History rhymes, even on crime
The last time the city had an apparently uncontrollable problem with gun violence, a massive budget hole deficit and a mayor who endlessly pleaded for help that wasn’t coming from Republicans in Washington while holding off on making hard decisions within his own power, New Yorkers ended up replacing that mayor with the guy who’s been seen lately raving, wild-eyed with hair dye dripping down his face, about a supposed massive conspiracy by the “Democrat cities” to steal the election that judges keep laughing out of their courtrooms.
The people talking about how Rudy Giuliani, who’s been fabricating fraud fantasies since he first ran for office in 1989, has always been this guy have at least a half a point. But they might want to stop and ask why it is that New Yorkers elected him mayor, and then handily reelected him.
While the NYPD doesn’t track innocent bystanders as a category, the headlines have been full of stories lately about people who were not the intended victim: An infant in a stroller at a cookout in Brooklyn. A little girl outside a supermarket in Harlem. A mom looking out her family’s apartment window after hearing gunshots in Queens. A woman in an apartment lobby in Staten Island.
It’s been overshadowed by the 25,000 lives taken here by the pandemic, but the number of shooting victims is up 101.2% this year, to 1,730 people through November from 860 last year, with almost all of that increase coming in the last six months. It’s an unprecedented rate of increase, albeit from a relatively low starting number by historical standards, that Mayor de Blasio has repeatedly attributed to a “perfect storm” of circumstances around the virus as “everything came unglued.” He didn’t mention this summer’s George Floyd and policing protests as part of that storm, or account for why shootings would go up during it, as they have in other cities, even as most other crimes have mostly gone down.
Speaking of storms, New York City is looking at something like a $9 billion revenue shortfall over the next two years. The state is looking at a $16 billion hole, meaning it’s not going to be able to help the city but rather is going to reduce spending on us and extract more from us. That’s not to mention the MTA’s $16 billion hole over the next four years. The unemployment rate in the city is 16%, twice the national average. Infection and hospitalization numbers are rising again. Even as rents are finally sagging, an eviction crisis is looming, held off for now by a series of makeshift executive orders intended to delay what looks to be inevitable.
It’s no sure thing that 2021 is going to be any easier, even if Gov. Cuomo doesn’t swoop in and use the Financial Control Board that’s an artifact of the city’s flirtation with bankruptcy in the 1970s to exercise still more control over the city, and impose austerity on whoever the next mayor turns out to be. After decades in which the city kept moving in one direction — richer, safer and more orderly — we may really be turned around now, with our “leaders” looking out from the stern.
Even as the well-off and more easily mobile have left New York and especially Manhattan, the political conversation here has been preserved in amber since February — all talk about policing reform, higher taxes and fending off gentrification.
The space between reality as people are experiencing it and reality as the political class is describing it feels as wide as at any time I can remember. It’s possible that gap won’t matter in a Democratic primary, and that the general election will be an afterthought again in our overwhelmingly Democratic city. That a new breed of politicians will manage through skill or circumstance to get better results from the same root cause medicines that liberals have been prescribing for five decades as an answer to our social ills.
It’s possible that the power of the police unions — who are on the political ropes here in a way they haven’t been since David Dinkins won his fight to start the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which has been losing its fight to actually review police conduct ever since — are finally about to be broken. That new progressive pols really will find a way to pour billions into needed services and start really treating homelessness, addiction and mental illness as public health rather than policing issues. That the rise in shootings really is just a symptom of this very sick year, and will just end.
But we’re just eight years removed from 20 years of non-Democratic mayors running our overwhelmingly Democratic city, and we may not be so many years away from the sort of crises that could get us there again.