The last days of New York A reporter's true tale

Seth Barron

Book - 2021

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Subjects
Published
West Palm Beach, FL : Humanix Books [2021]
Language
English
Main Author
Seth Barron (author)
Physical Description
xix, 280 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes index.
ISBN
9781630061876
  • Foreword
  • Introduction: Folly and Collapse
  • 1. "Worst Mayor Ever"
  • 2. Policing New York: The Progressive War on Safety
  • 3. New Crime City: Savage Permission
  • 4. Socialist Dreams: Spending Every Dime
  • 5. De Blasio's Bosses: How Consultants Run the City
  • 6. Nowhere to Go: New York and the Homeless
  • 7. Who's Thriving Now?: New York City as Open-Air Asylum
  • 8. Equity over Excellence: The Failure of the Schools
  • 9. Systemic Rot: How Reform Became Corruption
  • Coda: Anarchy in NYC
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index

Crime in New York City 2020 New York City is in a grim mood, and crime is driving the gloom. After decades of declining crime, and a general feeling of carefree personal security among an entire generation of New Yorkers unfamiliar with triple-locked doors, widespread graffiti, and avoiding parks after dark, New York was, seemingly overnight, scary again. Murders in 2020 jumped some 33 percent over the previous year, and shootings were even higher, as gangs felt free to blast away at each other in the open over obscure beefs and shows of disrespect. The Covid-19 lockdown capped the number of muggings, simply because fewer people were outside, but crime on the subway surged, even while ridership dropped to a tiny fraction of where it had been in normal times. Crime seemed to become ghastlier and more depraved, too. At the beginning of the current cycle, in October, 2019, a schizophrenic man named Randy Santos went on a killing spree one night in Chinatown, savagely murdering four sleeping homeless men with a heavy piece of metal equipment. Santos had a long criminal record and had been hospitalized. What was he doing out and about, people wondered? No answers were forthcoming. Weekends in New York began to tally Chicago-levels of victims: 15 shot one weekend; 25 another. A baby was among four people shot at a cookout in Brooklyn one Sunday night; he died from his wounds. When the police finally identified his killers, it turned out they were already in jail, having been apprehended for murdering someone else. Meantime, as New York City lapsed into chaos, its feckless leadership did little but sigh. Mayor de Blasio blamed "dislocation in communities," stemming from the coronavirus, but as for what's causing the disorder, he said that he is "much more interested in the solutions rather than continually debating the analysis." Following the 2020 Labor Day weekend, he spoke with pride of how "only" six people were shot in Central Brooklyn, the traditional location of the West Indian Day Parade, which was not held because of the pandemic; one of the wounded was a little boy whose femur was shattered. Meanwhile, noted "democratic socialist" Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from the Bronx connected the rise in shootings to economic deprivation. "Maybe this has to do with the fact that people aren't paying their rent," the congresswoman mused, "and are scared to pay their rent and so they go out and they need to feed their child and they don't have money so you maybe have to . . . they are put in a position where they feel they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry that night." This is a popular view about why crime occurs: all crime is economic at root, the thinking goes. Calls to defund the police and transfer the money spent on law enforcement to social services reflect this sentiment. Spending enough money on social workers, food banks, housing, and education, would render police obsolete, because crime would vanish. Yet it's clear that the current spate of shootings in New York City is not driven by economic need. Petty larceny, such as shoplifting groceries, was not higher against the previous year. And few, if any, of the recent killings appear to have been the result of a "robbery gone wrong." These are acts of revenge or score-settling, not economic crimes of opportunity. Ocasio-Cortez's vision of crime as driven by the need for bread is satisfyingly simple, because if it were true, it would be easy to fix. The truth is, violent crime is driven by the perverse motives of violent criminals--and New York City has given these individuals permission to run wild. But how did this happen, and why? A secure and prosperous city does not go to hell overnight, any more than the collapse of Rome occurred suddenly. It is the thesis of this book that the fall of New York City happened--as Hemingway put it--slowly, then all at once. The bad ideas of Bill de Blasio, accompanied by their terrible execution, set into play forces of undoing that disintegrated the joists and supports of New York's safety, prosperity, and future. Excerpted from The Last Days of New York: A Reporter's True Tale by Seth Barron All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.