Former New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir weighed in on Occupy City Hall protesters continuing to protest despite New York city’s approval of $1 billion dollars in cuts from the New York Police Department.
“This is a group that wants anarchy. They don’t want safety,” Safir said of the protesters on “Your World with Neil Cavuto.” “The fact is that the cuts that have been made are going to be real.
“They may not be … a billion dollars, but they’re going to reduce the amount of police officers on the street. Cops are retiring at record numbers. Response time is going to go down,” Safir added. “You did away with the anti-crime unit, which was 600 plainclothes officers who prevented crime. Uniformed officers respond to crime. Plainclothes officers prevent crimes from happening. So it’s going to be a much more dangerous city.”
Police officers are feeling “abandoned”, “betrayed” and their stress levels are “going through the roof” as protests and calls to defund departments persist across the U.S., organizations that advocate for cops’ safety and well-being tell Fox News.
Safir criticized New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio for caving into protester demands and for the city’s decline under his administration.
“Mayor de Blasio inherited … the safest large city in America, a booming economy. And it’s all going in the wrong direction because he is the No. 1 cause of what’s going on in New York,” Safir said. “What’s happening is he doesn’t support the police. He supports the protesters. You know what he’s talking about? Having social workers and health professionals respond to 9-1-1 calls without police officers. That’s ridiculous.”
The former police commissioner also warned that unless things turned around he may not recommend that people become a police officer under the current circumstances.
“I would never, ever think that I would recommend that somebody not be a police officer unless things turn around. Police officers put themselves not only at risk every day, as they’ve done for hundreds of years, but now with what’s going on in this country, they’re putting their families and their economics survival at risk,” Safir said. “District attorneys in some of these progressive cities and attorney generals are looking more to charge police officers than to charge violent protesters and rioters. It’s a ridiculous thing.”
“And, you know, with the Fourth of July coming, we should be celebrating the fact that these people have the freedom to protest, but they don’t have the freedom to loot and vandalize,” Safir added. “And as in Seattle, murder people.”
,”story by Fox News