July 26, 2022
Progressivism does not work in the subways.
What’s happening in NYC? In the city’s famed subway system, ridership is down and crime is up. On the now less-trafficked city streets, the addicted and the homeless are encountered everywhere. The filth that they leave only underscores the problem. After seven months of Eric Adams’ ministrations as “hizzoner the mayor”, the city has only half of the pre-pandemic city workers back and riding the trains. That is a problem for the untold number of small businesses that cater to the working masses who used to invade the city every morning and leave in the evening. Half of those folks are gone. Public school enrollment is in decline. While the nation’s unemployment rate is 3.6%, NYC’s unemployed rate is nearly 30% higher at 6.2%.
Yes these are problems, less workers in the City, homeless, dirty streets, piles of garbage on hot summer days, but the really big existential problem is the surge in violent crime!—In Adams’ NY City felonies are up 37% (over last year).
“Crime fighter” mayor, and former transit police officer, Eric Adams has been in charge—and you would think he would know how to fix the horrible crime problem, but nothing has improved, it has deteriorated.
Adams was elected as the last black hope of the nation’s Big Apple. He is sincere, and capable. He can spin out a good speech and a act out a good show. But for the struggling city, his glib speeches and slick dress-up-acts are not good enough. He is a after-all a Democrat and is infected with the disease of the left, “progressive dementia”. This mental state apparently includes the ability to ignore the real needs of the City, while one satisfies the need to remain in office by continually proving ones “progressive credentials” to the powers in Albany. Since progressivism simply does not work, hope is dimming along the “great white way” and in the rumbling underground subways too.
The straw that may have broken the city taxpayer’s back is a most recent case, wherein two of Adams’ transit police officers, hamstrung by sub Rosa police rules that limits their ability to get tough with violent offenders, were unable to subdue a teenage turnstile jumper. The frighteningly violent video of the encounter went viral. Though one of Adams’ officer’s made a valiant attempt to enforce the law (while dutifully never reaching for his taser). He suffered brutally for his restraint. His female partner just stood by and gave little aid to her male partner, her taser and billy club still around her waist, as she ineffectively shuffled around the struggling pair. Her young partner took a good beating, with many punches to the face, and body, and at one point body slammed into a railing where he was put into an embarrassing choke hold (the kind that cops are not allowed to use) by the athletic and very violent young criminal. With a little aid from a third officer (though unoffensive to the perpetrator) , the jumper was finally subdued.
The brave young officer was sent to the hospital for an ex ray and stitches, while the violent, police assaulting perp with a record of earlier crimes and releases, was dutifully released “on his own recognizance”, by the City AG, William Bragg. You will surely find this violent young man on another day, on some other train station, again jumping turnstiles, or assaulting someone else in the City. He has learned his lesson, no need to pay a fare for a ride, and you can get away with assault, even assaulting the police, the symbol of law and order. So unarmed citizens watch out. This young man will surely go on to more violent assaults. The City thanks you Alvin Bragg for ignoring victims and mollycoddling criminals. As you make the city unlivable.
On April 11, 2022 in a New Yorker “hit piece” author Clio Chang attacked new mayor Adams’ regarding his policing strategy. The new mayor, who had been elected on a “law and order” platform, was apparently in need of some “New Yorker magazine style” correcting. Chang posed the question to Adams on how he was handling the rising crime in the subways and on “turnstile jumpers”. She quotes Adams as saying that his plan is to arrest those who commit small crimes, because : “If you say its Ok to jump the turnstiles , then we create an environment where everything goes” (i.e. other more violent crimes).
Chang was not impressed and referred to Adams’ reply as “old style” or “broken windows policing.” In response, she reminded Adams of a slew of past stories of “violent” transit police arresting or attempting to arrest turnstile jumpers and other miscreants. She related a number of (then) recent cases where the subway criminal was “attacked” by a trio of cops; in another a perp was was tasered; and in another encounter a man, while resisting arrest, was pinned to the ground by several officers and then brutally treated as he was handcuffed.
Chang complained that as a result of old style “broken windows policing” those arrested are faced with charges that do not end at simple “fare evasion” but are often expanded to “resisting arrest” or “assaulting officers”. She referred to this as an example of “pretextural justification”. A policing method for stopping someone —(she added, that these are “often blacks and brown folks”)—and for no valid reason arresting them. She complained that the old style policing is only another form of “state sanctioned violence”. She, as other progressives, blithely and habitually ignore the terrible harm inflicted on the many victims of these violent offenders. They also ignore the existential need for the peaceful and law abiding citizenry to move freely through the subways and on the streets to pursue their lives and businesses. The function of the police and the judicial system is to protect the rights of these citizens and to separate the violent anti-social elements from society.
So three months later, the mayor who is alert and obedient to these far left arguments has apparently (go look at that video again) pulled his cops back from “broken window policing”. As was so apparent in the video of the attempted arrest of a 16 year old felon—police are ordered now to just “watch the windows get broken” and do nothing about it. Three months after the Chang interview some of Adams’ transit police (may sometimes) try to enforce the law—-but if they do, they are forced to act with “one hand tied behind their backs”. In Adams’ city criminals can punch a police officer in the face, put him in a choke-hold and beat him to a pulp—but the officer —and his partner—are not allowed to use their billy clubs, their tasers, or their weapon. That is if they want to keep their jobs and pensions, and avoid incarceration themselves. They know Bragg would not hesitate charging them.
So what are the citizens of the City paying the police for? To watch turnstile jumpers? To watch as citizens get mugged, beat up, pushed off the platform into on coming trains? With this level of protection..the citizenry are simply not getting their money worth of protection.
Thank Adams and his overseers in Albany. And don’t expect the City to survive the Adams’ maorality. The City it is going down the tubes fast. Progressivism does not work in the subways.
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