From WSJopinion: Rising crime is New York’s biggest issue, but some Democratic mayoral candidates remain more worried about 'overpolicing,' writes Mene Ukueberuwa
Wonder Land: Democrats hate to talk about law and order. But in New York City’s mayoral race, that’s all they’re talking about. Image: Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesWhen Bill de Blasio captured City Hall in 2013, he rode to victory as a progressive attacking the policy of “stop and frisk” to search pedestrians for guns. Crime had fallen over 20 years under Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, and many voters forgot about the city’s bad old days. Not anymore.
Violent crime is spiking again, and homelessness and public drug use are spreading where they had once receded. Washington Square Park, in the gentry liberal oasis of Greenwich Village, is often an open-air drug market. For three consecutive weeks since May 10, shootings and transit-crimes have risen while arrests have decreased.
Michael LiPetri, the New York City Police Department’s chief of crime-control strategies, has attributed the long-term decline in arrests to a deliberate drawdown of aggressive policing in 2010, while crime rates were low. City Hall has declined to change course in response to the current wave of violence. After a gunman wounded a little girl and two women in Times Square on May 8, Mr. de Blasio told reporters the city remains “a very safe place.
All of this has brought crime and public order to the center of the race to succeed the two-term mayor, even in the once safe progressive space of the Democratic primary. None of the candidates will remind voters of Mr. Giuliani, or of Mr. Bloomberg’s police commissioner, Ray Kelly, but crime and policing are a main dividing line in the race.
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