What would you do if you heard a woman screaming for help? Nothing, if you're in the NYPD.

It’s the one year anniversary of the Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde, Texas. The Washington Post has a large investigative feature about how the senior officers who botched the response haven’t faced professional consequences.

“A Post investigation finds numerous higher-ranking officers who made critical decisions remain on the job.”

The Post’s review of dozens of hours of body camera videos, post-shooting interviews with officers, audio from dispatch communications and law enforcement licensing records identified at least seven officers who stalled even as evidence mounted that children were still in danger.Some were the first to arrive, while others were called in for their expertise.

The New York Times, too, asks if we’ve learned anything from Uvalde.

A Year After the Uvalde Massacre: Did Anything Change?

(hint: no.)

But what made the Uvalde attack extraordinary was not just the death toll. It was the fact that more than 370 officers from local, state and federal agencies had responded to the scene — some standing in the school hallway — but allowed the gunman to remain holed up with students inside the school for 77 minutes before storming in to kill him.

After Uvalde, New York City Mayor Eric Adams assured New Yorkers NYPD officers would intervene right away to stop the loss of innocent life.

“That is not going to happen in New York. We go in with an active shooter,” he said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“Not only would the police go in with an active shooter, but the FDNY, EMS, they’re trained to go in with an active shooter,” the mayor added. “It appears as though this was treated more like a barricaded armed person or a hostage negotiation scenario instead of an active shooter.”

“Here in New York City, well-trained, deep intelligence — the goal is to go in and stop the immediate threat right away.”

Is that right?

In February of 2022, a man followed 35-year-old Christina Yuna Lee up six flights of stairs and then barged into her apartment. She started screaming and begging neighbors to call 911. They did. The police showed up in under 5 minutes. Then they waited. And they waited some more. They waited an hour and 20 minutes, to be precise, for the arrival of Emergency Services Unit, which broke in to find the attacker cowering under the bed and Yuna Lee dead in her bathtub. She’d been stabbed 40 times.

At the time, the NYPD claimed the door had been “barricaded.” (sound familiar? The door was also “barricaded” at Robb Elementary, until it turned out that it wasn’t even locked).

Over the weekend I went to 111 Chrystie, the building where Lee was murdered. It’s a six story walkup, across the street from a park where elderly Chinese people meet to play mahjong and exercise. There’s a seafood place on one side and a hipster coffee shop on the other. The only sign of Lee is a faded wooden memorial with weeds growing on it.

Pathos aside, notice something?

Even if her door had been “barricaded” (which, please. Her attacker was a mentally ill homeless man, not a criminal mastermind in the Ocean’s 11 franchise) what kept officers from breaching the apartment through the fire escape? In an hour and 20 minutes, they could have done any number of the following things. a) turned over a trash can and climbed on to get to the fire escape from the ground. b) Knocked on the door of the neighbors who called 911, who surely weren’t asleep, and asked politely if they could access their fire escape to break in through Lee’s window c) accessed the fire escape through the roof d) walked up to any man or woman in the vicinity and said, “Hello, we are cowards, will you climb the fire escaped to help a woman screaming for help?”

Believe it or not, that’s not even the worst part. The Emergency Services Unit is supposed to be on call literally 24/7. They’re the elite officers who are like supposed to thwart terror plots by disabling bombs. What in the Hell were they doing that night that it took them and hour and 20 minutes to show up?

Lee’s family is suing the city for the NYPD’s slow response, which they believe (and I agree) cost Lee her life (if anyone knows which law firm is handling the case, let me know). The lawsuit garnered rote coverage in the Daily Beast, New York Post, and the Daily News. By rote I mean “Lee’s family claims …” If you hadn’t been following the case (as I obsessively have) you’d scan the headline and move on, thinking probably they’re just trying to find more people to blame as a projection of their grief.

I love New York, but the politics are atrocious. The city runs on tourism, finance and real estate cash, so the NYPD’s main job is hustling homeless people away from the choice spots and busting brown and Black teenagers under various shady pretexts. It’s a devil’s bargain: the police unions own the Mayors so the Mayors do nothing but talk about reform and accountability while shoveling more and more money into the NYPD. And, with the demise of the Village Voice, the media landscape consists of the right-wing rag, the New York Post (or the “Daniel Penny for President Election committee.”) and the New York Times, which is constitutionally tepid on everything, but particularly so when it comes to “public safety.”

Yes, our Mayors go to gay pride. But in some ways the city is more right-wing than red country. While it doesn’t appear that the senior Uvalde officers got fired, I can’t imagine it’s particularly pleasant to be widely, globally, reviled and shamed as cowards who milled around while babies died. The NYPD faces no such scrutiny—ever—and even less accountability. It’s like the institution has on an invisibility cloak. Any time they fail at their jobs, someone or something else is blamed. Eric Adams used the opportunity of Lee’s death to smear bail reform. The crime was chalked up to anti-Asian hate, and lawmakers pledged that they stand behind their Asian-American citizens, even though there’s no evidence Lee was targeted because she was Asian-American.

Absolutely no one asked about the hour and 20 minutes during which Lee may have been saved.