Miranda Devine: How woke policies made New York a laughing stock
Woke politicians and an inept mayor oversaw the ruination of New York but now a new man in city hall is fighting back on the promise of better law and order, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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New York offers a cautionary tale on crime for NSW.
After eight destructive years in which the last mayor, Bill de Blasio, unwound all the zero-tolerance, tough-on-crime policies of his predecessors, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, and after the anti-cop riots of 2020, crime in New York has soared to levels nearing the bad old days of the 1970s and 1980s.
Areas of the city, like the streets around Penn Station, became open air drug markets where addicts, often with their pants around their ankles, act out various zombie poses or shoot up their drug of choice.
Homelessness is rampant and the city is filthy. Footpaths are strewn with garbage, smeared with human faeces and teeming with rats.
Let that be a lesson to the soft-on-crime, drugs-are-just-a-health-issue politicians who seem to be growing more emboldened in NSW.
It doesn’t take long to ruin a city when you bow to left-wing legal activists and drug decriminalises.
The effects aren’t obvious at first and then, one day, when the woke politicians are about to leave office, everything falls apart. That’s what happened in New York.
Like frogs in boiling water, New Yorkers didn’t realise until it was too late what de Blasio had done to them. But now the Big Apple has a new mayor, a former cop, the only candidate who ran on a law-and-order platform last November in this crime-plagued city.
Eric Adams is a Democrat but he is bringing back the Broken Windows policy that saved New York once before, in which you police small signs of disorder and anti-social behaviour to prevent widespread crime and engender an atmosphere of order and lawfulness.
At his urging, last month the New York Police Department announced it would start focusing on quality-of-life offences, which were discarded under de Blasio.
That means public urination and defecation, which have become all too common, actually will be policed.
Adams also has started talking about “zero tolerance”, another buzzword of the ‘90s that accompanied Giuliani’s law and order crackdown.
He has reinstituted the Anti-Crime Unit that used to be so adept at taking guns off the street. He has given the unit a more friendly name, Neighborhood Safety Teams, but the intent is the same,
He describes himself as the “wartime general” who can fix New York’s crime and homelessness problems. After two separate shootings that injured a seven-year-old and a three-year-old two weeks ago, he said New York had become “a laughing stock”.
“It’s just not OK to leave a daycare centre with your baby and hear gunshots, or walk across Kings Highway with your seven-year-old and hear shots.
“Anything goes in the city of New York. The most important city on the globe has become the laughing stock of the globe. And the dysfunctionality of our city has cascaded throughout the entire country.
“And (then critics complain about) the audacity that someone comes along and says, ‘I want to be your mayor,’ and simply says, ‘Follow the rules, follow the rules.”
He was referring to the strong pushback he is getting from social justice warriors and left-wing activists such as Legal Aid Society lawyer Jennvine Wong.
According to Wong, Adams’ plan to crack down on the quality-of life offences that have made life in New York so miserable is racist.
“Broken Windows policing has long been discredited for furthering mistrust between the police and the communities we serve and this rebranded version will yield those same results, with the same disparate enforcement.”
So far, Adams is standing tough against the critics: “Go visit that 13-year-old boy that was shot yesterday while sitting in the back of the car,” he said. “We need to stop criticising good, proper law enforcement with the proper proactive things to keep guns out of the hands of young people.” Amen.
You just have to look at the sorry reign of de Blasio to see what happens when you listen to lefties on law and order.
He inherited a safe, clean big city where people were getting along and working hard and enjoying themselves. The pandemic gave him power that went to his head.
He defunded the NYPD by $1 billion, disbanded the anti-gun unit, emptied the jails under the guise of Covid and let the crims take over the streets, destroyed small business with arbitrary lockdowns and cancelled gifted and talented programs at New York City schools, that were the ticket out of a life of crime for clever, underprivileged kids.
Mayor Putz, as he was known, had no real philosophy other than a vague, hippie communism. His notable flagship policy was to legalise marijuana, fitting since he was alleged to smoke it every day.
Now the stench of pot is everywhere, along with the stench of human excrement.
He started his reign of terror by killing the fabled groundhog, Staten Island Chuck, on Groundhog Day, which is an American tradition every February 2, in which the large rodents are brought out supposedly to predict an early spring.
De Blasio dropped Staten Island Chuck on his head and a few days later the poor groundhog died of internal injuries.
And basically, that’s what Bill de Blasio did to New York. After eight years of his tender mercies, the city is dying from internal injuries he inflicted.
His one achievement was to unite New Yorkers, whether Democrats or Republicans. They were over the moon when he finally left, at midnight on New Year’s Eve.
So let NSW Attorney-General Mark Speakman and NSW Police Minister Paul Toole beware. If you impose woke crime policies on a reluctant electorate your names will be mud forever. NSW will unite in hatred for you. We still remember the bad old days of the 1990s in Sydney under the soft-on-crime British bobby Peter Ryan who was hand-picked by then Premier Bob Carr and his police minister Paul Whelan to be police commissioner.
There were open heroin markets in Cabramatta, junkies dying on the Smack Express, Kings Cross a hellhole of drugs and violent crime, suburban home burglaries and break-ins a fact of life and teenage kids working at Pizza Hut murdered by armed robbers.
Sydney’s descent into anarchy also was the result of leftie “compassion” for criminals and a push to decriminalise drugs.
There is nothing compassionate about crime and drug addiction and both are the inevitable result of woke politics.
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