NYPD officer Jonathan Diller’s slaying reflects reckless politicization of law enforcement

OPINION:

The killing of NYPD Officer Jonathan Diller has rocked the law enforcement community nationwide.

The married 31-year-old father of a now-1-year-old boy was doing a traffic stop when he was shot in the line of duty. The story is all too familiar to anyone who has ever worn a badge. The facts of the case infuriate most people, law enforcement or not.

He didn’t have to be in that situation; he was put in that situation because of the reckless politicization of our law enforcement system. And countless other law enforcement officers in New York and around the country today will face God knows how many similar unnecessary threats before they clock out for the same inexcusable reason.

Let’s start with the facts. Officer Diller approached a vehicle that was idling at a bus stop when he was shot in the stomach below his vest.

The man charged with murder in the shooting of Diller has a long rap sheet. He has done multiple stints in prison for violent crime and was out on bail in connection with another gun charge from less than a year ago. The other man in the vehicle also has a lengthy record.

Any sane person would wonder why the suspect in Diller’s slaying was granted bail in the first place. That is a legitimate question, given how politicized bail policies have become across the country under our national epidemic of soft-on-crime prosecutors. But that’s not the whole story either. 

There’s a reason people don’t feel safe in our big cities today, least of all the men and women in law enforcement. Zooming out from Diller’s case to look at New York as a whole, the situation is pretty bleak.

One thousand National Guard members are patrolling the subway, but that’s mostly window dressing; they don’t have the authority to enforce the law, and they don’t have the numbers to secure the system fully. (I know. I started my career as a Transit Police officer before merging into the NYPD a few years later.)

Meanwhile, you can’t even walk down the street in any of the five boroughs right now without having to worry about some kid running up and trying to break your jaw for entertainment.

And here’s the thing: It’s all interconnected.

These problems all trace back to the same root: Criminals are emboldened across the country because politicians are telling them they can do what they like. It is common knowledge that many “progressive” politicians in our major cities have decided to focus on decriminalizing minor offenses and going, sometimes inexplicably, easier on violent offenders and career criminals and supporting cashless bail and minimum sentences. All of this gives lawbreakers the impression that they can operate with relative impunity. After all, what evidence do they have to the contrary?

And the data bears this out. Before Mayor Rudolph Giuliani got elected to clean up the streets, New York toyed with coddling criminals at all levels, from repeat offenders to the lowest-level lawbreakers. It wasn’t until we started really enforcing a policy imposing the rule of law for everyone across the board — be they kids spraying graffiti, armed robbers striking bodegas or gangbangers moving hard drugs — that we started to see things turn around. And this isn’t just law enforcement lore from a longtime cop.

The data bears it out. In his landmark sociology work “The Tipping Point,” Malcolm Gladwell explains in heavily researched detail how New York’s law-and-order turnaround started with things like busting subway fare jumpers and graffiti artists. The data and countless years of my and my fellow NYPD officers’ experience bear out a simple fact: When you let the little stuff slide, you’re giving tacit permission for the bigger stuff. Some people call that “broken windows” policing; I call it enforcing the laws on the books.

Here’s the bottom line: The rule of law does not exist without the force of law. Full stop. You’re not going to have the safety, security, prosperity and freedom that all exist downstream of the rule of law unless you’re willing to uniformly enforce the laws across the board for everyone. If you don’t do that, you get the chaos and violence that you’re seeing in New York right now. You get more emboldened criminals, more people being sucker-punched, and more police officers being killed.

The way out is simple: Politicians need to take a stand for the laws that protect their citizens and not the people who break them; at the same time, people should stop electing people who won’t stand up for them.

• Rob O’Donnell is a retired NYPD detective, board member of The Pipe Hitter Foundation, and host of “The Rob O’Donnell Show.” Follow him on X @odonnell.