According to gun control advocates, you don’t need a gun. You, the law-abiding citizen, are protected by the police. The po-po have no legal obligation to protect you, but c’mon. You’re no a crime fighter. And see? Crime’s going down. So forget all this armed self-defense stuff, kick back and let the cops do their job. Nowhere is this agit-prop more prevalent than it is in New York City. Mayor Michael Bloomberg is America’s most ardent and active gun control advocate. But how would that play out if it were widely known that New York City’s Finest (air quotes optional) have been intentionally under-reporting all sorts of crimes, including assault, armed assault and armed robbery? That the threat against law-abiding citizens is larger than advertised? Well guess what Serpico fans? The Village Voice has news for you . . .
For more than two years, Adrian Schoolcraft secretly recorded every roll call at the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn and captured his superiors urging police officers to do two things in order to manipulate the “stats” that the department is under pressure to produce: Officers were told to arrest people who were doing little more than standing on the street, but they were also encouraged to disregard actual victims of serious crimes who wanted to file reports.
Arresting bystanders made it look like the department was efficient, while artificially reducing the amount of serious crime made the commander look good.
And so the NYPD’s “Quality Assurance Division” investigated Schoolcraft’s claims. Even as the po-po persecuted the whistleblower, their own peeps discovered that Schoolcraft wasn’t whistling Dixie.
Investigators went beyond Schoolcraft’s specific claims and found many other instances in the 81st Precinct where crime reports were missing, had been misclassified, altered, rejected, or not even entered into the computer system that tracks crime reports.
These weren’t minor incidents. The victims included a Chinese-food delivery man robbed and beaten bloody, a man robbed at gunpoint, a cab driver robbed at gunpoint, a woman assaulted and beaten black and blue, a woman beaten by her spouse, and a woman burgled by men who forced their way into her apartment.
“When viewed in their totality, a disturbing pattern is prevalent and gives credence to the allegation that crimes are being improperly reported in order to avoid index-crime classifications,” investigators concluded. “This trend is indicative of a concerted effort to deliberately underreport crime in the 81st Precinct.”
And throughout ALL of New York City. I repeat the gun control connection: if you want to prevent citizens from taking up arms in their own self-defense, a practice protected by the United States constitution, you want those citizens to believe there’s no need.
I’m not saying this scandal is a conspiracy to deny New York City dwellers their 2A rights. I’m saying it’s part of that conspiracy. The New York City police lied and people died. People who might have been able to save their own lives.