It can’t be easy for cops in New York City to serve a town that regularly denigrates them as racists. Retired FBI agent James Gagliano outlines the problem.

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Gagliano: New York City is served by the finest police department in the world – a department it hardly deserves.

Back during the early 1990’s, as the beleaguered city was reeling from decades’ worth of criminal siege, the New York City Police Department systematically disassembled the myth that crime and disorder were endemic. Block by block, cops wrested back control, and in 2013, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg proudly proclaimed New York America’s “safest big city.”

However, as the old aphorism goes, no good deed goes unpunished. While campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, Bloomberg was forced to apologize for the NYPD’s employment of suddenly-controversial “Stop, Question, and Frisk” (SQ&F) practices. The forced backpedal failed to impel his campaign, as the Democrats’ far-left wing had already taken the party hostage. It mattered little that shortly after the height of SQ&F employment in 2011 (685,724), 81 percent of New Yorkers viewed then-Police Commissioner Ray Kelly favorably.

The woke brigade arrived that same year when progressive Bill de Blasio won in a landslide with 73.3 percent of the vote. Using his inauguration speech to rail at the NYPD, he lamented a Dickensian “tale of two cities.” His “solution” was disbanding the wildly-successful NYPD anti-crime unit he had once described as “elite” – the plainclothes officers who removed illegal guns from street. This ill-advised pander resulted in shootings increasing a staggering 205 percent. It appears that all the hard-earned gains that began under visionary Commissioner Bill Bratton were to be undone.

In one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the New York City mayoralty, de Blasio, who was also seeking the Democratic presidential nod in 2019, recounted from a Miami debate stage that “[f]or the last 21 years I’ve been raising a black son in America.” De Blasio, whose son is bi-racial, continued that he “had to have very, very serious talks with my son, Dante, about how to protect himself in the streets of our city…including the fact that he has to take special caution because there have been too many tragedies between young men and our police.” No doubt the 36,000 uniformed members of the NYPD were inspired by their leader’s calumny.

Noted Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer, Jr. published a 2019 study that determined that racial disparities do not exist in officer-involved-shootings, as relates to raw data or when taking important contextual factors into account – such as disparities in patterns of offending. What ultimately causes this distortion of reality is related to availability heuristic, a mental shortcut that impacts perceptions. The liberal mainstream media’s coverage of police shootings is predictably biased; fatal police shootings of white subjects are not nearly as newsworthy as ones involving person of color. The more we view something, the more we believe in its ubiquity…

Democrats hold a 56 percent (D) to 26 percent (R) stranglehold on registered voters in New York City. This wide chasm continues to guarantee political control of the world’s greatest city. Since its 1845 establishment, the greatest police department which serves that city has suffered a staggering 1,068 line-of-duty deaths – running into harm’s way to keep New York safe. Maybe the NYPD should question its sacrifice. Better question: Does New York City deserve the NYPD?