Hochul’s Subway Stunt Is Pure Politics

THINK of it as the unbearable lightness of being Kathy. This would be the latest stunt from the Hochul administration — the deployment of National Guard troops to address subway crime, a problem Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his anti-crime brain trust solved a generation ago.

Oh, for sure, not completely. As long as there are criminals, there will be subway crime.

But it was up 45% year-on-year in January, which is intolerable in an election year. Just ask any politician (save maybe AOC).

Enter Krazy Kat — and 750 uniformed National Guard soldiers with orders to search straphangers’ bags for weapons and other dangerous stuff.

That is to say, to do what amounts to stop-and-frisk — the prophylactic strategy developed by Giuliani and continued by Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Criminals, fearful of being busted with a gun, began to leave the heat at home, and violent crime dropped like a rock down a well.

And not just on the subways: Armed muggers take the trains to work, too.

But the practice gave progressives and their fellow travelers the fainting fantods, so it was abandoned. Now here we are in 2024 with transit crime rates through the roof and felons free to slash conductors, beat platform buskers and kick straphangers to railbeds — leaving riders everywhere in fearful anticipation of an inevitable next outrage.

But you can be sure of one thing: Nothing broadcasts panic more loudly than uniformed soldiers publicly performing duties reserved by custom and common sense to civilian police agencies.

Or maybe not panic; maybe impotence is the word.

Having lost the will to protect life, limb and personal property by traditional means — that is, by enforcing the penal and criminal-procedure codes — New York now takes tentative steps toward overtly militarized policing.

This is not the same thing as local police departments adopting military-style gear and tactics; that’s a regrettable, but not unreasonable, response to real-world dangers.

This is uniformed military personnel engaged in law enforcement.

Now, Hochul may not understand the issue because she doesn’t seem to understand much, but Americans have seen military involvement in domestic policing as a threat to civil liberties at least since the post-Civil War Reconstruction period — and they take great care to avoid it.

To be sure, there’s a difference between the Regular Army and the National Guard, and troops often are deployed for natural disasters and in response to events like 9/11.

But there is no emergency. A crisis, yes, but no emergency.

What Hochul has done here is, again, a political stunt — undertaken to divert attention from her unwillingness to confront the core problem: the hammerlock crimetolerant progressivism has on public policy in New York.

The progs unraveled the Giuliani-Bloomberg public-safety restoration, slowly and with deliberation delivering New York to its current chaotic state.

The challenge now before Hochul is to reverse the reversal — a task requiring courage, insight, sound judgment and a willingness to spend precious political capital if it’s to be successful.

Fat chance.

So New Yorkers must content themselves with theatrics rather than safe public transit — in this case, with an empty, ill-considered effort to resuscitate a once-successful policy killed by people Kathy Hochul is afraid to confront.

Hazard a guess as to how it works out.