Miranda Devine: New York’s subways a trip to the bad old days
I haven’t ridden the subway in New York for a year. First it was the coronavirus. Now it’s the homicidal maniacs trying to shove you in front of a train, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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I haven’t ridden the subway in New York for a year. First it was the coronavirus. Now it’s the homicidal maniacs trying to shove you in front of a train.
Just last weekend two people were fatally stabbed and two seriously wounded by a serial killer dubbed the “A-train ripper”.
No surprise that the suspect is a mentally ill, homeless drug abuser whose past arrests include an assault on a cop. Rigoberto Lopez, 21, is in jail without bail after being arrested on Saturday, less than 24 hours after the subway rampage.
Great work by the NYPD, but he never should have been on the streets after the last four times they arrested him. In his short life he has been arrested and hospitalised numerous times, and his besieged father had to take out the equivalent of an apprehended violence order against him.
Nor should we be surprised that the victims also were homeless.
It was just 16 months ago that four homeless people were beaten to death in Chinatown by another vagrant.
That’s life in New York, which has been plagued by destructive criminal justice reforms from woke state politicians, a rabidly anti-cop mayor and lax judges and prosecutors batting for the wrong team.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has taken a bad situation in a pandemic-battered city and made it infinitely worse.
He put his wife in charge of fixing the homeless problem and all she did was spend $850 million with nothing to show for it.
The city now is paying to house the homeless in hotels which used to serve tourists and yet the streets have never been so full of rough sleepers and hollow-eyed souls begging for money.
As life grew more dangerous for the ballooning homeless population, only the police kept an eye on them, protecting them and packing them off to hospital if their mental health spiralled out of control.
But DeBlasio was more than happy to agree to demands from anarchists and Black Lives Matter activists, including his daughter, to defund the NYPD to the tune of $1 billion.
That was at the height of the racial protests which broke out across the country last summer after the death of George Floyd, an unarmed drug-affected black man, at the hands of police in Minneapolis, where the defund-the-police movement was born.
This week we learn that crime has soared so much in Minneapolis that it is planning to spend $6.4 million to hire dozens of new cops just months after the city council voted to abolish the police department.
De Blasio and his ilk pretend they are all about compassion for the underdog, but going easy on criminals and abandoning the mentally ill to the streets makes New York a hellhole and only hurts the vulnerable most.
Albanese’s ‘great’ call with Trump turned out to be a dud, so why can’t Dutton capitalise?
The Prime Minister’s failure to get an Australian exemption from American steel and aluminium tariffs is emblematic of his all talk, no action style, writes James Morrow.
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Anthony Albanese’s pitch to avoid Donald Trump’s tariffs is simple: we are not ripping anyone off. The President appears to have listened, but the PM has not convinced him yet.