Democrat New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio rode into office by capturing the White House/Democrat/Media zeitgeist that involves a relentless and dishonest hate campaign against American law enforcement. De Blasio’s whipping boy was stop-and-frisk, a policing policy he shamelessly demagogued as a racist tool of racist cops who only want harass young black men. Now a black man is begging de Blasio to reinstate stop-and-frisk:
A surge in New York City murders — including four people slain in just five bloody hours as the weekend began — has grieving family members begging Mayor de Blasio to bring back the NYPD’s right to search for guns.
“We need stop-and-frisk,” Stacey Calhoun, the devastated uncle of one of the four fatalities, said Saturday afternoon, tears filling his eyes over the nephew he had just lost.
Jahhad Marshall — a charismatic 23-year-old with a promising future as a chef — had died of a stray bullet to his back early that morning outside the Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City, police said.
Stop-and-frisk was a policy that allowed the NYPD to stop, question, and if they deemed necessary, frisk a pedestrian. The obvious result of de Blasio ending stop-and-frisk is more thugs carrying guns, and other contraband.
De Blasio’s response to the uptick in murder and violence was exactly what we have come to expect from the bloodless, robotic statisticians that increasingly represent Obama Democrats. The Machines really are taking over the world:
“We saw this about the same time last year,” the mayor said.
“We had a spike that we had to deal with, but we pushed it back,” he said optimistically.
“We had real concerns, legitimate concerns last spring and we ended up with the best year on record in a generation in terms of lowering murder and lowering crime.”
Overall, crime is down over last year, and the violence is “first and foremost a gang problem,” the mayor said.
No, Mr. Mayor, violence is not just a gang problem. Jahhad Marshall was an innocent bystander. And so was an uncle, who obviously adored his nephew. So is everyone who loved Jahhad. So is everyone in that neighborhood who now has to live with the unnecessary fear of being the next Jahhad.
As someone who, for nearly two years, lived and worked in a high-crime inner city (the Northeast side of Milwaukee in the mid-eighties), I am not at all surprised that the people who live through this nightmare are the ones calling for a reasonable middle ground between the false choice of stop-and-frisk (a policy that might have gotten too aggressive) and no stop-and-frisk:
“It’s scary how many guns are out here now,” said a resident of the Brownsville project, who gave her name as Ann and her age as 72.
“They shouldn’t just stop and frisk any of our young black men — but they need to do something about these guns,” she said.
As another woman at the Marcus Garvey Houses said of stop-and-frisk, “They need to target it. With all these shootings, people getting killed, do it, but stop and frisk the guys you know from experience might have a gun, and not some kid who’s trying to better his life and get out of here.”
Compared to last year, murders and shootings in New York are respectively up 17.7% and 7.7%. Those aren’t numbers, those are people. And it is not just those getting shot who are the victims, so are those living in fear as more and more violence breaks out in their neighborhoods. These are innocent (mostly black) people already burdened with poverty.
Now, due to a cynical, dishonest (Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown) community-organizing political campaign waged against the police by the White House and its surrogates in the phony civil rights community (SPLC, Al Sharpton) and the media (primarily CNN), these innocent people are the ones imprisoned more and more in their own homes, and by a legitimate fear of a criminal element emboldened by the left’s persecution campaign against law enforcement.
How do you get the Obama coalition to come out in droves to vote for an old, rich corrupt white lady named Hillary? Easy, “The Ferguson Effect.” Nothing motivates voters more than fear and despair.
If Obama and Sharpton and CNN can paralyze the cops through a persecution campaign, crime goes up. When crimes goes up, people turn to the government for help. Keep ’em down. Keep ’em angry. Keep ’em voting for the same political party that intentionally caused their misery.
I’ve had CNN on all morning. Jahhad Marshall has not been mentioned once. Black lives inconvenient to The Narrative don’t matter.
Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, the SPLC, Jeff Zucker, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon see Jahhad as nothing more than a sacrifice to the god Cloward-Piven.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC