"The New York City public advocate, the City Council speaker and other elected officials called on the Police Department on Wednesday to fix inequities in how it deploys investigative resources in poor, predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods.
Elected leaders were also working on measures seeking information from the department about how it assigns detectives and about the precinct-by-precinct rate at which it solves violent crimes. That would represent a sharp break from years of secrecy around how the department investigates serious crime in different parts of New York.
The calls for transparency followed the publication of an article last weekend in The New York Times that analyzed confidential deployment data and found that precinct detective squads and homicide squads in parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens were sharply understaffed compared with those in Manhattan.
Precinct detectives in the Bronx, the borough with the highest violent crime rate, carried an average of 20 more violent felonies last year than detectives in Brooklyn and Queens, and 30 more than detectives in Manhattan and Staten Island. Overall violent crime in the Bronx — murders, rapes, robberies and felony assaults — rose last year through late December, even as the city on Wednesday touted citywide declines in crime.
The 40th Precinct in the South Bronx, where overall crime climbed by 13 percent last year, had the city’s highest murder rate through November, but the fewest detectives per violent crime. The precinct covers some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, including Mott Haven and Melrose, and the population is largely black and Hispanic."
This problem is not unique to NYC. Polticians respond to those with $, connections and political clout. Too bad for the rest of us. They pretend to careabout poor and minorities, but for many, it's just an other example of "let's pretend." "The affluent wheel gets the grease."
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