The NYPD is running an unethical experiment on New Yorkers. Let's see what happens.

A deliberate slowdown of policing efforts could yield some valuable data about how to fight crime

Mayor de Blasio
(Image credit: (Spencer Platt/Getty Images))

Scientific knowledge sometimes isn’t worth the ethical cost. For example, when it was first suspected that smoking causes lung cancer, a strong way to test the theory would have been to take a bunch of babies, expose half to lots of cigarette smoke for decades, and see what happened. That would have resulted in valuable evidence but obviously would have come at too high an ethical cost.

The New York Police Department is apparently not moved by these sorts of considerations. Enraged by the murder of two police officers, which has been ludicrously blamed on Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city's finest have been conducting a work slowdown in protest. (The official line is that there is no coordinated slowdown, but the numbers don't lie.)

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.