It took the editors of the New York Daily News quite a while to get to the point in their latest editorial. They open with a catalog of New York’s woes, wrought largely by their elected leaders’ feckless response to the challenges provided by COVID-19, continue with what is actually a rather mild complaint about their mayor rather than the litany of malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance that could be laid at his feet, before coming to this:
Some office work and storefronts may never return. But companies and industries lost can become new companies’ and industries’ opportunity. In times past, disused, decaying factories became artist studios. Abandoned warehouses became housing.
But we’ll never bounce back if growing numbers of families and companies flee in fear for their safety, not just from the virus’s threat, but from the violence humans keep committing against each other. Safety was the foundation of the city’s renaissance in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. Cracks in that foundation could be its undoing.
So far this year we’ve seen more than 900 shootings, nearly double the 492 we saw by this time in 2019. Yet NYPD officers have made 180 fewer gun arrests this year than in 2019. In fact, NYPD arrests in murder cases have fallen 9.5% from last year, and robbery arrests dropped 11.1%.
Pikers. Chicago, with a population approaching 20% that of New York City, has had 489 homicides and 2,205 shootings so far this year.
One question. Do the editors think there might be some relationship between fewer arrests and more crime? The 12 step programs say that the acknowledging that there’s a problem is the first step on the road to recovery. What’s the problem?
There is one passage in the editorial I want to gripe about:
We say worry and not panic because we’ve faced near defeat before, and prevailed, against cholera epidemics, riots, depressions, fiscal calamity and crime waves. Each time, Gotham rebounded thanks to the courage and ingenuity and determination and vision of its leaders and its people.
In my lifetime alone New York City has been bailed out three times by the federal government which is to say all of the rest of us. Rather than “the courage and ingenuity and determination of its leaders and its people”, New York City has been pulling itself up by our bootstraps. I think a little gratitude and humility are in order. Enough!
As Mama Rose put it New York is the center of New York.
