So glad I do not live in an urban environment. From City Journal:
Underground, a Pandemic of Lawlessness
New York’s subways are suffering from an old, familiar plague: broken windows. For the first half of the year, the Daily News reports, the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has recorded 485 smashed windows, costing nearly $300,000—including 47 destroyed on just one July day. The MTA has also lost $1.2 million worth of digital-screen property to vandalism this year. Old-time New Yorkers who rode the trains before their mid-1980s renaissance will remember spider-vein windows and doors as a ubiquitous part of commuting—along with something grimmer: the threat of violent crime. It’s no surprise, then, that a bloom of broken windows is coinciding with a surge in criminal attacks on people riding on or working in subways.
The pandemic’s first five weeks saw three murders in the subway system; now comes a fourth, the gruesome death of 57-year old Dwayne “Bilal” Brown, pushed to the subway tracks and killed by a train as he tried to break up a fight on a Harlem platform earlier this month. The last time New York’s subway system saw four murders in one year was in 2007—and 2020 is barely half over. Moreover, 2007 was an aberration. Over the past 23 years, the subways have seen an average of just over two people murdered each year.
New York has been roiled by pandemic for three full months now. The risk of being a crime victim on any given trip is low—well below 1 percent—just as it was, incidentally, during the highest-crime days of the 1980s and 1990. But the statistical probability has skyrocketed. In June, an essential worker riding the trains, or working among in the public in the transit system, faced six times the risk, relative to last June, of being robbed, and more than five times the risk of being assaulted. One emergency-room nurse has been assaulted twice on her commute this year, the first time getting hit in the face by an assailant and the second time being repeatedly beaten with a cane.
Low ridership, and fewer eyes on platforms and trains, has emboldened criminals. In June, only 905,000 passengers rode the subways, compared with more than 5.6 million in June 2019. Yet the number of robberies went down by only one, compared with last June, to 46, and the number of assaults by just three, to 19. The raw number of robberies has increased over the past three months, from 35 in May and 44 in April. The surge in violence is particularly remarkable considering that since the first week in May, subways have been shuttered to riders—for the first time ever—from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m., hardly the safest hours to ride even during normal times.
And these morons want to defund the police? Cuomo and De Blasio are the poster children for progressive leadership.
All narrative and no leadership. All hat and no cattle.
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