As Police Commissioner Edward Caban resigns under the growing cloud of a federal corruption investigation, New York City’s finest are in a tough spot.
The NYPD has been a model for police departments in the US and abroad thanks to one principle: A Merit-based ethic that promotes the best people, ideas, strategies, and technologies led to excellence. Yet for the past decade, the department has had this ethic chipped away.
Former Mayor Bill de Blasio ushered in an era focused neurotically on race and gender.
This led to promotions, policies, and a trumpeted new narrative that put “anti-racism” and self-flagellation over good policework, public safety and respect.
Mayor Eric Adams not only extended this identity-based framework — pledging to hire the first black, female police commissioner — he layered on top his own trademark weakness for appointing his vaguely sketchy, not-ready-for-primetime inner circle to top posts.
Phillip Banks III, for whom Adams augmented the role of Deputy Mayor for Public Safety into a near executorship over the NYPD, exemplified this patina of “unindicted co-conspirator” among Adams’ leadership.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Hannah Meyers is director of the policing and public safety initiative at the Manhattan Institute.
Photo by Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images