A Policing Playbook for New York’s Next Leader

Since 2023, New York City has made significant progress on crime, with homicides and shootings down after rising for several years.

Even so, New Yorkers still witness persistent signs of disorder, from violence to public drug use to the seriously mentally ill roaming the streets.

If the next mayor is to strengthen public safety even further, he will need to reinforce the police department, Rafael A. Mangual and former NYPD commissioner William J. Bratton argue. “To do that,” they write, “he must handle three challenges: ensure that the department is adequately staffed; boost the rank-and-file’s morale by showing he is a partner to officers; and deliver measurable wins on serious crime, while remaining responsive to New Yorkers’ concerns about disorder and quality-of-life issues.”

Read their astute analysis here.

The American Medical Association is the nation’s largest doctors’ organization. Its guidance regularly shapes public policy and clinical protocols. But despite the group’s reputation as an authority on medical research, the AMA has repeatedly defended so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors, a treatment with no empirical evidence of effectiveness.

Leor Sapir reviews a series of videos published by Daily Wire, which depict the AMA’s president, Bobby Mukkamala, making false claims about pediatric gender medicine. In calls with an Ohio state legislator, Mukkamala misstates the suicide rate among trans-identifying youth and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of evidence-based medicine.

Sapir believes that the AMA president is failing in his “duty to ensure his organization does not support harmful treatments that lack basis in science and medical ethics.” Read more here.

Earlier this week, President Trump signed an executive order that requires the attorney general to prioritize the prosecution of anyone who burns the American flag. But the order is toothless, thanks to a 1989 Supreme Court ruling that found that flag burning is protected speech.

“That can be remedied,” Charles Fain Lehman writes. “The president’s well-documented affection for the flag is consistent with public opinion, which has long disdained expressive flag burning.” To square these beliefs with the Constitution, Lehman argues, President Trump should “call on Congress and the states to honor the upcoming 250th anniversary of the nation by passing an amendment banning the burning of American flags.”

Artificial intelligence data centers are driving growth in electricity demand at a rate not seen in 50 years. Consider that a single data center hosts hundreds or thousands of AI server racks, and each rack uses as much energy each year as 100 cars.

The challenge in building the energy systems required to fuel this growth isn’t a lack of resources, Mark P. Mills writes. The U.S. “will need to weigh choices and tradeoffs, while minimizing government friction.”

Read more on tech companies’ efforts to drive the AI revolution, and the obstacles they will face in doing so.

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