Miranda Devine: Criminals take over New York as NYPD funding cut
After months of violent anti-police protests New York’s finest are demoralised and resigning in droves, writes Miranda Devine.
January 26, 2021 - 10:10PM
The Daily Telegraph
Crime and disorder have turned New York into the dystopian Gotham city of Batman fame.
Zombies roam filthy streets and fights and stabbings are commonplace outside the once salubrious hotels that now house thousands of homeless.
The feeling of menace on the streets is familiar to anyone who lived here in the 1980s and 1990s when the city last fell apart.
Graffiti is back on the subway, and so are almost daily reports of someone being shoved into the path of a train.
Bail reform and other soft on crime policies pushed by the despised Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo, along with pandemic-related jail releases, have led to an explosion of violence on the streets.
As I write, my police scanner app shows that a woman is stabbing a man with a knife nearby, as well as an “assault with weapon” and a “dispute involving gun”.
In the first 24 days of this year, 21 New Yorkers have been murdered, an increase of 75 per cent over the same period last year, reports the NYPD union. A total of 71 New Yorkers have been shot, an increase of 51 per cent.
On Friday, a 26-year-old man got off a bus from Atlanta in downtown Manhattan and immediately was attacked by a gang of about a dozen people in broad daylight.
They beat him, stabbed him in the head and torso and stole his mobile phone, shoes and all his clothes, including his underwear.
The same day, a motorist surrounded and terrorised by teen cyclists who broke the windscreen and smashed every panel of his car as he sat at traffic lights in Midtown last month, complained to police that he “is frustrated there has been little progress in the case”.
Everyone knows there are no longer any consequences for bad behaviour in this city.
After months of violent anti-police protests, which culminated in the city council stripping the NYPD of $1 billion of funding, New York’s finest are demoralised and resigning in droves.
And it is at this exact precarious moment that the New York State Attorney-General Letitia James declared war on the NYPD.
She has sided with anarchist thugs who threw bricks and Molotov cocktails at police and set fire to their squad cars, by filing a law suit last week against the NYPD for what she described as “excessive force against peaceful protesters” last year.
She dismissed the violence of those protests, during which 350 cops were injured, and 450 businesses were destroyed, vandalised or set on fire during one 10-day period, as mere “instances of property damage and injuries to NYPD officers at or near some of these early protests.”
Then she doubled down last week after another riot erupted on Martin Luther King Day near City Hall.
Police Commissioner Dermot Shea blasted the protesters as the “antithesis of Dr King” with their “violence, throwing bottles, breaking property, calling for the death of officers [and] to burn the city down.” Eleven cops were injured in that melee.
But James blamed the NYPD for their “concerning behaviour … As we laid out in our lawsuit, this is a longstanding pattern that must stop.”
That’s a guarantee the crime wave won’t stop.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
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Charming.
Yes, seems like a another clear case of "be careful what you wish for".
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