Take a bow, Mayor Bill de Blasio. This attack on two women on the streets of New York is your handiwork.
The two women, one a tourist from Russia, were walking along a street in Chelsea when the man, unprovoked, attacked them both. He dragged one and smashed her into a scaffolding pole while trying to steal her purse. The two victims were taken to a nearby hospital, and one reportedly suffered severe lacerations.
The attacker remains at large and surely knows that if he is ever caught — which is unlikely given the reduction in NYPD officers over the past year — he’ll face little if any prosecution. Woke prosecutors aren’t interested in putting violent criminals behind bars anymore. New York’s Democrats from the governor on down are much more interested in going after law-abiding Americans. They’re easier prey.
Related: Democrats and Their Policies Are Abetting America’s Violent Crime Wave
De Blasio inherited a New York City that was largely safe thanks to decades of dedicated crime-fighting beginning in the very late Dinkens years but coming to full effectiveness during the Giuliani years. That city is gone.
To understand why, let’s rewind to a year ago. The nation was roiling in riots, which were encouraged by Democrat leaders including de Blasio himself. At the same time, Democrats, backed by left-wing activist groups, pushed to defund police in most of our major cities. Some were stupid enough to actually do it. De Blasio and the NY city council cut police funding by about $1 billion, the largest defunding by dollar amount. Austin, Texas, led the way by percentage, with its all-Democrat city council slashing about a third of its police budget in August 2020.
CNN captured the false debate at the time in this piece with a tilted headline: “Crime is surging in US cities. Some say defunding the police will actually make it fall.”
Those who claimed defunding police would reduce crime were wrong and deserve to be named. In the story, they are not named. CNN couldn’t actually find any, but its headline claims that “Some say defunding the police will actually make (crime) fall.” CNN lied in that headline. Blatantly, outrageously lied. It quotes a couple of academics and advocates saying, well, maybe having more cops doesn’t always reduce crime. That’s not the argument presented in the headline.
The best CNN could do was find a study put together by another media outlet, USA Today.
A 2019 joint investigation from USA Today and the Marshall Project found that the number of police officers doesn’t correlate with a city’s crime rate. Other studies have drawn similarly inconclusive results.
That paper is one of Facebook’s paid fact-checkers, by the way. Questioning them is not possible on a level playing field since they can tattle to Facebook and throttle your traffic for doing it, but questioning them is necessary. The paper uses college interns who don’t know a thing (but have very strong opinions) to question reporting from other outlets, sometimes leading to Facebook traffic attacks on them.
The Marshall Project is an advocacy group on the left. It’s hardly an unbiased resource for USA Today to partner with, and hardly an unbiased authority for CNN to cite. Would USA Today partner with, say, Right on Crime, a project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation?
But this is how the news often works. It’s public relations for an advocacy group of the left, cloaked in the skin of actual news, embedded in a policy debate that’s not even real. Conservative groups cannot get similar treatment from mainstream media outlets. It’s impossible. If they obtain coverage, they are identified as conservative or described with some pejorative. Left-wing groups are almost never similarly identified.
There was no credible debate on defunding police last summer. The debate was fake and the damage would soon prove real. The results of defunding were easy to predict: it would make crime skyrocket, especially when the nation was already getting gut-punched by COVID and the mostly Democrat lockdowns and spiking social ills from that. Left-wing activists who had long advocated for defunding police took advantage of the hothouse atmosphere of last summer — the pandemic, lockdowns, George Floyd’s death — to stir up riots and to call for defunding police. They were wildly successful in their opportunistic advocacy. They also got people killed and have created a permissive atmosphere that is eating our cities away from within. Police are retiring in droves all over the country. Crime is up hard across the country. A tourist in Austin was killed a few weeks back; the Russian tourist in this video survived but may have permanent scars from the wanton attack on her. Joe Biden went from a crime-fighting senator to an objectively pro-crime fool and demagogue.
As Kruiser wryly observed, de Blasio will be replaced either by a former NYPD cop who ran on a law-and-order platform (and is black), or Curtis Sliwa, the man who got so fed up with New York’s 1970s crime waves and Democrat enabling of criminals that he founded the Guardian Angels to bring some safety back to the streets. A cop or a vigilante will replace de Blasio. If de Blasio were capable of being shamed or humiliated, having a cop or a street justice advocate replace him should do the trick. But he’s too arrogant to care.
Let’s hope similar developments happen wherever foolish Democrats who don’t care about your safety (none of them actually do, they just care about destroying the country as it is so they can replace it with what they want) are replaced similarly wherever police were defunded. They deserve the humiliation, and Americans deserve to have safe streets again.
