“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” Or maybe Bill de Blasio could just say, “What, me worry?” But what the former Sandinista supporter and now esteemed New York City mayor did say, on Wednesday, as Big Apple crime surges, is that “for seven years, we have made this city safer and safer.”
To prove this wasn’t just a momentary loss of sanity, de Blasio the next day followed up by boasting that “we now have fewer people in our jails than any time since WWII, and we are safer for it and better for it.”
For the record, shootings last week soared 253 percent over the same 2019 week; burglaries and rapes are up, too.
This “violence exploded across the city after the NYPD disbanded its anti-crime unit of plainclothes cops on June 15,” reported the New York Post July 4. And with the police handcuffed, harassed, and disheartened, “de-policing” is the order of the day.
As the Daily News informs, “‘The de Blasio administration and City Council have both been clear: reduce arrests, reduce summonses,’ the [police] unions said in a statement.” This all translates into, “Reduce safety.”
Not for Bolshevik Bill, though. After all, everything can seem like peaches and cream, wine and roses when ensconced in a cocoon of bodyguards. And thus it was on Wednesday that de Blasio, in an event he calls “Media Availability,” made the “for seven years, we have made this city safer and safer” comment (video below; relevant portion begins at 2:26).
It was the next day, while standing behind a lectern emblazoned with the words “Black Lives Matter,” that the mayor doubled down, uttering the “We now have fewer people in our jails than any time since WWII, and we are safer for it and better for it” line (video below).
Of course, if de Blasio is taking a leaf out of former Obama attorney general Eric Holder’s book and believes there’s “a common cause that bonds” him with criminals, his “we are safer” comment makes some kind of sense (although it’s unlikely that even the thugs are safer).
Then again, the mayor does have one little “fact” around which to construct his rationalization: While shootings and murder are up, wrote the Daily News July 11, “overall crime is down by nearly 3% this year, NYPD data shows.”
Now, one could quip that murders will do that: You don’t report your wallet being stolen when you’re dead. The reality, though, isn’t funny at all:
Obviously, if police are reducing arrests and summonses’ issuance, less crime is recorded.
(Shootings and murders leave you with a body in the hospital or morgue and aren’t so easily hidden.)
Ex-Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake employed this technique in 2014, do note: Stop arresting people and “Voila!” — crime “drops” (sort of like a tree falling in a forest that no one hears).
Yet there’s more to it. As with how a stage-3 cancer patient may not seek bunion treatment, it’s common for residents of large, crime-ridden metropolises to not report minor crimes.
Having grown up in NYC, I speak from experience: We had a car battery, wall air conditioner and more than one bicycle stolen and a vehicle vandalized and never reported any of the thefts. All it would’ve meant, after all, was time wasted at a police station without the remotest chance of our property’s recovery. Big Apple authorities had (and have) bigger things to worry about.
Yet crime did drop precipitously under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who among other things applied the broken-window crime principle; this continued under Mayor Michael Bloomberg who, for all his flaws, didn’t tolerate street crime.
But now de Blasio seeks to defund the already-demoralized police. Consequently, cops “are quitting in droves, and nobody should blame them,” wrote the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin last month. “Would you risk your life to enforce the law under this mayor?”
“New York has had its share of corrupt and incompetent mayors,” Goodwin also stated, characterizing de Blasio, “but never has it had one who is both of those and also a lazy bum.”
So perhaps it’s not surprising that while running for the White House, a September 2019 presidential poll had de Blasio at zero percent support in New York City. Gotham residents increasingly consider the mayor the kind of man who lights up a room — when he leaves it. Term limits assure that he will leave, too, at 2021’s end.
Yet what also won’t be surprising, to those grasping man’s nature, is that NYC dwellers will elect another Democrat very much like him. It’s why German philosopher Georg Hegel observed, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.” And like the Titanic having backed up to hit the iceberg again, that is the tale of our sinking cities.
Photo of Mayor de.Blasio: AP Images
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
