Ah, the joys of a sanctuary City run by a Democrat in Repub clothing:
REVENGE OF THE BAD OLD DAYS
FIXING THE LITTLE THINGS MADE NEW YORK CITY SAFE. THEY'RE STARTING TO BREAK AGAIN.
by JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN, realclearpolitics.com
June 28, 2008
Does it feel some days as if New York-- wealthy, successful, seemingly at the top of the world -- is slipping back into the bad old days of crime, noise, dirt, rudeness? Like pentimento rising from an old canvas, the traces of New York's previous misery are appearing on the streets and in the subways -- graffiti, aggressive panhandling, open drug dealing, filthy public areas, ear--splitting noise, screeching sirens, a sense of disorder we thought was gone. It's not "Soylent Green" again, but the old Hollywood sense of lawless New York is rearing its ugly head.
Worse, something menacing seems to be happening with violent crime. The newspapers have been filled recently with stories about horribly vicious cases -- the trial, for example, that ended last week in a 44--count guilty verdict against the man accused of the brutal rape and torture of a Columbia University student living in Hamilton Heights, a seemingly safe neighborhood.
Then there was the bicyclist, said to live in a flophouse in Greenpoint, who plunged a knife into a woman in Long Island City for no apparent reason. The assailant had served nine years in prison for random stabbings in 1994. That date should bring New Yorkers up short, since things were already starting to turn around for us then. Psychotic attackers are back in our lives -- and also, apparently, living at public expense in shelters.
Is this current violence an aberration? Or is it something that will prove to be more routine and serious? Is this an example of what Jeremy Travis, the president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, calls the problem of prison re--entry: They all come back?
Could it all come back?
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The NYPD's CompStat data indeed show upticks in violent crime since last year. The city has had 238 murders so far this year (as of last Sunday), up 7.6 percent from 221 last year, and 664 rapes, up 6.2 percent.
Should we be worried? Queens Councilmember Peter Vallone, chair of the council's Public Safety Committee, thinks so. "We're seeing the beginnings of a return to the bad old days," he says. "We should never forget that we're a thousand percent better off now than we were in 1991, when we had only 31,000 police officers on the street, and we made a decision, through the Safe Cities program, to increase that number by 10,000. |
