How the court just hurt cops and the communities they serve – New York Daily News

In September of 1997, as a newly minted officer, the New York City Police Department handed me a Glock 19 and gave me the authority to carry it concealed on the citys streets. Born and raised in Brooklyn, it felt like an extraordinary privilege. In my rookie days, I would feel it on my hip and had to remind myself I was actually allowed to carry it. I needed it because I had promised to defend the lives of New Yorkers.

Since New York State passed the Sullivan Act in 1911, that was the bar for lawfully carrying a concealed weapon in New York City: a demonstrated need for it. Few people had one. So, in a city of more than 8 million people, only 3,000 private citizens are presently licensed to carry a concealed pistol in public. Anyone else is guilty of a felony. The signal this sends is clear: A heavily-armed society is a dangerous and unpredictable one, and it is the governments responsibility to regulate carrying guns in public.

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Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled this bar was too high. Being armed with a gun in public is a constitutional right, they declared, and a person doesnt have to prove any special need, beyond a general need for self-defense, to exercise that right. The dangers of a city armed to the teeth with handguns were explicitly left out of the calculus.

There is evidence that the more guns a city has on its streets, the more shootings there will be, the more road rage incidents will turn deadly, the more guns will be stolen from cars and homes, the more people will commit suicide, and the more we will accidentally kill our own children.

To the court, this wasnt what mattered. With this ruling, people who are not specifically excluded for reasons of insanity or criminal history shall be permitted to carry concealed handguns on New York Citys streets if they want to. Apart from the toll this will take on our citys poorest and most vulnerable communities, it turns the NYPDs work environment on its head in a way that will make policing more confusing and dangerous for everyone.

There are four things New York City police officers are taught about guns from their first day in the academy: Legal guns on the street are a rare exception; any gun makes a situation more dangerous; your job is to take control of situations where a citizen is armed with a gun; and your mission is to keep guns off the street. This is why officers demand to see a persons hands to be sure there isnt a gun in play. If you think someone is armed, you draw down on them first, seize their pistol, and then sort it out. Its not that a person is armed and dangerous, but that armed is dangerous. For decades in New York City, believing that a person was armed with a gun in public offered police enough criminal suspicion to justify stopping and frisking them.

The first time I saw this thinking in action, I was in field training in the Bronx. As I filled out paperwork at the scene of a routine car accident, senior officers suddenly drew down on a motorist who had the barrel of a pistol barely visible below his shirt. It turned out the man was a city correction officer, he had just done a poor job of keeping his pistol concealed. The officers holstered and apologized, but the man understood what had happened and why: Once a situation became an armed encounter, New York City cops would act.

I never forgot that lesson. In a city like New York, the police were the bulwark against the gun violence that comes from an overly armed populace. As we relentlessly enforced the citys gun laws and watched the murder rate consistently sink, we felt like we were onto something. For all its size and complexity, New York City became remarkably safe for everyone because guns in public were so rare, with progress especially felt in communities of color.

The NYPD didnt pull this rationale out of thin air but took it from the Supreme Courts 1968 decision in Terry vs. Ohio. It set the precedent for how police relate to an armed populace. In affirming the courts decision to empower police to stop and investigate people who may be armed, Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote, If the State of Ohio were to provide that police officers could, on articulable suspicion less than probable cause, forcibly frisk and disarm persons thought to be carrying concealed weapons, I would have little doubt that action taken pursuant to such authority could be constitutionally reasonable. Concealed weapons create an immediate and severe danger to the public, and though that danger might not warrant routine general weapons checks, it could well warrant action on less than a probability. To Harlan, the simple presence of weapons out in public was the danger, not just unlicensed ones, and that gave police cause to investigate.

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One thing we can be sure of is that the citys police and attorneys are resourceful, and they will find ways to continue to regulate guns in public. The city may define sensitive places very broadly, to include so many prohibited public areas that legally carrying a gun becomes very impractical, for example though if they do, prepare for court challenges that may succeed.

Officers may continue to act on the presumption that armed is dangerous, even if lawful, and stop armed people to investigate. One of the biggest ironies is that todays Supreme Court, which has been more sympathetic to police officers than any in decades, may be inclined to support these approaches. The day of its concealed carry ruling, the court also ruled on Vega vs. Tekoh, a striking 6-3 decision that effectively concludes police have no constitutional duty to read people their Miranda rights. As New York City finds loopholes in the courts decision and empowers officers to use them, the cases that make it to the Supreme Court will be heard by a sympathetic ear.

But loopholes are still a far cry from the sensible law that kept New Yorkers comparatively safe for so long. If there is any sign that this decision put ideology ahead of public safety, it is that attorneys for the left-wing Bronx Defenders and the Brooklyn Defender Service filed briefs in support of the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, the right-wing plaintiffs in this case affiliated with the National Rifle Association. If liberal public defenders siding with the NRA strikes you as dogs and cats living together, you are not wrong. One saw an opportunity to put more guns on the street, and the other saw an opportunity to hamstring the police, both disregarding the public safety of the communities affected. As they say, the enemy of your enemy is your friend.

The rise in violence that accompanies a heavily armed city wont convince the ideologues on either side to change their views. For its part, the NRAs answer to gun violence will always be more guns. It is a perverse logic: If you are worried about other peoples guns, you should just get one yourself and be prepared to use it. Meanwhile, the Bronx and Brooklyn Defenders who filed their brief will always resist arrest and prosecution as part of the solution for gun violence. If gun violence rises, they will defend shooters from prosecution while gesturing toward a utopia where nobody uses guns or needs police because there is no reason to commit a crime. They will blame the government for not creating this world for people.

Stuck in the middle of all this, as usual, will be the poor, the vulnerable and the police, left to sort it out amongst themselves. With this ruling, the Supreme Court put its imprimatur on the public health and safety tragedy that continues to unfold in our major cities. Gun ownership rose dramatically in 2020, it was accompanied by historic increases in homicide, and the toll of these deaths were overwhelmingly borne by the nations minority communities. Now, New York Citys police, who know the danger of guns and who rely on the law to keep them off the streets, will be deprived of one of their most important tools.

I left policing at the end of 2019 and havent carried a gun since. Its not because I cant, but because I dont want to live in a place where I need to. Every developed nation that has taken New Yorks approach to gun control and kept firearm carry rates low are much safer places than the United States. People thrive in well-governed communities where few people carry guns in public and the law makes it clear that they are the exception rather than the rule. This idea, which is a reality in so many other countries, now seems as nave a fantasy as cities where everyone has guns so nobody dares use them, or nobody wants guns because they have everything else they need.

Del Pozo is a policing, public health and criminal justice researcher. He served in the NYPD for 19 years and for four years as chief of police of Burlington, Vt.

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How the court just hurt cops and the communities they serve - New York Daily News