arrests; a third have rap sheets with 20-plus arrests; and another third are either shooters or shooting suspects. Only 1% have no recorded arrest.
Mind you, Williams & Co. don’t want to just kill the database, they first want everyone in it notified and told how they can “submit requests for records contained” in it — potentially letting gangs uncover the identities of NYPD informants.
You thought we were over the top in calling this “pro-crime”?
Laughably, one council member used the hearing to also complain of how the NYPD’s Explorers program for local community youths attracts the “cream of the crop” instead of potential gangbangers “hanging out on the block.”
For us, that recalled Lesandro “Junior” Guzman-Feliz, the 15-year-old Explorer brutally hacked to death by members of the Trinitarios in The Bronx six years ago; the gang database likely helped to solve that murder, which led to the conviction and imprisonment of more than 13 thugs.
Progressive “reforms” of recent years have already done far too much for the local criminal class, but the progs keep pushing for new ways to boost the bad guys.
Even if wiser heads quash this particular idiocy, the public remains at elevated risk until the voters start profiling progressives for political “execution” at the earliest electoral opportunity.
