No Fast Fixes on Crime
Gov. Hochul’s move to deploy 750 National Guard and 250 State Police into the subways sends a decent message: She’s no longer cowering before the loony left on crime, yay! But it doesn’t address the causes of rising crime underground (which aren’t remotely what the left pretends they are; more the exact opposite). Nor is it any permanent solution, no more than Mayor Adams’ vow to up NYPD patrols in the system.
Subway crime is up 13% over last year, with blood-chilling incidents piling up, with slashings, stabbings, shootings and pushings onto the tracks. So it’s reassuring to commuters that the gov’s sending some help; after all, she’s the same pol who a few years ago chose a “defund the police” fanatic as her lieutenant governor.
Yet she helped surge more enforcement into the system a year ago; it helped — but crime went back up after the surge ended.
And where will Adams’ added cops be pulled from? NYPD brass are stuck playing whack-a-mole — with crime popping back up in whatever area loses its patrols.
None of this addresses the recent laws that handcuff cops and guarantee revolving doors for perps; nor the feckless prosecutors and judges who err even further on the side of keeping menaces out of jail.
Hochul has announced that she won’t even try to make further fixes to the state’s botched criminal-justice reforms this year; the progressives who run the Legislature just won’t have it. And she’s already shown she won’t make soft-on-crime district attorneys like Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg do their jobs, or lose them: The internal-Democratic-Party politics aren’t good there, either.
She’s trying to show that her Democratic Party isn’t pro-crime, by sending in the Guard — hoping state voters won’t slam Dems in this fall’s elections as in 2022.
Democrats across blue America are reaping the whirlwind of years of shortsighted, far-left policies that have brought on out-ofcontrol crime and disorder. They’re only scrambling to “show they care” now because of the impending elections.
But the forces of crime and disorder weren’t let of some Pandora’s box in one fell swoop, and showy quick fixes won’t magically contain them again. Really turning the corner on crime requires undoing the disastrous decisions that got us here.