This isn’t the first time America’s coastal cities have felt entropic – soaring crime rates in the 1970s drove many people away. But then they were drawn back to cheap dwellings in large run-down brownstones and began gentrifying.
This, combined with an overhaul in policing and a much tougher approach to crime, turned the likes of New York and San Francisco into beacons of desirability.
But – and I speak as a passionate anti-Trumper – years of Democratic rule have destroyed the likes of New York and San Francisco, turning them into dystopias of anarchy, jamborees of unpunished violence, theft and vandalism.
In a particularly grisly turnaround, New York, once the most Jewish-feeling city outside of Israel, has become home to some of the Western world’s most disgusting anti-Israel activism, with marches, demonstrations and of course the staggeringly vile, criminal encampment at Columbia and others colleges.
Who would have thought that New York would become a city in which kids wearing surgical masks, wrapped in the garb of Islamic terrorists, would yell “Zionists get out” from the top of their lungs for months on end?
Nothing could be more symbolic of this grim and foolish descent than the arraignment last week of New York mayor Eric Adams on five counts of bribery, wire fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations.
Among other things, Adams, a former police officer who became mayor three years ago with a promise to be tough on crime, is alleged to have taken $100,000 (£75,000) in luxury travel perks from a Turkish businessman and official in a cash-for-influence arrangement.
The truth is I’ve never liked New York, but I could recognise its appeal for others. On a recent trip, though, I had the fright of my life on the subway in Brooklyn, with a maniac roaring through the subterranean walkway threatening anyone in his path, including me – he then leaped the turnstiles as the man behind the ticket desk watched, exclaiming without moving an inch.
The nutcase could well have been armed, and I had read about the “trend” of knocking women onto the subway tracks, and the guy who knifed the back of two women’s legs in the same day on the subway in June 2023. My heart took a while to calm down.
The friend I was visiting at the time worked as an investigator in New York City– she told me the threat of violence on public transport is so prevalent that she had taken to carrying her gun on her.
Much of this nonchalant criminality is down to woke officials, especially public prosecutor Alvin Bragg. Bragg has himself admitted to being frightened on public transport, but it’s thanks to his lax bail laws that so many of the system’s criminals run free despite previous arrests.
Predictably, Bragg dropped criminal charges in June against the anti-Israel protesters who had been arrested after storming a Columbia campus hall and barricading themselves in.
Indeed, in the decade since my gun-carrying friend got her criminology degree and began her career in public service, she has gone from being a centrist to being a staunch Republican.
Her sister lives in San Francisco. “The Democrats have destroyed New York and San Francisco,” she wrote to me a week ago when I asked why she would never vote for Kamala, formerly a public prosecutor and attorney general of California. “The progressive prosecutors,” she said, “have left no consequences for criminality, allowing looting and shoplifting so retailers leave the city, politicians have caved to pressure from BLM activists, police are no longer pro-actively policing, the migrant crisis is leading to more public disorder and homelessness, a culture of villainising police as bad guys and exalting perps as good guys/ victims and the end of ‘broken windows’ allowing for increasing public disorder and small time crime which breeds bigger crime…” She could, she assured me, go on.
The root of the rot, then, is the rewriting of law and order as racist. Broken windows policing is the idea that police should punish even the smallest crimes, because crime loves itself, and will otherwise rise exponentially. Give an inch and a mile will be taken.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the crime, shoplifting, open drug taking, homelessness and tent encampments that might once have been the necessary downside of a famously progressive, dynamic city have consumed it.
There too the problem is hopelessly woke legislators. The terrifying pinnacle of social justice theory arrived in the form of Chesa Boudin, ex-district attorney elected in 2019 on a ticket of ending “mass incarceration” and racial discrepancies in arrest.
Boudin’s own background is tragic and interesting: descending from a long line of Marxist thinkers, his parents belonged to the extreme-Left Weather Underground, and were both arrested for murder in connection with an 1981 robbery (after their imprisonment he was raised by other Weather Underground extremists).
The disastrous consequences of Boudin’s decadent belief that crime should not be punished because some of the people who commit it are racial minorities were too great even for the highly progressive voters who elected him – and he was recalled after just three years in power.
America needed to root out racist policing, which I saw as a child even in progressive Boston. It was disgusting.
But under the influence of the most dangerous ideas in a generation, progressives have pulled off an over-correction which has ruined once-great cities, possibly for good.
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