The face masks many Covid ritualists still wear may not filter out viruses too well, but they do stop authorities from filtering out different pathogens: criminals.
So warned New York City mayor Eric Adams recently when, in perhaps the ultimate Captain Obvious moment, he told Big Apple shop owners Monday that they should “not allow people to enter the store without taking off their face mask” — because it makes it impossible for police to identify shoplifters.
Ironically, Adams is the man who not even a year ago went to court to try to perpetuate NYC school mask mandates for children under five years old. This itself is a moral crime because masking children is more dangerous for them than the coronavirus ever was, as ex-child-mask advocate and CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen learned after masking caused her young son developmental problems.
What type of developmental problems cause prominent politicians and medical figures to apprehend the obvious only years too late has not been reported. As for Adams’s recent revelation, however, Business Insider informs:
“Do not allow people to enter the store without taking off their face masks,” Adams told a local radio station Monday. “When you see these mask-wearing people, it’s not about being fearful of a pandemic. (They’re) fearful of the police catching (them) for their misdeeds.”
Adams said that stores need to be able to use technologies to “identify those shoplifters and those who have committed serious crimes,” but that face masks — an item that has become commonplace, albeit decreasingly so, due to the coronavirus pandemic — make it hard to do so. He added that once in the store, shoppers can feel free to wear face masks.
Adams’ comments come as retailers have sounded the alarms about above-average theft rates for months. Walmart President and CEO Doug McMillon said in December 2022 that stores would close and prices would rise if theft levels did not drop.
As to these levels, NPR writes that as NPR member Gothamist reports, “Robberies spiked in New York City last year, with 17,411 reported last year, compared to 13,831 in 2021, according to NYPD data. Before that, the number of reported robberies hadn’t exceeded 17,000 since 2013.”
Providing an example of what masking folly has wrought, NPR tells us that one “masked man has been connected to at least four recent robbery cases across several boroughs, including a holdup that resulted in a clerk’s death.”
“In each robbery, Assistant Chief Joseph Kenny of the NYPD’s detective bureau said, ‘The perpetrator arrived on the scene driving a dark-colored scooter, wearing a white full-bodied Tyvek suit and a dark-colored face mask,’” the outlet continued.
Yet at a Monday news conference, reporters pushed back against the mayor’s unmasking advisory, asking “if it was realistic to expect someone who intended to rob a store to remove their mask as they go inside,” NPR also relates. “‘The whole mask thing, in this case, it seems kind of silly,’ said journalist Kemberly Richardson of ABC 7.”
NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, however, said that the “mask-removal policy could prove particularly effective … in stores that have installed buzzers to grant customers’ access,” as NPR puts it.
While this is true, the reporters’ point is well taken. I long ago noted that the mask mandates would be a boon to miscreants. Why, many localities had at one time enacted laws against public mask-wearing in certain contexts precisely because it facilitates crime.
In fact, prior to the Covid fiasco, donning a mask outside on any day but Halloween was immediate cause for suspicion; hence, criminals would be reluctant to tacitly identify themselves by wearing one regularly. This fear is gone because of what actually is the wider problem: Mask-wearing normalization.
The kicker is that as even the left-wing New York Times admitted last month, “States with mask mandates fared no better against Covid than those without.” When “it comes to the population-level benefits of masking, the verdict is in: Mask mandates were a bust.”
Yet can one un-ring this bell? People are creatures of habit, reluctant to depart from the status quo, and many Americans — especially where crime is rampant, big cities — do and will continue donning masks. They have their reasons, too.
Some may actually believe masks reduce their chances of contracting any airborne respiratory disease. There also was the study finding that “unattractive people” are more likely to face-diaper-up.
And, for sure, certain people can have strong psychological reasons for embracing the behavior. An extremely introverted individual with social anxiety, for example, may find in a mask a comforting firewall against gratuitous social interaction.
What’s more, there are politically correct legal impediments to Adams’s masks-off measure. That is, “Any rule that would force immunocompromised people to remove their face masks would violate the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and the New York State Human Rights Law,” NPR informs.
Of course, if Adams really is serious about suppressing illegality, all he need do is embrace Rudolph Giuliani’s 1990s policies. As I related last year in “How NYC Won the War on Crime,” they transformed a crime-ridden Big Apple into “the safest large city in the nation” and authored what a law professor called “one of the most remarkable stories in the history of urban crime.”
If Mayor Adams replicated this miracle, he’d ensure his reelection and, despite his many failings, secure his place as one of American politics’ true heroes.
