During the dinner party Friday night (yes, old people still have dinner parties), the guy sitting across from me explained that we’re back to rampant crime, a crime spree.  I asked him why he thought so, and he looked at me like I was a moron. “Don’t you read the papers?” he finally sputtered.

I sighed, knowing what he meant.  If it bleeds, it leads, and there has been no shortage of news about people getting killed, both cops and robbers people shot by cops.  For nice people who have no other context, it could well seem like we’re back to gunfights in the street.

After gently suggesting that there really isn’t any crime spree going on, to which he gave me one of those looks that suggested I shouldn’t move any closer to him or he would have to take a defensive stance, I tried to explain that a handful of high profile issues mask the fact that, compared to the 1980s, we’re living in crime paradise. It’s just not happening, a point echoed by the New York Times editorial.

The New York City tabloids, TV news and other elements of the city’s early-warning system for the apocalypse have noted a steady rise in shootings and homicides. To some this smells like the beginning of the end of many years of falling crime, and with it, presumably, the mayor’s credibility as a leader who can keep the city safe.

Any prolonged increase in violence is worrying, and shootings have been climbing for two years.

So there is a crime spree? Not exactly.

But Mr. de Blasio has a ready response, which he repeated on Friday. It’s that serious crime overall is still down — way down — from historic highs. That the shooting problem is largely confined to a few precincts in Brooklyn and the Bronx, where gangs and drugs hold sway. (Police Commissioner William Bratton said it’s “career criminals, killing and shooting other career criminals.”)

But there is a secondary effect happening that will give the outward appearance of a return to crime while it relates instead to an entirely separate problem, dubbed the “Ferguson Effect.”  From Room for Debate:

A rise in gun violence in New York, Baltimore and other cities after months of angry protests over police killings of unarmed black men, have led some to see a ”Ferguson effect,” in which police, spooked by criticism of aggressive tactics, have pulled back, making fewer arrests and fewer searches for weapons.

Is this the backlash to public disapproval of cops killing people, particularly unarmed black men, for no good reason?  Much as we may condemn these actions, the cops have decided to take even fewer risks, do even less of the job for which they are well-compensated, to teach the public a lesson about how much we need them, how much we should respect them?

Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Institute offers the fear-mongering badge-licking cop-shill perspective:

Officers say they are reluctant to be proactive because of the vitriol they face. The victims will be law-abiding residents of crime-ridden areas.

Any police killing of an unarmed, innocent civilian is a horrifying tragedy that training must work incessantly to prevent. And officers have an obligation to treat the public with courtesy and respect. But if police officers disengage, the casualties will be millions of law-abiding residents of crime-ridden neighborhoods who were liberated from fear by the last two decades of proactive enforcement.

So even if they make the occasional boo-boo, it is our duty for the benefit of millions of law-abiding residents to trust the police and be compliant.

Former New York City police officer, Marq Claxton, now the director of the Black Law Enforcement Alliance, disagrees.

Police work is not factory work. It takes specialized training and a special type of person who is willing to risk life and limb on a daily basis in the face of internal and external resistance.

But as difficult as the job may be, that does not give officers the right to hold back from vigorously doing their job because they are angered by criticism and calls for reform. Professional police officers should never place their own sensitivity ahead of public safety.

Claxton is no cop-hater. He clearly thinks well of cops, the difficulty of the job, the dangers faced. He acknowledges the emotions at play by police, their butthurt at not being universally viewed as the heroes they perceive themselves to be.

Police work will always be dangerous and it will always appear that you serve an ungrateful community. If you are worthy of the title police officer, you must strengthen your resolve to make a positive difference in providing safety, security and service to the community. Suck it up and get to work!

Another former cop, who now teaches at the John Jay College of Coppery and Shoe Repair (and a New York Times favorite pundit), Eugene O’Donnell, has also had enough of the whining.

America needs a dialogue about policing based on facts and pragmatism, not orthodoxies and preconceptions, where emotionalism is curtailed.

Police have become dangerously disconnected from communities, especially in places where zero tolerance, “Broken Windows” and numbers-driven policing have been the rage.

The upshot isn’t that we’re experiencing a crime spree, but a job action by police more concerned with their hurt feelings at losing the respect of the community and failing to do their job to teach us a lesson.  And some are applauding the “less is more” result, without enough consideration of the fact that, without police doing their job, crime does, in fact, happen.

On the other hand, lawyers, civil libertarians and commentators who by and large do not live in communities where demands on the police are high, have frequently suggested that less policing is the best policing.

While the media may be fanning the flames of fear-mongering, which lasted through a desert of petit fours and fresh berries for me, the loss of liberty and occasional murder of a black man is giving rise to confusion about whether we need more or less policing, and whether the cops deserve more or less respect.

But what became clear by the time my glass of Chateau d’Yquem was empty was that fear is back, and that sucks the thoughtfulness out of the discussion. And if fear is the motivating force, the police are going to get anything they want.