That groundbreaking revelation appears in the intro to Heather Mac Donald’s New York Post piece on the New York Civil Liberties Union’s attempts to get cops to quit their “trespass-affidavit program” where flatfoots patrol private apartment buildings looking for lurkers who don’t belong there. But Mac Donald — no friend to modern leftist orthodoxies — misses a key puzzle piece in New York’s post-Sandy experience . . .
The looting was concentrated wherever police precincts were evacuated due to flooding, reported The Wall Street Journal, such as on Coney Island, where the entire 60th Precinct was emptied out, and the 100th Precinct in the Rockaways….
Across the city, burglaries had spiked 7 percent from Monday to Thursday over those days last year — a number likely to rise as evacuees return and tally thefts from their abandoned homes.
We’ve just lived through a demonstration of what happens when the police go away.
D’oh! And she was this close to nailing it. Mac Donald stopped just one sentence too soon, probably not wanting to open that particular kettle of fish – New Yorkers have also just lived through a demonstration of what happens when a disarmed populace is forced to surrender its personal safety and wellbeing to a police force that can’t possibly keep everyone safe in normal circumstances, let alone in the aftermath of a natural disaster.
Oh, and as for the NYPD’s predilection for stop & frisk and patrolling private properties looking for drug dealers other troublemaking yoots, the need for those tactics would drop drastically if the general populace in the Big Apple were allowed to exercise their Second Amendment right to armed self defense. And that would mean fewer NYCLU lawsuits, less NYPD tsuris and fewer lawsuits clogging up the courts and draining city bank accounts. Pretty much a win-win for everyone involved. Nah…makes too much sense. [h/t John B.]