Pols go soft on crime, and cops pay with their lives

Officers at the scene of Friday night’s shooting. Christopher Sadowski for NY Post

Beat the drum slowly for the NYPD — one officer shot dead and another grievously wounded Friday evening in service to a city that gave up on gun violence years ago, and that now is paying the price for having done so.

Meanwhile, rookie Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg says he’s been getting undue grief because of his soft-on-crime views. Poor him.

No cop answers a domestic violence call without the heart skipping a beat. Passions rage. Weapons — usually kitchen tools, but often worse — flash. Blood flows.

On Friday night in Harlem, it was a gun — forever the scourge of city streets, but now present in such numbers that nobody is safe, not even that 11-month-old girl shot in the face while sitting in a car seat in The Bronx on Wednesday.

Friday, in the blink of an eye, one young life came to a profoundly unjust end and another is in grave danger. Details were sparse last night, but what comes next is no mystery at all — bereft survivors; shocked and tearful colleagues; inspectors’ funerals, with the bagpipes and the bunting and the long blue lines of cops from all over the country.

And then, of course, come the recriminations and the finger-pointing. So let’s get started.

Mayor Eric Adams addressed the public after Friday’s tragedy.

Robert Mecea for NY Post

Before last night, three other cops had been shot since Bragg took his oath of office, and it’s only been three weeks. That’s too soon to declare a trend, of course, and not long enough to hang the blame directly on Mr. District Attorney. But there is every reason to blame the city’s rising tide of gun violence on the law-enforcement ethic Bragg so firmly, publicly and defiantly embraces.

It holds that the proper role of the police, and especially the prosecutor, is to soften criminal penalties generally — and, in particular, to avoid prison sentences whenever possible. All in the name of equity.

This has been so even before former Police Commissioner Bill Bratton finally had his fill of the de Blasio administration and bolted.

Bragg is getting heat for his soft-on-crime policies.

Stefan Jeremiah for NY Post

Mayor Adams has promised a course reversal, but he seems so far to have no plan for that. And with Bragg all but ordering his staff to ignore misdemeanors and do their best to avoid what he terms “carceral” outcomes — prison terms — the way seems clear for Manhattan’s young gunsels to lay waste wherever and whenever it suits them.

Once upon a time — before, say, two years ago — killing a cop was seen as worse than mere murder. It was, quite correctly, understood to be an assault on the rule of law — that is, as an offense against society itself.

Today, the role of shredding the social contract has been taken up by progressive prosecutors like Bragg, radical members on city councils and in state legislatures across the country — and, of course, by radical termites with Twitter accounts.

The scene where one officer was fatally shot around 6:20 p.m..

Christopher Sadowski for NY Post

How much of this can be laid to Friday night’s murder in Harlem will become clear soon enough. But it is all but irrefutable that New York’s political class doesn’t take violent crime — especially gun crime — seriously enough to do anything about it.

And the zeitgeist clearly holds police life cheaply — no matter what the politicians themselves will be saying today.

Not so most New Yorkers. They see the NYPD for what it is — a rare treasure and a blessing — and they hold its members to their hearts at times like these.

As they should. Where would they be without it.