Poltroon Posse
NY’s biggest recovery obstacle: its leadership
SO New York stopped prosecuting turnstile jumpers, and now folks are smashing windows in the subways. Has there ever been a more delicious vindication of a venerable policing policy than that?
The theory was simple enough: Fix one broken window in a public space, and your work is done. Ignore it, and soon enough, you have more broken windows. Many more.
Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance decided in 2018 to stop prosecuting fare-evaders — it seems they were being targeted disproportionately, compared to non-fare-evaders — and suddenly bad things began to happen. This includes, most recently, several hundred thousand dollars worth of deliberately smashed subway-car windows.
The irony is obvious: Does anybody think the windowsmashers actually pay their way into the system? But the trend is ominous. Vance’s refusal to enforce the fare-evasion law isn’t at all surprising — he’s the fellow who had to be shamed into prosecuting Harvey Weinstein, after all. But it’s worse than that: He’s feckless — but he isn’t unique.
The Big Apple may well make a respectable post-pandemic recovery; it wouldn’t be wise to bet against that. But the city isn’t going to get there soon with its present political class.
Vance is a case study. But the fact is, right now, the Empire State is led — if that’s the proper word — by a posse of knaves, pickpockets and poltroons.
Gov. Cuomo is making googoo eyes at 2024, but clearly he also is paralyzed by his coronavirus nursing-home debacle. Nothing risky is going to happen for the rest of his watch. Now Mayor de Blasio, as irresolute as ever, says he sees re-opening restaurants as a class-struggle issue, of all things, and so that’s not a priority for him.
The result is that one can have a stack of pancakes indoors in Nassau County, but not a couple of hundred yards to the west in Queens — to say nothing of in Manhattan’s central business district. Clearly the road to recovery is not paved with absurdities of this sort.
And that’s not the worst of it. New York City’s sidewalks have fresh blood spatters each morning, and its hospital emergency rooms fresh gunshot cases each night, and all Police Commissioner Dermot Shea says is that talk of an NYPD slowdown makes him angry.
As well it should — except that the charge is essentially true. Individuals cops may be working harder than ever, largely because there are substantially fewer of them. But arrests in the city are down more than 40 percent from a year ago, and both murder and shootings are dramatically up — the latter being a direct result of politically driven changes in specific NYPD anti-gun strategies.
This has had entirely predictable results, as anybody who has been paying any attention knows all too well. Except, apparently, Shea.
“We need to take a look at where we are right now,” he says, “because this, I think we would all agree, is not really working.”
Why yes, we would indeed all agree on that. Especially the not working part.
And, also, that Shea is no doubt dissembling here, because the truth would cost him his job — namely, that New York City has too many well-armed, vicious gangbangers shooting each other and innocent bystanders, because that’s the course the city has chosen.
The shooting crisis and the MTA’s literal broken-windows problem reside on different planes of seriousness. But they have at least this much in common: They both reflect a shocking, across-the-board loss of vision, wisdom and will among the elected leadership.
Has anyone, from Cuomo on down, had anything realistic to say about Gotham’s metastasizing violence epidemic? Or about the unraveling of hard-won social compromises that helped haul New York out of a dystopian sinkhole 25 years ago, and then kept city streets clean, safe and civil? Until now?
Of course not. Not a peep. Recovery?
It’s six months into the pandemic and a tsunami is cresting over New York’s public finances. Unemployment in the city exceeds 20 percent. Schools are about to open, and there is no plan. Yet Cuomo and de Blasio, forever entangled in their juvenile rivalries, can’t even agree to talk about agreeing — about anything.
Broken subway windows may not seem like much, given all that, but they matter. It’s what happens when the adults leave the room. Thus, New York’s most critical need right now is more grown-ups in high places.