While crime in New York City is dropping, assaults against the New York Police Department officers are up 23 percent, the department’s director of operations told reporters Monday.
During a press conference at One Police Plaza with Mayor Bill de Blasio and NYPD Commissioner Jim O’Neil, the mayor said that stop-and-frisk stops went down 97 percent since its apex in 2011 and that 2,000 additional NYPD officers that were approved in the city 2015 budget will go into full effect by January 2017.
“As gun arrests go up, we’re seeing our assaults on police officers … up significantly,” Shea said.
According to Shea, there have been 995 assaults on NYPD officers in 2016 so far compared to 804 in the same time frame last year.
The 23 percent increase is “further evidence of our officers putting themselves in harm’s way,” Shea said.
Donald Trump excoriated the crime situation in city at the first debate at Hofstra University last week and called on cities around the country to allow their police departments to use the stop-and-frisk tactics that have been banned in New York by the de Blasio administration.
Crime is dropping in NYC, but assaults on NYPD officers are up 23 percent this year, Dermot Shea says.
— laura (@nahmias) October 3, 2016
“Stop-and-frisk had a tremendous impact on the safety of New York City,” Trump said. “Tremendous beyond belief. So when you say it has no impact, it really did. It had a very, very big impact.”
Trump later remarked, “Homicides last year increased by 17 percent in America’s 50 largest cities. That’s the largest increase in 25 years.”
Trump’s critics sniffed at his remarks, but as the New York Post pointed out the Washington Post confirmed Trump number back in July, while the New York Times said murders spiked 14 percent in the 100 largest cities in the nation.
“New York City actually was part of the grim 2015 trend, with homicides up 6 percent. But the NYPD took aggressive steps to adjust, and 2016’s numbers are looking much better,” the Post reported.
Clinton laid into law enforcement at the debate for “implicit bias” in their work saying, “I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other, and therefore, I think we need all of us to be asking hard questions about, you know, why am I feeling this way?”
“But when it comes to policing, since it can have literally fatal consequences, I have said, in my first budget, we would put money into that budget to help us deal with implicit bias by retraining a lot of our police officers,” she said.