Posted on 12/29/2023 5:38:53 AM PST by MtnClimber
The man in the green hoodie wanted to show off his knife. The weapon he flicked open was a large foldaway with a curved blade, illegal in New York City, no matter its length; the setting for his performance was the uptown D train, going express from Columbus Circle to 125th Street. There was a full moon in the sky, and underground, as so often now, there were disturbances: fights broke out, insults were hurled, the air was thick with barely suppressed violence. Protests earlier that day had brought part of the metropolis to a standstill. A group of demonstrators, riled by the accidental death of a mentally ill homeless man with an outstanding arrest warrant and a history of violence, had shut down the subway at East 63rd Street and Lexington Avenue for nearly an hour, blocking doors and occupying the tracks to prevent trains from entering or leaving the station. Now, a late Saturday night was bleeding into predawn Sunday, a fragile metal shell was hurtling through a lighted tunnel under the earth, and in the conductor’s car, a show of prowess was being put on. “My arm doesn’t move, bro.” Holding the knife at his side, the man in the green hoodie opened the blade discreetly, with a small movement of his hand. “If my arm doesn’t move and you’re making eye contact with me, you won’t see shit until it’s too late.” Several times he opened and closed the blade before his friend’s eyes, feinting with it, brandishing it in full view of half a dozen riders. His dreadlocks swung heavily as he moved. He explained with gusto how he might stab someone to death.
The woman in the parka wanted to dry her clothes. Through the long winter, she had haunted, day after day, the area of Riverbank State Park between the skating rink and the athletic field. There, just outside the snack bar, under the eaves, a row of dirty Formica tables with plastic bench seats had offered a place to rest, to set down the overstuffed bags that burdened her. Now, however, a heavily trafficked picnic area lay for her purposes in ideal May sun—and on the backs of half a dozen wooden benches, she draped the contents of those bags, as if on a clothing line: T-shirts, socks, striped cotton panties. Like a peddler who dealt in the leavings of a life, she spread out her belongings. Evil-smelling solvents were clustered on a table; Gatorade empties were dumped on every available seat. There was something off, almost distracted, about the woman’s demeanor; her wrinkled face was fixed in a bitter scowl as she shuffled from one bench to the next, until the whole semicircular seating area was cluttered up. Passersby looked longingly or resignedly at the mess and went on without a word. At one man who dared seat himself on the corner of a bench, she yelled in a heavy accent: “Go ovah deye! Dis one bizz-ee!” Leaning back to admire her handiwork, the woman was a figure out of season. There was the heavy black parka, beneath which she wore a patterned skirt reaching to her ankles and a baby-blue sweatshirt with raised hood. White sandals were her only concession to the day’s warmth. A Parks employee in a green windbreaker told her to pick up her belongings; she ignored him. “It’s not wintertime no more. People want to use the park,” he said. She pretended not to hear. Half an hour later, he was back with two uniformed officers of the Parks Enforcement Patrol. The French-speaking woman in the parka found English enough to protest: “You know me! I here every day. I pay! I pay every day!” The Parks employee shook his head wearily. “You don’t pay nothing.”
The man in the blue fedora wanted his G train to speed up. As it pulled away from the station, he ranted and raved. “You’re moving like snails and turtles in the motherfucking cold, man.” His mind veered, like a runaway locomotive jumping the tracks: “I’ll stay masked up. Don’t go near that cabinet! ‘Cause I’m not takin’ that shot. I’ll smack you so hard, make you piss, fart, and shit on yourself, doctor or nurse. Who you think I am, man? The darker the berry, the sweeter the juice!” The after-work throng shrank back, did its best to ignore him. But his diatribe changed again: “Ladies—if there are ladies! You virgins, lesbians, you celibacied bitches! You’re scared of the Scorpi-o! That’s what I said. What? It’s my time.” For five minutes he kept on, shifting from one hateful remark and threat of violence to the next. His audience was everyone and no one. As the train pulled into Hoyt–Schermerhorn Streets station, he crowded the doors, playing music loudly on his phone, dancing in purple sneakers.
A handful of symbols can suffice, as in Tarot, to tell the fate of a city, or at least the direction of its future. Investors speak of “directional bets,” analysts and consultants of being “directionally correct” in their assessments of an industry or enterprise. Shuffle your experience like a deck of cards and turn face-up a few anecdotes. Where are American cities heading? How lucky does betting on them make you feel?
Consider, first, the new normal for murders. Though down from their 2021 highs, homicide rates in Chicago and Milwaukee, in New Orleans and Pittsburgh and Houston, indeed in most cities around the country, remain sharply higher than before the pandemic. Half of the top 20 “homicide hubs” have suffered, since 2019, spikes of 50 percent or more in their rates for this most violent of crimes. Between 2011, when I moved to New York, and 2021, the murder rate in U.S. cities climbed by 46 percent.
These facts are not in dispute. But even now, for most New Yorkers, it is not a city of murder that we experience. Nor even, for most of us, a city of mugging or looting, though the New York Police Department made about 10,000 robbery arrests in 2022. Beneath these headline statistics, like high-flying banners, what kind of city can we discern? It is a city that reeks universally of weed smoke, a city of loitering and farebeating, of scofflaws and rough sleepers, of untreated mental illness and unhoused—or expensively housed—migrants, in record numbers. Eight years after the end of stop-and-frisk, NYPD arrests for firearm possession in 2022 reached their highest level in 27 years.
To live in New York today is to experience, on a regular basis, visibly and abrasively, the element of crime. By this, I mean more than run-ins with the “criminal element,” that is, serious offenders, though such encounters are more frequent. I mean not only, for instance, the 25 times that someone was pushed onto subway tracks in 2022—four more times than in 2021—but also the countless small infractions, spit in the eye of the body politic, the casual disrespect for law and common decency: the picnic table covered in food waste and Kool-Aid pouches when a trash can is two feet away; the pharmacy with locked cabinets for such valuables as fruit juice and deodorant; the requirement, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent Van Gogh exhibit, to empty your water bottle before entering the gallery, for fear that some vandal might smuggle in a substance with which to desecrate the art, as has happened at more than a dozen museums over the past year. I mean, in short, all the demoralizing effects of which pervasive crime is the cause, the impact that lawlessness and an inescapable awareness of it—to say nothing of official resignation or indifference—has on society and the psyche.
I dwell on New York because I know it best, have watched it grow and molt and carry on for more than a decade, and have worked and loved and suffered and once or twice nearly died in its unmindful embrace. I have spent 11 of my 12 years of residency in the same two-bedroom apartment in uptown Manhattan......
The crime is increasing everywhere. I suppose it happens to most countries that are tilting toward socialism. There is a loss of self respect and others get even less respect.
Don’t go out in the street in NYC to have a smoke. It attracts crazies who want to bum one from every direction. I was nearly attacked for saying no
So as tens of thousands of illegals arrive at NYC, all I can say is STFU. You Libs do not get to decide which laws to enforce and which to disregard. There’s a whole group of people with their own list of laws to disregard, too bad that their list is different then your’s NYC……. Mayor, wants some lemons?
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