With the feds seizing his phones and political change suddenly in the air, it’s a good moment to note perhaps the only thing the city’s centrist mayor and his lefty foes agree about: that New Yorkers don’t appreciate how safe they are.
Crime rates are down from last year and a fraction of what they were in the long-ago “bad old days” of the early 1990s, even if they’re still up a bit from before the pandemic.
But 45% of people in New York City said in an October Siena poll that “the problem of crime in your community” is worse than it was a year ago, while just 13% said it’s better.
Thus, the pols say, there must be journalists, or the GOP, or something keeping New Yorkers from appreciating how good they have it, whether that’s a credit to Eric Adams’ police or proof that bail and other justice reforms didn’t harm public safety.
“They start their day picking up the news, the morning papers, they sit down and they see some of the most horrific events… It plays on your psyche,” Mayor Adams, who claimed that honorific by campaigning on how out of control the city felt and his promise to change that, said in June, when a different poll showed just 3% of New Yorkers felt more safe since the pandemic while 70% felt less safe.
But local news coverage hasn’t become more horrifying since he was elected. If anything, the city’s other tabloid played up crime and chaos during the primary to help Adams make his case after endorsing him and has reset its coverage since.
Two stories on the same page of Thursday’s Daily News captured the split between how New Yorkers feel and how they’re told they should feel.
That first was about a 49-year-old man the police say is a chronic swiper who was holding open a subway gate in Midtown while “asking” people who went through to give him a dollar, and told a 40-year-old woman skipping the fare he’d take her purse if she didn’t pay up.
A 43-year-old “subway vigilante” who happened to be passing by took out the revolver he’d purchased 13 years earlier, fired a shot in their direction, then said “leave her alone” before firing a second shot and taking off, according to a video reviewed by reporters at the Post.
Fortunately, he hit no one and was found the next day at his desk at the film equipment company he’s worked at for 17 years.
Below that news was another story — “Robber shot dead at unlicensed weed store” — about a 23-year-old who’d tried to hit one of the city’s thousands of convenience stores illegally selling cannabis, which have inevitably become targets of opportunities for gunmen.
In this case, a video came out later showing Romel Carey walking into the 24-hour deli and pot shop in Morris Heights in the Bronx just before midnight and pulling his gun only to run off when the 26-year-old behind the counter, Fares Alhazmi, pulled his own gun. Carey came back about 40 minutes later, entering with his gun out this time, and as a customer was also in the store, chasing Alhazami as he ran black and forth behind the counter. Somehow, Alhazami fired a shot on the run that hit and killed Carey.
The video looks like a Looney Tunes bit except that it’s real life, a robbery, and a death.
When the city can’t or won’t competently enforce its own rules, things can get out of hand quickly.
The danger signs that leave New Yorkers feeling unsafe when the numbers say they’re pretty safe seem a lot like broken windows — a term Democrats have rebranded as a slur.
Adams and his cronies seem to prefer a top-down approach to the NYPD, mostly ordering hands-off or light-touch policing punctuated by busts of wild over-enforcement like encouraging cops to start hundreds of dangerous car chases.
Expect more madness in a city with lots of legal gun carriers, including on the trains, after the Supreme Court struck down our century-old gun law. Where there have been more self-defense claims in subway killings so far this year than there were total subway killings in any year from the start of the century to the start of the pandemic.
In that June poll, 69% of New Yorkers said they feared a local “shooting in which a gunman targets people based on their race, religion or ethnicity.”
And that was before the terror attack in Israel and war in Gaza.
Add it up and the result is crime numbers are low but fear is not.
Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City and a columnist for the Daily News.
Harry Siegel: Pols can’t see clearly through broken windows: New Yorkers fear crime despite what leaders say
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12.11.2023
With the feds seizing his phones and political change suddenly in the air, it’s a good moment to note perhaps the only thing the city’s centrist mayor and his lefty foes agree about: that New Yorkers don’t appreciate how safe they are.
Crime rates are down from last year and a fraction of what they were in the long-ago “bad old days” of the early 1990s, even if they’re still up a bit from before the pandemic.
But 45% of people in New York City said in an October Siena poll that “the problem of crime in your community” is worse than it was a year ago, while just 13% said it’s better.
Thus, the pols say, there must be journalists, or the GOP, or something keeping New Yorkers from appreciating how good they have it, whether that’s a credit to Eric Adams’ police or proof that bail and other justice reforms didn’t harm public safety.
“They start their day picking up the news, the morning papers, they sit down and they see some of the most horrific events… It plays on your psyche,” Mayor Adams, who claimed that honorific by campaigning on how out of control the city felt and his promise to........
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