Departing NYPD Chief Slams ‘Magical Thinking’ of Reformers

Outgoing NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea. Photo via CBS-TV New York.

Blaming the rise in violent crime on “misinformed” efforts to overhaul the justice system, outgoing New York police commissioner Dermot Shea said authorities should stick with the kind of policies that were proven to keep people safe.

“I can also tell you that more than 80 percent of the people arrested for illegal gun possession this year are not in custody. Does that sound like a formula for success?” he wrote in an essay for the New York Post.

The essay, framed as advice to his incoming replacement, Keechant Sewell, on exactly what kind of job she is taking on in a city grappling with both a spike in crime and a department steeped in low morale, encouraged her to follow strategies that had already demonstrated success in crimefighting.

“She will have a hard enough job keeping nearly 9 million people safe with the tools we have,” he wrote.  “When I hear some officials say, ‘We can’t arrest our way out of our problems,’ I have to wonder: What problems are you talking about? If it’s opioid abuse, probably not; if it’s a rise in gang-related gun violence, if you’re not making arrests, you’re not addressing the problem.”

Shea, who was appointed commissioner in 2019, said that as a result of focused policing policies introduced by his predecessors and continued by him, the department made 44 percent fewer arrests than they had five years before.

But in 2020, following the onset of sweeping changes to New York’s legal system enacted by the state legislature, “ideology triumphed over expertise,” he wrote.

Bail reform meant that only defendants charged with a narrow range of offenses could be held before trial. A defendant’s history of violence — the best predictor of future violence — could not be considered by a judge. Discovery reform required DAs to produce a vast amount of documentation, much of it which he called irrelevant, before proceeding with a prosecution.

Shea drew a connection between these changes and the fact that, in the first two months of 2020, major crime in New York City went up 23 percent.

“During the past year and a half, all across the country, debates over criminal justice have been characterized by magical thinking, a wishful insistence that we can have public safety without police,” Shea complained.

“Budgets have been slashed. Resignations and retirements have further reduced police manpower. Morale is in a tailspin, which makes police recruitment — particularly among young Black men — especially challenging.”

As proof that arrests often yield results, Shea points to the 1980s, when police departments around the country shifted away from a laissez-faire approach to drunk driving and, as a result,  alcohol-related vehicular fatalities fell by 52 percent. In the 90s, a comparable change took place with the approach to domestic violence, with a “must arrest” approach to acts of physical injury by an intimate partner, resulting in a 65 percent reduction in domestic violence victimization rates between 1995 and 2015.

And while Shea agreed that we should have better preventative programs to put young people on a path to school and career success, and to interrupt violence before it happens, he warns that investments like these will take years to yield positive results and that many people today do not have that kind of time.

Many criminologists counter the arguments made by critics like Shea, pointing out that the evidence shows no correlation between bail reform and increasing crime rates.  In most categories other than violence, crime rates have continued to decline.

See also:  The Danger of a Return to Crime Alarmism, The Crime Report. Nov 23, 2021.