NYPD fights to take back the night

After armed criminals killed two New Yorkers during Labor Day weekend’s Caribbean-heritage festivities in Brooklyn, observers claimed that New York City’s police officers weren’t able to do their jobs, and that violence ensued. But, in fact, officers did do their jobs, and did them well. A more careful analysis of the NYPD’s weekend performance helps illustrate why crime in New York continues to decline, even as it increases in cities such as Chicago and Baltimore.

The West Indian Parade takes place on Labor Day, but the J’Ouvert street festival starts the night before, and goes all night. As Sunday night turned into Monday morning, just before 4 a.m., Tiarah Poyau, a 22-year-old college student, was walking with three other women friends along Empire Boulevard. Then, she fell down dead – shot in the face at close range. It’s not clear whether Poyau was a random victim, or whether her shooter targeted her because she rejected his sexual advances, as the New York Post reported.

A half-hour earlier and one block away, 17-year-old Tyreke Borel was walking alone. He sat down on a bench and was shot dead. Emergency workers thought he was suffering from a drug overdose. Two people were wounded in the same area.

Bad as all that is, it could have been worse. Consider the work police officers and prosecutors did weeks before the Labor Day weekend, sweeping into the area and arresting gang members to take illegal weapons off the streets. Police and other city agencies also worked on their specific J’Ouvert weekend plan. Mayor Bill de Blasio said two weeks before the event that the city would double the number of officers out, deploy 200 floodlight towers and use sensor technology to track gunshots.

Police continued this work on Sunday, the night of the J’Ouvert festival. A little bit after 10 p.m., officers in the year-old Strategic Response Group, created for large events, observed a young man smoking marijuana on a street corner. They arrested him and recovered a loaded firearm. Two hours later, police in the same group saw a man and thought he looked like a man in a wanted poster. They went to talk to him, and watched him pass a loaded gun to a 16-year-old girl as they approached him. They got that gun off the streets as well. Four hours later, after the two fatal shootings, strategic-response police saw a 16-year-old boy and a 21-year-old man sharing a marijuana cigarette. They arrested them, and recovered a 9 mm handgun and a .40-caliber handgun. Finally, at 6:23 a.m. on Monday, police chased a 17-year-old boy for unclear reasons, and recovered a fifth firearm. “Just some notable arrests,” NYPD Chief of Department James O’Neill, who will soon take over Commissioner Bill Bratton’s job, said Tuesday afternoon.

Yes, notable: Five dangerous and illegal weapons taken off the streets – largely through “broken windows” policing techniques. As many cities have abandoned such techniques, or never did them well in the first place, New York continues to use this strategy, and, most importantly, to use it well. Because of these police stops, the officers were able to disarm five dangerous young men and boys of their weapons before they could use them. Tiarah Poyau and Tyreke Borel are dead – but who is alive today because of these gun seizures?

Police also used good overall law-enforcement techniques to quickly catch Poyau’s alleged killer. After killing Poyau, the alleged shooter, Reginald Moise, realized he should get rid of his gun. He brought it over to a female friend’s house, where he shot it twice through a wall (missing a baby in a nearby apartment). He broke a mirror, cut his hand, and got in a car to leave – only to crash into three parked cars, and find himself arrested for drunk driving (at least the sixth arrest of his 20-year-long life).

Hours later, someone called to complain about the shots fired in the apartment the night before. Police, visiting the scene, learned about how the suspect cut his hand, and remembered that their drunk-driving suspect had a similarly lacerated hand. The police also matched the bullets at the apartment to the bullet at the street-killing scene. Now, Moise faces a second-degree murder charge. It may seem obvious to arrest drunk drivers, to stop drunk driving. But traffic stops are important for another reason. People who drive badly often aren’t too good at managing the rest of their lives, either – and are often hiding something important.

J’Ouvert was a disaster and a tragedy: Two young people dead, following the deaths of two young people last year. It would be easy to call it a de Blasio administration failure. But in reality, it was a success. Overall, for the Labor Day weekend, New York had 21 shooting incidents, down from 40 in 2011, O’Neill said. The city had seven murders, down from a high of 10 in 2005, and up from four last year.

Besides the two lives lost, this success cost, likely, millions of dollars in police overtime and equipment, and it took months of military-style planning. That’s the scary part of the story.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. Follow her on Twitter @nicolegelinas