A world of crack, urine and catatonia: Welcome to Washington Square Park

NY Post ^ | 8 July 2021 | Sohrab Amari

[Rummyfan]

#DefundPolice is on the back foot. With a former NYPD officer poised to capture Gotham’s City Hall and Team Biden preposterously claiming that defund was ack-shually a GOP scheme all along, it’s clear mainstream Dems have resolved to ditch the slogan, if not the entire agenda. So what now for true believers of a movement that last year swept up much of the liberal gentry?

You could witness the defunders’ plea for attention in the wee hours of the morning Thursday at Washington Square Park. For more than a month now, the park has been the site of a battle of wills between the NYPD enforcing an on-again-off-again midnight curfew and revelers determined to “reclaim public space,” as an ACLU volunteer monitoring the action told me.

Yet with their ranks diminished, the gathering of mostly white, heavily female and extremely young anti-police militants looked not a little like high-school goths protesting the principal’s strict new bathroom-pass policy.

The effect was to foreground the misery of the numerous addicts who call the park and nearby streets home: a world bathed in crack smoke, drenched in urine, murmuring with the fragmentary, delusional self-talk of lost souls.

[Rummyfan]

[Rummyfan]

Not that there is any reasoning with the militants. The night ended, predictably, with their accusations that I was racist for working for this newspaper and for supporting “the terrorists” (the men and women of the NYPD). I was also chided for “drinking on the job” (the woke can suddenly become the most prudish Victorians when the friend-enemy dynamic calls for it).

[FatherofFive]

Lol! I first read it a ‘white, heavy females’.

[The people have spoken]

I lived there in the mid ‘70s. There have always been junkies and street hustlers and other minor nuisances in the park, but it sounds like it’s worse now.

[Fester Chugabrew]

The word “fumigate” comes to mind. But how? Who? When?

[Jeff Chandler]

I first read it a ‘white, heavy females’.

Works either way.

[cdcdawg]

“the gathering of mostly white, heavily female and extremely young anti-police militants”

Feminism strikes again. “Heavily female” and probably all quite heavy despite their youth.

[eyedigress]

That isn’t cheap booze.

[bigbob]

sounds like a story about Hillary...but no visuals for THAT kind of crack!

[Organic Panic]

A story about Hunter Biden’s hotel rooms?

[Billthedrill]

Something is profoundly wrong with urban America.

Fish rot from the head down. Talk to the suits.