Escape From New York

I lived in New York City in the last half of the Rudy Giuliani mayoralty. It was a glorious city. If only I had a dollar for every conversation I had with someone that started, “I’m a liberal, but…,” and then went on to praise Giuliani for cleaning up the city and making it livable again. A main part of Giuliani’s strategy was the so-called “broken windows” theory: the idea that tolerating relatively minor quality-of-life crimes signaled to criminals that the people of the city did not care about defending order, and thus invited more serious crime.

Well, as with the proverbial dogs that return to their own vomit, New York City voters have broken definitively with Giuliani-era maxims. The newly elected Manhattan district attorney, a wokester named Alvin Bragg, has announced that his officer will cease seeking prison time for all but a handful of extreme offenses. No kidding — check out the memo. Excerpt:

The new DA is also not going to prosecute certain other crimes. Fare jumpers, hookers, trespassers and others — it’s your city now, baby!

What if the city and the state pass laws demanding prison time for certain offenses? Can the DA just ignore the law? Is this even permitted in our democracy?

The violent crime rate in NYC is soaring now, but voters, in their infinite wisdom, elected a soft-on-crime District Attorney (who depended on George Soros money to run his campaign). Bragg did not hide his soft-on-crime positions during the race; New York voters knew what they were getting with him. Now NYC joins other progressive DA cities like Chicago, San Francisco, and Philadelphia, all of which are overrun by violent crime.

I remember thinking, after living for several years in New York City, how the people there had seen what good government, including strong policing, could do to turn around a city that was once considered a national basket case, and that they would never, ever return to the Bad Old Days.

via GIPHY

The post Escape From New York appeared first on The American Conservative.