When President Donald Trump proposed using the military to quell the violent riots tearing up our country in 2020, the Left portrayed it as an intolerable authoritarian instinct. But now National Guard troops are on New York City subways to help maintain order — courtesy of left-wing governor Kathy Hochul — and what’s the reaction?
Barely a peep.
Critics may say it’s not hard understanding why the Guard, along with NYS troopers, are being recruited to help the New York Police Department do the job the latter used to do alone:
The Left’s war on the police has caused the NYPD’s numbers to shrink along with its morale.
In fact, the department lost approximately 3,000 officers last year, and currently sees an average of 200 a month quitting the force. Consequently, the corps has shrunk from a 2000 high of 40,285 officers to just under 34,000 (as of one year ago) — all while NYC’s population increased markedly.
Other cities have also experienced law-enforcement officer shortages. For instance, Pittsburgh just announced that owing to its “seriously understaffed force,” it “will no longer respond to certain calls labeled ‘in-progress emergencies,’ such as harassment, theft, and burglary alarms,” reports American Military News.
Of course, if you wanted to ultimately federalize the police, rendering them incapable of doing their jobs would be the first step.
WREG-TV Memphis reports on Hochul’s plans:
Hundreds of New York National Guard members will be heading to the New York City subway system, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Wednesday [3/6]. That’s just one part of a series of changes coming to the city’s trains after a string of high-profile crimes across the New York City subway system — including two back-to-back shootings that killed two people in the Bronx and a slashing in Brooklyn.
Hochul, a Democrat, said she will deploy 750 members of the National Guard to the subways to assist the New York Police Department with bag searches at entrances to busy train stations.
“For people who are thinking about bringing a gun or knife on the subway, at least this creates a deterrent effect. They might be thinking, ‘You know what, it just may just not be worth it because I listened to the mayor and I listened to the governor and they have a lot more people who are going to be checking my bags,’” Hochul said at a news conference.
The deployment of the National Guard would bolster an enhanced presence of NYPD officers in the subway system. The governor said she will also send 250 state troopers and police officers from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a state agency, to help with the bag searches.
Below is a video report on the story.
All this said, some are objecting to Hochul’s plan. For example, why “not resume allowing the local police to do their job?” asks American Thinker’s Pamela Garber. “Why not let judges do their jobs by ending bail reform? Why does local crime need to be outsourced to the National Guard when it had been handled effectively at the local level in years past?”
Of course, the answer is that left-wing demagogues handcuffed the police, particularly in the 2020 George Floyd riots’ wake.
But Garber addresses this, with an analogy:
The National Guard is like Amazon, the big savior who surpasses all competition. The local police are like small businesses, left out in the cold and replaced by Amazon. And the local government is like a parent with Munchausen syndrome by proxy. The Munchausen parent creates his child’s illness; fosters it; and, instead of plain parenting, gets the Amazonesque government to take control.
Like a small business, the local police are being pushed aside by the bigger, supposedly more capable National Guard. And who created this problem of criminals being out and about in high volume and conditioned to getting a “never go to jail and stay free” card? Now that the Munchausen government can solve crime in place of local police, will we ever get our police presence back at the local level? And where does the outsourcing of our problems stop?
In truth, minimizing crime isn’t rocket science. For starters, and as NYC mayor Eric Adams (who’s generally a cause of the woes) correctly pointed out, “We have a recidivist problem. Just 38 people who were arrested for assaulting just transit workers … committed 1,126 crimes in our city.”
Actually, though, every criminal-coddling jurisdiction has a recidivism problem. As the DOJ related in 2016, “A very small fraction of individuals who commit crimes — about 2 to 5 percent — are responsible for 50 percent or more of crimes.”
In other words, locking up the small number of habitual offenders eliminates most crime immediately. Yet this won’t happen if George Soros-appointed prosecutors effect revolving-door “justice.”
History is instructive, too, as the necessary crime remedies have been effected before — in NYC itself. That is, the metropolis was once more dangerous than today. Yet policies embraced decades ago by then-major Rudolph Giuliani changed this, transforming the Big Apple from a murder capital recording 2,262 homicides in 1990 to a remarkably safe big city with, in its best subsequent year, fewer than 300 killings. I examined this in the 2022 New American essay “How NYC Won the War on Crime.”
Of course, though, a prerequisite for winning a war on crime is wanting to. And observing many of our leaders, some could conclude that crime is the war they’re waging on the people.
