No society can function without police enforcing the law, yet who can expect them to do that if thugs who kill cops don’t pay a sufficient price?
As The Post reported Sunday, gangbanger David McClary — who put five bullets into the head of 22-year-old rookie Eddie Byrne — is up for parole this month, poised to become the 44th cop-killer sprung early from prison these last eight years.
That’s right: Forty-three savages who had the audacity to murder cops, a clear attack on civilized society, who have already walked free.
Thank the radical Parole Board members then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo appointed and the drastically relaxed rules he set up to appease the pro-criminal left.
Assigned to guard the home of a witness set to testify against a druglord in 1988, Byrne was a sitting duck as he sat in his marked police car when McClary cowardly snuck up and blasted him.
McClary is “clearly the most culpable and dangerous” of the slain cop’s killers, yet “he still denies any knowledge of what was going to happen,” fumes the officer’s brother, Kenneth Byrne.
A guy like that should plainly never see a day of freedom again.
Yet the Cuomo-dominated Parole Board has already sprung one of McClary’s accomplices, Scott Cobb.
Its parole gifts for numerous other cop-killers are equally outrageous:
- Lee Ernest Walker, who fatally shot Officer Juan Andino in 1984 over eyeglasses.
- David Gilbert, one of 1981 Brinks truck robbers.
- Herman Bell and Anthony Bottom, who assassinated two officers, Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini.
- Richard Rivera, who murdered Officer Robert Walsh execution-style.
And on and on. . . .
Good for Mayor Eric Adams, himself an ex-cop, for demanding the Parole Board deny McClary’s release.
GOP mayoral hopeful Curtis Sliwa echoes that: “No one who murders a police officer should ever see the light of day again.” Hear, hear.
Cuomo, the author of this “free cop-killers” insanity, is also running for mayor. Yet how could expect the NYPD, which he’d oversee, to respect him as its boss?
Nor should he expect the police union to endorse him.
Ditto for Gov. Kathy Hochul and other pro-crime lawmakers, who’ve similarly made easier for perps to win parole.
Frankly, it’s hard to see why anyone who wants to live in a civilized world would back pols like these, as long as they keep putting the interests of cop-killers above those who seek public safety.