Added up, NYC is ‘15 Buffalos’
Don’t forget evil that took Kyhara
ALL the usual suspects joined President Biden in Buffalo Tuesday to mourn the victims of last weekend’s mass murder there. But did they also have a thought for Kyhara Tay — at 11 years of age the latest victim of New York City’s slowmotion slaughter of the innocents?
Biden termed the Buffalo massacre a “despicable act . . . motivated by a hateful and perverse ideology,” and while he surely should have added race-obsessed mental illness to his diagnosis, Tuesday wasn’t the time to parse words.
What happened in Buffalo Saturday was evil, pure and simple. But so, too, was the murder Monday of Kyhara Tay of The Bronx, struck down by a bullet fired at someone else by a gunman riding an electric scooter a full city block away.
Her death, while lacking Buffalo’s high drama and potential political significance, was no less tragic. Plus, truth to tell, it likely was more preventable.
Biden was surrounded by New York Democrats while in Buffalo — Gov. Hochul, Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, and the leaders of the veto-proof Albany
Legislature among them. This isn’t to make a partisan point, but simply to state the obvious: The party has had the state in a policy hammerlock for years now, and it needs to be held accountable for its mistakes.
And few have been more consequential than the insanely wrongheaded criminal justice “reforms” of 2019. Combined with the Bill de Blasio administration’s public-safety fecklessness following 2020’s George Floyd riots, they have rendered city streets increasingly unsafe. Make that murderously unsafe; surely Kyhara Tay’s family wouldn’t argue.
Adams to Albany
And neither would Mayor Adams. After the shooting, “I went to the hospital and prayed with them,” he said. “The doctors stated that they were going to work on her throughout the night.”
But soon after, he said, “we lost her.”
Lost her to a soul-dead shooter on a scooter — to a fellow with no more respect for human life than the Buffalo gunman but who might have been deterred by more vigorous law enforcement in New York City.
To that end, Adams went to Albany Tuesday with a clear message: I’ll refocus the NYPD on basics, if you recalibrate New York’s bail and criminal-procedure laws — and together we will help make New York a safer place for 11-year-olds on Bronx sidewalks.
Children 10% of vics
Certainly the need for action is real. At least 40 children and teenagers have been shot so far this year — roughly 10% of the city’s firearms victims — and there’s no evidence of a decline from last year’s total of 138.
Doubtless some of the teens were complicit in their own injuries — gang violence is endemic in New York. But that doesn’t undercut the mayor’s message in the least; he’s already focusing on gangs, but he needs help.
And while several of the city’s DAs could be doing much more, it remains that only Albany can give the mayor what he needs: a reasonable reappraisal of the 2019 penal law changes — followed by a swift reform of those “reforms.”
Again, Tuesday’s focus was on Buffalo, correctly. But it remains that this year there have been at least 150 murders in New York City this year — or 15 Buffalos. This is a 20% increase from midMay 2020. Which, in turn, was the first year following Albany’s penal-code mischief. Correlation shouldn’t be confused with causation, they say. But Eric Adams thinks there’s a connection. It’s his city that is suffering and he wants action. He should get it, without delay.