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Escape From New York

Woke new Manhattan DA tells criminals to relax, he's going to be soft on crime
Screen Shot 2022-01-04 at 6.15.14 PM

I lived in New York City in the last half of the Rudy Giuliani mayoralty. It was a glorious city. If only I had a dollar for every conversation I had with someone that started, “I’m a liberal, but…,” and then went on to praise Giuliani for cleaning up the city and making it livable again. A main part of Giuliani’s strategy was the so-called “broken windows” theory: the idea that tolerating relatively minor quality-of-life crimes signaled to criminals that the people of the city did not care about defending order, and thus invited more serious crime.

Well, as with the proverbial dogs that return to their own vomit, New York City voters have broken definitively with Giuliani-era maxims. The newly elected Manhattan district attorney, a wokester named Alvin Bragg, has announced that his officer will cease seeking prison time for all but a handful of extreme offenses. No kidding — check out the memo. Excerpt:

The new DA is also not going to prosecute certain other crimes. Fare jumpers, hookers, trespassers and others — it’s your city now, baby!

What if the city and the state pass laws demanding prison time for certain offenses? Can the DA just ignore the law? Is this even permitted in our democracy?

The violent crime rate in NYC is soaring now, but voters, in their infinite wisdom, elected a soft-on-crime District Attorney (who depended on George Soros money to run his campaign). Bragg did not hide his soft-on-crime positions during the race; New York voters knew what they were getting with him. Now NYC joins other progressive DA cities like Chicago, San Francisco, and Philadelphia, all of which are overrun by violent crime.

I remember thinking, after living for several years in New York City, how the people there had seen what good government, including strong policing, could do to turn around a city that was once considered a national basket case, and that they would never, ever return to the Bad Old Days.

via GIPHY

UPDATE: Reader Another Dave comments:

As a 30+ year resident of the Rotten Apple, I can assure you many are angry and demoralized by the sad state of affairs in this city, crime being at the top of a growing list.

Unfortunately, the demographic reality has shifted since the 90’s, and even back then Giuliani only barely won. There is a permanent liberal upper class that cares nothing for the chaos because it never touches them, and growing numbers of activist blacks and Latins who can’t seem to think further out than simply having token POC in positions of authority, no matter how much insanity ensues.

The stone cold reality is that the vast majority of crime in NYC is committed by black men, and getting tough on crime means getting tough on the black underclass which produces the majority of the criminals.

Getting tough on the underclass means sending thousands of black men to prison, which makes white liberals feel bad, and makes black people angry, and we simply can’t have that.

That leaves us staring down the barrel of another decade, or more, of horrendous, and increasingly brazen, criminality, and an administration committed to NOT dealing with the problem.

On top of that we have Covid restrictions that are not only punishing half the city’s population, but crushing tourism.

During the first lockdowns in 2020, cell phone and postal service data showed more than 400,000 people left the city, nearly all of them upper middle class.

New data from similar sources shows most never came back. I know six families, all making 6 figure salaries, that fled during the first lockdown and will never return, and these were folks with kids committed to staying here for the duration of their children’s education.

This city, as well as LA and SanFran, are being actively destroyed by shockingly myopic political posturing/maneuvering fueled by progressivist fantasies.

The urban chaos of the 70’s and 80’s lead to massive white flight out of several of America’s greatest cities, and it took a full generation to reclaim them.

The exodus out of NYC and California is now well underway, with Florida and Texas seeing the greatest increases, but unlike Giuliani’s renewal of the 90’s, I’m not sure the political or cultural will exists any longer to fix the urban chaos now swallowing NYC and LA/SanFran.

America’s 3 greatest cities may take more than a generation to fix, if at all. It may be Detroit all the way down.

 

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