Last Days of New York: a reporter's true tale - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Seth Barron is a New York City-based reporter and editor who has covered local politics closely for more than ten years. Associate editor of urban policy at City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, Barron is a widely-read columnist and reporter on politics and issues in New York City. Barron became intimately familiar with the ins and outs of New York City politics through his City Council Watch blog, and then worked in City Hall as legislative director for a council member from Queens. His work has appeared in the New York Post, New York Daily News, and Wall Street Journal and also appears regularly on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News to discuss New York City issues. He frequently appears on a range of local and national television and radio programs as a commentator. https://www.city-journal.org/contributor/seth--barron_849 https://www.manhattan-institute.org/expert/seth-barron https://www.realclearpolicy.com/authors/seth_barron/ https://www.foxnews.com/person/b/seth-barron https://muckrack.com/seth-barron/articles https://nypost.com/author/seth-barron/

HEATHER MAC DONALD is the national bestselling author of The War on Cops, the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a contributing editor of City Journal. A former aspiring academic with roots in deconstruction and postmodernism, she has been the target of violent student protest for her work on policing. Mac Donald holds a B.A. from Yale and an M.A. from Cambridge in English, and a J.D. from Stanford. In 1998, Mac Donald was appointed to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's task force on the City University of New York. In 2004, she received the Civilian Valor Award from the New Jersey State Law Enforcement Officers. She is a recipient of the 2005 Bradley Prize. In 2008, Mac Donald received the Integrity in Journalism Award from the New York State Shields, as well as the Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration from the Center for Immigration Studies. In 2012, she received the Quill & Badge Award for Excellence in Communication from the International Union of Police Associations. 

Mac Donald's work at City Journal has canvassed a range of topics, including higher education, immigration, policing and "racial" profiling, homelessness and homeless advocacy, criminal-justice reform, and race relations. Her writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The New Criterion and Partisan Review, among other publications. 

 https://www.manhattan-institute.org/expert/heather-mac-donald

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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.