Helpless People in Lawless City

Changing of the management guard is often times cause for a celebration. My college newspaper was no different and every spring we hosted a banquet for that year’s retiring editorial board. “Banquet” was really a fancy way of saying that we shelled out a few bucks at the hotel across the street from campus for a room with non-paper tablecloths and chicken sandwiches on decent china. The break from the brutalist concrete of the student center was welcome, and the relaxing atmosphere kept the stories flowing. The photo editor put together a slide show (a time long before any fourth grader could whip up a multi-media PowerPoint) and popped a cassette tape into a boom box he had brought along. The strains of “Dirty Laundry” started up, with a predictable groan from all in the room. The outgoing editor-in-chief looked dour, a Serious Journalist who would go on to do Serious Journalist Things, and all I could hear him quietly mutter was, “I hate that song.”

35 years after that lunch, Don Henley seems almost quaint in poking fun at the fourth estate. Long before predicting that bubble-headed-bleach-blonds and innuendo would rule the airwaves, there was the standby tabloid mantra, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Unfortunately for New York City, there is so much blood on the streets it’s hard to know what story would start the day’s coverage. Only the vintage New York Post headline, featured on a long-ago opening credit of Saturday Night Live, captures what is going on: “Mayhem In The Street.”

Starting with the Covid populace imprisonment to the George Floyd protests, property crime progressed from petty theft to pretty well-well run theft rings. But after that, the wheels have fallen off the axle of law and order. We are at a point now that shooting deaths and hospitalizations outnumber Covid cases.

How the hell did we get here?

Nine shot last Sunday.

15 shot over 15 hours the previous weekend. Three in 15 minutes.

A six year-old girl runs for her life as her father is shot next to her in broad daylight as they crossed the street. The father dies.

A one year-old is shot in the park at a family picnic, the victim of a stray bullet. The Mayor visited the grieving family. The Police Commissioner visited the grieving family. Presumably, like any high profile case on the show Law & Order, the Chief of D’s [Detectives] was on the phone to the precinct to establish how important it was to crack this case.

The NYPD’s Chief of Patrol was one of three officers hurt trying to break up a melee.

On. And on. And on.

But wait, shouldn’t we all be safe with the city and state having, depending on how you look at it, the toughest gun laws in the nation? Now Chicago and Washington, D.C. could also argue that they have the toughest gun control laws as well. Chicago and Washington, D.C., by absolute numbers for the former and percentage by the latter, are in even worse shape than New York City.

So really, how the hell did we get here?

Blame lies across a land so large it could almost cover all of blood splattered on the sidewalks. Responsibility and action are, unsurprisingly, in shorter supply than hope for a Covid vaccine.

Our Governor was “concerned,” calling the violence “horrific.” Beyond that no plan of action to end this scourge has been forthcoming. Our insipid Mayor once again shunned any responsibility, blaming the Courts for closing up shop during the pandemic. The Court system, being a government entity, had plenty of statistics to back up their rebuttal that tens of thousands of cases had been processed during Covid. Unfortunately, no matter how efficiently the Courts work, New York’s new bail laws don’t just create a revolving door for criminals but hand out a permanent get out of jail card that is the envy of this real-life Monopoly game. Naturally the Mayor endorsed these “criminal justice reforms” and the Governor gleefully signed them into law. The effect has been to let out repeat offenders so that they could go out and repeat again, including the alleged attacker of the NYPD’s Chief of Patrol.

Perhaps disbanding the NYPD’s “anti-crime” unit, in order to appease the non-law abiding, curfew-breaking Floyd rioters, was the tipping point. Maybe, maybe not. I’ve never been a fan of the unit’s name, as I can’t imagine there is a companion “for-crime” unit. But what was the purpose of the group? Getting the guns off the street that the mighty cloak of the law was supposed to shield us from in the first place.

And for the rest of us, really almost every every person in the city, who are just trying to live our lives? What is the message our “leaders” give us?

Kick 'em when they're up. Kick 'em when they're down.

© 2020 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.