Even after a gunman opened fire into a crowd, killing a man and wounding four other people at last week’s West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn, the NYPD declared the event a rousing success and one of the safest celebrations in years.
That’s like being in the waiting room of a hospital where a loved one is having a procedure done, and the doctor comes out and says that the operation was a success, even though the patient died on the table.
The police may not have been able to prevent Monday’s shooting anymore than the doctor was able to keep the hospital patient alive, but neither tragedy is a moment to be talking about success.
That’s beyond tone deaf. That’s just cruel.
Just ask the family of 25-year-old Denzel Chan, who died a day after he was shot in the stomach by a man who fired into a parade crowd along Eastern Parkway near Franklin Ave.
Chan’s despondent dad, Collin Dover, said he wasn’t impressed by how many guns cops bragged about confiscating before, during or after the parade.
Police said 35 guns were recovered over the Labor Day weekend in the five Brooklyn precincts that link to the West Indian Day Parade route.
After the shooting, another 13 guns were seized, some along the parade route just feet from where the onlookers were shot.
“If they seized every gun, then Denzel would be safe today,” said Dover, 60, who said he didn’t know his son had gone to the parade. “If it’s safe, how are guns coming in? How did the guns reach the parade? That’s what they got to find out.”
Marius Sirju, 64, who was grazed in the arm and shot in the shoulder wasn’t singing the police’s praises, either.
He had sworn off going to the parade more than 20 years ago after a shooting back then, but this year he had relatives visiting from Trinidad, and wanted them to see the dancers and floats.
“I’m never going back there no more. No siree,” Sirju said. “I could have been a dead man. I could be in cold storage right now.”
But to hear the NYPD’s top brass tell the story, the West Indian Day Parade was a Sunday picnic.
Before the blood was scrubbed off the sidewalk, police were taking a victory lap around Grand Army Plaza.
“I’m not speaking without regard to the victim who lost his life or the four other victims hurt by gunfire,” NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey said at Police Headquarters Wednesday.
“But the NYPD was prepared. During this weekend we took numerous guns off the streets. We kept hundreds of thousands — upwards to a million people — safe.”
The tactless tone was set by Mayor Adams, a retired NYPD captain, who heaped praise on the police.
“Was there anything that we could do?” Adams asked. “How do you stop a nut from taking a gun [and] shooting into a crowd?”
There have been no arrests.
It’s no one’s fault that a gangbanging gunman was able to slip through the cracks. Even with boots on the ground and barricades on every block, this shooting seemed to be out of their control.
But what is in their control is what they choose to say after someone gets shot to death in broad daylight on their watch.
Crime is as much about perception as it is about statistics. No one wants to hear about drones in the sky when there’s fresh blood on the streets.