By Sheikh Moussa Drammeh.
As perhaps the most vocal supporter of NYPD and its crime-fighting programs such stop-n-frisk in the last decade, I’m anxious to be pleasantly surprised by Mayor De Blasio and his Police Commissioner, Hon. Bill Braton’s for being able to maintain the yearly crime reduction and harmonious relations between NYPD and its harden critics.
Campaign rhetoric and new administrations promised police changes are always music in constituents’ ears, and more often than not they just remain that, soothing blues music.
As a New York City Community Empowerment Leader since 1988, I know firsthand the unbearable cost of high crimes and violence in the black and brown neighborhood I called home since 1986.
To me, it’s personal. Pacifist African immigrants, whose numbers in New York City ballooned in the nineties in mostly high crime communities, were not immune to the ravaging murder rates of pre-Bloomberg-Kelly era. As a result, we will play a wait and see to how effective De Blasio-Braton public safety policies would, regardless of constituents-feel-good-policies-shift.
At the end of all this, we hope, pray and strongly demand the uninterrupted historical crime downward trend experienced in recent decade.
May God assist this new administration and its best trained police professionals in the nation, the NYPD. God bless New York.
