New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has long taken pride in calling the Big Apple the “safest big city in America.” But as one NYPD officer said, speaking on background to the New York Post, it’s time for Hizzoner to stop saying that. In what the media is correctly describing as “a grim milestone,” New York has now recorded more than 1,000 shootings for 2020 and there’s still a full four months to go. There are obviously a number of factors contributing to this dismal trend, but City Hall doesn’t show any signs of paying much more than lip service to the problem as yet. Is it any wonder that New Yorkers are fleeing at a rate that’s overwhelming the local U-Haul centers and moving companies?
The city surpassed 1,000 shootings for the year on Sunday, according to NYPD data, which also shows an average of nearly 10 people fell victim to gun violence each day over the last four weeks.
With four more months left in 2020, New York City logged 1,004 shootings as of Aug. 30, according to NYPD data released Monday. Last year, there had been just 537 by that time.
It is the first time the city has eclipsed the benchmark in gun violence since 2015, when 1,138 shootings were recorded for the entire year.
To put this dreadful number in context, last year there were a total of 772 shootings. For the entire year. We’re already ahead of that figure by more than 200. To be fair, 2019 was nothing to write home about either. Shootings and other violent crimes were already on the rise and had been for several years, though not at this level.
Also, for a full historical view, we’re still nowhere near the worst, darkest days that Gotham has seen. In 1990 there were more than 2,600 murders. The number of shootings was nearly triple that. So we’ve still got a long way to go before reaching the bottom of the barrel, but the numbers are clearly trending in the wrong direction and have been for a while now. The cops are making adjustments where they can under the current conditions, such as increasing the number of police on the streets on the weekends. But the City Council and City Hall are busy trying to defund the NYPD and trying to blame them for the ills of the Big Apple. So more and more cops are retiring or just quitting.
The fact is that Bill de Blasio has nothing to brag about when he talks about the safe conditions in New York City. He inherited a city with historically low crime rates from the mayors who preceded him. They drove those numbers down from the bad old days of the nineties by employing a broken windows policy of nipping crime in the bud and aggressively breaking up criminal activity wherever they found it. Since de Blasio took charge, the trends have all headed in the wrong direction.
The NYPD has been under siege since Bill de Blasio took charge. The cops famously turned their backs on the Mayor in large numbers when he showed up to speak at the funeral for an officer who fell in the line of duty. All of this was taking place long before the pandemic hit or the demonstrations and riots over alleged police brutality. Those things have no doubt accelerated the process, but the trouble was brewing long before that.
New York City is no longer the safest big city in America. It’s reverting to what it was in some darker times that we had thought (or at least hoped) were well behind us. But the toxic epidemic of socialism has spread throughout the five boroughs now. Even when de Blasio leaves office after this term is finished, New Yorkers will almost undoubtedly elect someone else just like him. And the cycle will continue until enough people wake up and realize that they’re getting exactly what they’ve been voting for. Of course, by then it will probably be a very different city than the one they grew up in.
