Credit where it’s due: The pro-crime progressives in Albany never rest in seeking new ways to make us less safe.
Their latest madness: a bill to ban cops from stopping and searching drivers over things like broken tail lights or expired license tags — in the (utterly bogus) name of racial equity.
The most famous example of a major criminal caught over such an infraction may be serial killer Joel Rifkin, pulled over for a missing license plate while he was moving a body to dump.
Not that we expect a wave of such murders if this bill becomes law: Driving without plates or with broken lights are not in themselves horrible crimes.
But enforcing minor violations — just like not tolerating transit farebeating — prevents a lot of worse crimes.
Let the small stuff slide, that is, and you get more big stuff — more speeding, more drunk driving, more recklessness of all kinds.
And hamstringing cops from going after such scofflaws — the law normalizes tossing litter out of your car window, for Pete’s sake — itself erodes public safety, by eroding the confidence of law-abiding people and making them feel like saps for following the “little” laws at all.
But state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, running for Manhattan borough prez, doesn’t care: Pushing this bill helps him posture as the defender of blacks and Latinos.
That minority drivers get stopped more frequently for the small stuff than white ones, you see, is supposedly proof that the system is racist.
How often do cops even get a good look at the driver before they pull him over?
Where it doesn’t stop officers from enforcing minor infractions, the bill would discourage them with huge amounts of paperwork (including collecting the racial data that Empire State progs now obsess over).
Hoylman’s a dangerous cynic or outright fool — but that’s no guarantee Albany won’t embrace this idiocy; it’d fit right in with all the other “criminal-justice reforms” of the last few years.
If the public doesn’t squawk, it’ll never occur to the big brains at Let the Killers Out Inc. that nobody wants to live in a state or city where the roads are Mad-Maxified.