I Am Bemused

With a great deal of hilarity and equal parts disgust, I watch the clamor arising over Trump attempting to restore law and order in Washington, DC.  Seriously?  We now have evidence that senior police officials have been cooking the books to alter statistics to make it appear that crime rates are falling. Independent statistics show that DC has a crime rate up to 5 times higher than places like Islamabad and nearly 10 times higher than Western cities in decline like London and Paris. Our cities are a national disgrace. Sure, the tourist traps are well scrubbed, Boston’s Quincy Market, Baltimore’s waterfront, and New York’s South Street Seaport, for example, but to get there, you have to drive through urban blight: graffiti, crumbling infrastructure, trash-strewn thoroughfares, and homeless encampments. That teenager in the lawn chair on the street corner with a cellphone, a paid lookout for the gang selling drugs, junkies in a stupor in city parks, itinerant youth congregating to harass shopkeepers and citizens going about their day. And not a cop in sight. We are devolving into a dystopian urban scene from Blade Runner. And then we hear the district attorney from DC claim that we “can’t arrest our way out of crime.” His solution?  More resources for our youth. Translation: more cash. Of course. The democrat solution for everything. The DC police actually issued a laundry list of dos and don’ts to prevent carjacking, in addition to distributing Apple Air Tags to track your stolen vehicle. Among them, keep your windows closed, keep your car locked, drive in the center lane, never drive alone, and always leave a car length between you and the car in front when stopped to provide an escape route. You have to be kidding me. A former surgery resident who served his training in Newark, NJ, told me those instructions, minus the air tags, were part of his job briefing 30 years ago, along with keeping your sunroof closed and never put valuables on the passenger seat in view and after a sham fender bender, never, ever get out if your vehicle. Nice to know that 30 years of Democrat rule in our cities has yielded no improvement. But taking a look at recidivism tells us a different story. As reported by Mike Slater on Breitbart, 40 percent of Crime in Atlanta is perpetrated by 1000 repeat offenders. Eighty percent of incarcerated criminals are repeat offenders. So in response to the DA: yes, we can arrest our way out of crime, you idiot. And we all know what the problem is, you just can’t say it in polite society. Urban youth and a deteriorating public education system, coupled with single-parent households and an ever-increasing disregard for law enforcement, with government rewards for sloth and underachievers, have given us a generation of inner city youth intent on lawlessness. And apparently, the left looks at these folks as their voting base and intends to tolerate the disorder and throw more money at it. Enough. We tried it your way, and it doesn’t work. Witness the vacant mall space that everyone attributes to Walmart and the internet. Is the decline in foot traffic really the result of internet shopping or safety concerns? Livingston Mall in New Jersey was once a thriving shopping center until the geniuses decided providing bus service from inner city Newark to the mall was a good idea. Access for all, including a segment of the population without the socioeconomic means to support the mall’s tenants. Brilliant. Unsavory individuals began using the mall as a social center without intending to buy anything. Assaults became commonplace, and carjacking soared as inner city youth simply took the bus to the mall and drove home in the vehicle of their choice, found stripped and on blocks days later in Newark’s less affluent neighborhoods. The mall suffered a premature demise. Providence, RI, installed an upscale mall downtown with big-name flagship stores. A dispute arose over a fancy hotel, whose lobby provided access to the mall from the city side, when they policed their lobby, not allowing inner city youth to congregate, use the access to the mall, and scare off hotel guests. The city won the argument to allow unfettered access, the hotel saw booking decline, then sold out to a lesser quality chain, and the mall, whose crime rate soared when invaded by inner city thugs, saw its foot traffic crater, the flagship stores left, and the mall deteriorated in quality and return on investment. Well done, Providence. In Syracuse, NY, the expanding Destiny Mall has, for years, hidden an increasing crime problem. Once again, inner city miscreants used the mall as a hangout, and violence was on the rise. Carjackings increased, theft was accepted as the cost of doing business, assaults in the parking garage and bathrooms became commonplace, and shootings in the food court and fights on the mall concourse made local news as the bored inner city youth resolved their petty disputes with violence. Store employees recounted horrific tales of being told not to confront shoplifters, and to tolerate returns for cash on merchandise that had been stolen with damage from removing anti-theft tags and, in some cases, urine stains from the common practice of peeing on the sensors to disable them. Yuck. And you, the law-abiding consumer, pay for that theft with increased prices to compensate for the loss. Flagship stores left, and mall traffic decreased as it became well known that it was not a place to be after dark. Only when the wife of Syracuse University basketball coach Jim Boeheim was robbed at gunpoint by a teenager did the mall’s problems make the nightly news. 

Why must we tolerate this mayhem in democrat controlled cities?  Do we really want our cities to resemble third-world hellholes, degenerating into breeding grounds for crime and sinkholes for an ever-expanding welfare state?  Of course not. And we should not. Punish the small minority of offenders with jail time. Restore our inner city parks and schools to safe zones for learning and community gatherings, and let’s take pride in our cities once again as centers for culture, entertainment, and the arts. And to do that we have to rethink the path that Democrat rule has put us on and that’s going to require those that live in the inner city to reprogram and help themselves take their cities back. And that may require Trump’s help. Enough already, we don’t have to live like this.