I used to work for a New York City-based international market data and media conglomerate with offices in Times Square. I’d be in NYC at least once a month for three or four days and loved every damned minute of it. I stayed in a nice hotel half a block from our offices and used every penny (and more) of my per diem to eat at as many good restaurants as I could possibly get into when I was there.
This was in the early 2000’s. Rudy Giuliani had just left office after miraculously cleaning up the seemingly unmanageable disaster of a city he was left when David Dinkins faded into obscurity. Giuliani made the city a clean, safe, and very fun place to be (as long as you didn’t care about your gun rights).
Every night I was there I’d roam all over Manhattan and occasionally Brooklyn, usually taking the affordable, graffiti-free subway wherever I was going and walking the streets with little or no concern for my safety. Crime just wasn’t much of a problem or consideration.
Sadly, those are now the good old days. The current Mayor, Warren Wilhelm Bill de Blasio has been in office about seven years now and has done a spectacular job of completely undoing every bit of progress that was made under Giuliani and sustained by (yes) Michael Bloomberg.
The city had been trending down for years under de Blasio, almost from the day he was inaugurated. Now, in addition to the Mayor’s mal- and mismanagement, NYC has also been hit by a pandemic, it’s opened its jail, it allows those arrested for current crimes to run loose, and the city’s government accommodates rioting and looting in the name of social justice and the right to protest.
All of the above have combined to cause the city to devolve into a place I’m sure I wouldn’t recognize if I were ever temporarily insane enough to go back again. This, in a place that makes it next to impossible for the average citizen to legally own a firearm to protect herself and her family.
City government is packing homeless people, including convicted sex offenders, into empty hotels. People in neighboring apartment buildings are navigating bums and junkies that now live in their neighborhoods, afraid to let their children outside.
Luxury brands and other retailers are suing their landlords to get out of their leases. The streets and avenues feature block after block of boarded-up once-thriving businesses.
@RealistNews New York City Is Gone, Boarded Up.
Watch What Communism Has Done To NYC – From
Comrade DeBlasio’s Madness To The Insane Bolshevik
Looters, New York City Is Gone, Boarded Up…Dead pic.twitter.com/eWD6vetru3— William (@traderwill2) August 17, 2020
Granted, the coronavirus has been particularly hard on NYC given its population density, but it’s been hard on virtually every city of any size across the nation and no city has fared as poorly as has the Big Apple. It now looks more like Escape from New York than Devil Wears Prada.
And then there’s the crime. Never one to enjoy a happy relationship with New York’s Finest, Hizzoner — always a socialist at heart — has sliced $1 billion out of the NYPD’s budget. Because defunding the police is de rigueur among big city Democrat mayors these days who want to stay on good terms with the left-most fringes of their constituencies.
As justification for the cuts, de Blasio says they will allow him to achieve “real reform” and “real redistribution.”
So while the city was busy releasing 2000 people with pending firearms-related charges against them in July alone, the Mayor was doing his level best to make sure the NYPD would be even less capable of dealing with the increased criminal activity.
One of the consequences of all of this, to no one’s surprise, is a massive spike in the city’s crime rate, including triple digit percentage increases in shootings.
Earlier this morning, police officers from the 73rd Precinct responded to a 911 call of a male and female shot in front of 41 New Lots Avenue. When they arrived, they discovered a male with a gunshot wound to the head and a female with multiple gunshot wounds. pic.twitter.com/uXNwmhatsO
— Chief Rodney Harrison (@NYPDDetectives) July 3, 2020
The latest is this drive-by (park-by?) shooting in Brooklyn on Wednesday:
A gunman fired off about half a dozen rounds in a broad-daylight shooting on a Brooklyn block that has seen two fatal acts of gun violence this week alone, a new video shows.
Surveillance footage shows an unknown triggerman fire a handgun out the driver’s window of a gray BMW X5 just before 3:30 p.m. Wednesday near the corner of Ocean and Woodruff avenues in Flatbush.
The luxury SUV, with temporary plates in the rear window, then speeds off, the video shows.
An 18-year-old victim later died from gunshot wounds to the chest and the arms at the hospital, cops said. A 33-year-old man was also wounded in the shooting but was expected to recover from the blast to his stomach.
Worse still, there’s no prospect of anything being done by the powers that be to improve the situation. Mayor de Blasio had already shut down the NYPD’s Street Crime Unit and probably would have cut $2 billion from the force’s budget if he thought he could get away with it. Meanwhile, the exodus of cops became such a deluge that the department had to put limits on the number of officers who could process retirement applications in any one month.
As a result, it won’t be years, but decades before New York City recovers from its infection — one that originated in China and another that metastasized outward from Gracie Mansion.
New York City’s always been resilient, coming back from the devastation of the 1970s and the destruction of 9/11. But this time seems different. Some say it will never again be what it was. A good portion of our readers will be happy to hear that, thinking New Yorkers are getting exactly what they voted for and richly deserve.
I’ve talked to a number of people who live in NYC and they all report the same thing. They’re either leaving or seriously considering it. It’s just not a place they or anyone they know wants to be now and they have no idea if or when it will be that kind of place again. That’s particularly sad for those of us who’ve spent a significant amount of time there and came to love what it once was and may never be again.