Chicago gets a lot of digital ink — all of it well earned — for its lack of civility and brotherly love under Democrat leadership for the last ninety-plus years. Now, under the hard-left gun rights-hating “leadership” of Bill de Blasio and now Eric Adams, New York City is falling into ruin too.
But at least Chicago residents don’t have to worry about a good guy carrying a gun on the subways.
But that’s because Chicago has fewer subways.
In the last couple of days, Chicago had the case of a security guard who worked high profile events steal a man’s Pepsi while riding on a CTA train, then shoot the man dead when he objected to being robbed. All of that happened in front of horrified bystanders.
To that, New York City said hold my beer and watch this. There’s a new video out of urban youths fighting on a subway train and one of them, a 15-year-old, is shot dead right there.
Video shows chaos on subway as 15-year-old is shot and killed https://t.co/EQsaATWtHx pic.twitter.com/gXJJiVIqvo
— New York Post (@nypost) October 22, 2022
“But how could that be?” you ask. After all, pretty much all of New York City is a “sensitive” location – otherwise known as a “gun-free” zone. Kinda like Chicago.
Oops, that’s right. That “gun-free” silliness was only ever for the law-abiding. It never has and never will apply to criminals, gang-bangers, or the politically connected.
Like Chicago, after having its budget slashed, the NYPD has faced a flood of retirements and others just quitting. In fact, 4000 of New York’s finest will likely retire or otherwise separate from the department this year. That’s almost half-again more than last year’s impressive numbers. The New York Post has that as well . . .
The NYPD is on pace to see more than 4,000 cops retire or resign this year – the most since the post-9/11 exodus, data obtained by The Post show.
Pension fund figures reveal 3,054 officers have filed to leave the department so far this year — 42% more than the 2,155 who exited at the same time last year through Sept. 30.
The NYPD has worked for over five years without a new contract, and it’s expected to see perhaps as many as 2000 additional retirements if a new contract is approved soon.
What does that mean for the cops who remain? Can you spell mandatory overtime?
See again the New York Post . . .
Gov. Hochul and Mayor Adams said Saturday they will flood the city’s crime-ravaged subway system with more cops and ramp up the installation of additional surveillance cameras.
Their “Cops, Cameras, Care” initiative — announced Saturday at Grand Central Terminal just over two weeks before Hochul tries to retain her seat on Election Day – includes the state-run MTA Police Department and the NYPD joining forces to add 1,200 extra overtime shifts daily to watch over the subway system.
This, they said, would translate into about 10,000 extra hours of cops patrolling subways and that New Yorkers would soon see officers covering subway platforms on extended tours daily in at least 300 stations during peak hours.
Ten thousand extra hours only translates into 1250 8-hour shifts, or less than two weeks to have an extra 20 cops per shift keeping an eye on NYC’s massive 700-plus miles of subway system.
The @NYCMayor and @GovKathyHochul are joining forces to announce “cops, cameras, care”— a new initiative aimed at improving safety on the subways: MTA and NYPD officers will surge system with 1,200 shifts every day, officers present at more than 300 stations during peak hours. pic.twitter.com/UTJvgzBuJv
— Gloria Pazmino (@GloriaPazmino) October 22, 2022
What will 4,000 fewer cops working the streets mean? If you think fewer cops means bucolic streets, then bless your heart. Good luck with that.
Meanwhile, a great piece came out today at The American Spectator on so-called “Weaponized Government Failure.” In it, Scott McKay puts forth his theory that Democrat political leaders intentionally drive the middle class away with lousy services and high taxes to nudge the pesky middle class to move out of their Democrat-controlled cities.
Let’s call it Weaponized Governmental Failure. It’s the single most explicative factor in the breakdown of American political consensus in the 21st century, even though it’s been around since the latter part of the 20th century.
The simple definition of Weaponized Governmental Failure is this: it’s the deliberate refusal to perform the basic tasks of urban governance for a specific political purpose.
The crime and the graft and the potholes and the bad drainage, not to mention the spotty trash collection or nonexistent snow shoveling, aren’t incompetence. In fact, none of what you see in the American public sector is incompetence. The people responsible for it are quite highly educated and well-trained in their craft. You just need to understand what their craft is.
It’s a choice to do a poor job with the more mundane tasks of running a city, and an educated and purposeful choice at that. If you do those things effectively, after all, what you will get is middle-class voters moving in. Middle-class voters tend to choose to live in places where they can expect to get actual value out of their tax dollars — good roads, safe streets, functional drainage, decent schools, a friendly business climate, and a growing economy, among other things — and those things are hard to produce when you govern the way the Left does.
Put a different way, middle-class voters are a pain in the ass.
Those pesky voters who would hold politicians accountable aren’t especially welcome.
For a Landrieu, or a Kwame Kilpatrick, Marion Barry, Bill de Blasio, or Lori Lightfoot, it is no great loss if those middle-class voters declare themselves fed up and decamp to the suburbs. Their exodus simply makes for an electorate that is a lot less demanding and easier to control.
That “white flight” is a feature. It’s not a bug. And it isn’t all that white either. Those suburbs the folks are leaving for? Their minority population share usually increases as their population does. Why do you think that is? Simple: the black middle class has no more use for these woke urban Democrats than the white middle class does.
And it’s quite a mutual sentiment, to be sure.
Drive out the pesky middle class and you’re left with overwhelmingly Democrat-voting masses of poor residents who are dependent on social services. What’s more, if you keep them disarmed and helpless, they’re be even more dependent upon government for their safety and security as well.
The urban socialist Left wants a manageably small core of rich residents and a teeming mass of poor ones, and nothing in between. That’s what Weaponized Governmental Failure produces, and it’s a wide-scale success. New Orleans votes 90 percent Democrat. Philadelphia is 80 percent Democrat. Chicago is 85 percent. Los Angeles? Seventy-one percent. None of those cities will have a Republican mayor or city council again, or at least not in the foreseeable future.
Because there are very few middle-class voters left in the cities.
Some even say this is done on purpose by Democrat political leaders to facilitate the pesky middle class to leave the city, leaving behind the easier to control and manipulate densely packed low income residents.
Welcome to New York City. Like Chicago, it’s hemorrhaging productive residents as they flee the crime-ridden cesspool of high taxes and lousy public services.
The more middle-class voters you drive out of the city, and the fewer middle-class voters your public school system creates, the more pliable the electorate becomes.
A pliable electorate is one you can rule forever without successfully governing.
They rule over a ruin, but they rule.
And the Democrat Party barely exists outside of the ruins those urban machines produce. Check out any county-by-country or congressional district-by-congressional district electoral map from the 2016 or 2020 presidential elections, and what you’ll see is a few islands of blue in a sea of red. Even in blue states like Washington, Oregon, Illinois, and Minnesota most of the territory is solidly Republican; it’s the dense population of Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis, and the other big cities that always, or at least often, overwhelms Republican votes in the suburbs, exurbs, and small towns.
Democrats rule the ruins in decaying, deep blue urban centers, but they still rule. It also goes for small cities like poverty-stricken Braddock, Pennsylvania, a town thrust onto the world stage with its former mayor John Fetterman who’s running for the US Senate. But the problem is more pronounced in major metro centers like New York City and Chicago.