America’s big cities are becoming more and more violent, and the Democrats residing there are getting more and more addled.
An informative April 3 New York Post article demonstrated how the siren song of “decarceration” continues to dominate Democrat discussion in the Big Apple as various candidates line up for the race to succeed outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio in elections this year. This is happening as mayhem runs rampant in the streets of the city that never sleeps:
“Shootings across the five boroughs have soared by 20 percent through Feb. 14, 2021, compared with the first six weeks of 2020. Subway violence is on the upswing, with MTA workers fearing for their lives after a man rampaged through the A line, killing two and wounding two others last month. Horrifying hate crimes against Asian Americans are surging. On [March 22], a 65-year-old woman was kicked and punched in Midtown in broad daylight as bystanders watched and didn’t lift a finger to help.”
The progressive response? Criminal is such a harsh word, isn’t it?
“It’s still very devastating to me that the recent subway stabbings were framed by some of my colleagues in this race as incidents that should be criminalized versus being seen as a public health and transformative justice issue,” Dianne Morales stated at a video forum for Democratic mayoral candidates on March 17. The event was conducted by Vocal-NY, a radical activist group funded by globalist progressive billionaire George Soros. It “was co-hosted by a lifelong criminal, a lifelong drug addict and a homeless person,” The Post’s Jason Curtis Anderson wrote.
The commitment to fighting “mass incarceration” is so steeped in urban Democrat minds that random, unprovoked subway knifings are painted in pastel hues as incidents calling for “transformation” rather than being a dire sign of the need for a stronger law enforcement presence on the streets of the chaotic city.
White Supremacy Card Flops
As attacks on Asian-Americans soar in New York and elsewhere, it should be remembered that ethnic Asian leftist activists obsessed with identity politics have been leaving their own people defenseless in the name of racial awareness for months now.
“I think it’s hard for us to fundamentally reconcile that that entity [police] is going to protect our community, when, oftentimes, violence against people of color is coming from law enforcement,” Kham Moua, head of the policy portfolio at the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, a “civil rights organization,” told NBC News last September.
Sung Yeon Choimorrow, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, felt it unfortunate that crime victims would seek out help from police:
“I’m not going to tell an Asian American woman who has to commute on public transit every day to go to work who’s facing harassment that she shouldn’t call the police because she’s being complicit with white supremacists … I’m not passing judgment on the Asian Americans who support this decision and are standing behind this. It’s a tough situation.”
Fast forward six months and the attacks have become more brazen. Even progressive media outlets acknowledge that blaming white supremacy for the spate of brutal assaults, often in broad daylight, has now become a thoroughly failed narrative. A March 24 article at the leftist-dominated, taxpayer-funded Voice of America website admitted:
“In New York City, where anti-Asian hate crime soared nearly nine-fold in 2020 over the year before, only two of the 20 people arrested last year in connection with these attacks were white, according to New York Police Department data analyzed by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. Eleven were African Americans, six were white Hispanics and one was a Black Hispanic.”
Allowing Subway Knifers to ‘Learn and Grow’
Amazingly, urban progressives truly believe a hug-it-out approach is the proper community response to savage attacks on vulnerable citizens. “When you allow the perpetrator and the victim the opportunity to talk with each other, there is a much higher likelihood that the results coming out from it would both heal the individual, the victim, but also provide the opportunity for the perpetrator to learn and grow,” Moua told NBC in September.
[memberzone align=”left”] This is the vacuous “transformative justice” language now peppering the Democrat New York City mayoral race. It presents a dilemma for the man who appears to be emerging as the leading candidate by default, 2020 presidential aspirant Andrew Yang. Yang is being hailed by some for not shying away from emphasizing the need for more policing to clean up a city quickly unraveling, yet he knows he must walk a very fine line as he does so.
Yang’s official mayoral candidacy website shows that even the so-called “sensible” Democrat in the race must resort to absurdities in describing policing in the Big Apple in 2021. “We need a New York Police Department (NYPD) that is focused on protecting New Yorkers,” a position statement reads. “A high-functioning police force that serves racial justice goals is the aim.”
Yang knows fully well that arresting criminals does not “serve racial justice” in the minds of his fellow Democrats. His words here are nothing more than a confession that he will not be able to pursue a common-sense approach on fighting crime as a Democratic mayor of America’s largest city, no matter how much he might care to do so.
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Read more from Joe Schaeffer.
