I
Time feels weirder than ever in these post-New York Pause days, when things are open again, supposedly, and the governor who says it’s halftime in the fight against the coronavirus is writing a book about his victory over it. Taking just one moment of silence for each of New York’s 32,451 COVID deaths would stretch over nine hours.
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[The mayor's] counting down the days until someone else’s election in November, and with the hope that he can just keep buying time until then. Speaking as someone who’s started every week for 20 years or so with the sincere belief that this will be the one when I finally get it all together, I can relate. ... If any of the people hoping to be our next mayor has a serious vision for leading the city out of the deep financial hole we’re already in while building a foundation for a fairer and more resilient future, it’s news to me.
Meantime, New Yorkers can find an endless run of anecdotal “news” stories in the Times about well-heeled people leaving New York, or in the Post about poor and violent people ushering the Bad Old Days back in. In a city where people are always coming and going, and something terrible is always happening somewhere, it’s not hard to find accounts that confirm the trends your editors are fixated on.
But a piece in The News on Friday stopped me in my tracks, and may end up slowing down an awful lot of New Yorkers. Ace transit reporter Clayton Guse reported that there have been so many smashed windows on the No. 7 — at least 200 since the start of August — that the MTA might have to cut service on the line after exhausting its glass reserve for those subway cars.
That’s a huge jump from 32 broken windows in May and June — itself a huge jump from just two broken windows over the same two months last year, when train ridership was four times bigger and drunk baseball fans were the usual smashing suspects. It’s not clear if the unseen smasher (or possibly smashers) has anything to do with a guy the police are after who’s used some blunt object to break 200 windows in 63 different train cars on multiple lines since March.
It is clear that things aren’t going well.
That gunplay is way up across the city as some cops have withdrawn from streets even as others have been barricading parks and simply occupying full blocks in Manhattan around precincts in the midst of a department-wide nervous breakdown about being held to some outside account for officers’ actions.
II
Trump, Rudy and the PBA’s cynical ’90s’ NYC fear campaign
I kept thinking about our “bad old days” as America’s Mayor™ ripped into America’s “Democrat” mayors at the Republican National Convention Thursday night for supposedly sanctioning “out-of-control violent crime and rioting” as he claimed that Joe Biden, of all people, was a “Trojan horse” for the anarchist left, preparing to bring chaos and violence to a community near you.
Rudy paid special attention to Bill de Blasio’s New York, where shootings and murders spiked this summer and June saw widespread looting in Manhattan. Said our old mayor, “how did we get overwhelmed by crime so quickly and decline so fast.” He didn’t wonder about how even with that spike, from historic lows, the city is much safer by every measure than it was when he left office in 2002.
Giuliani spoke just after Pat Lynch — who’s led the NYPD’s biggest police union since 1999, when Rudy was in his second term — endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in the PBA’s history, declaring that “the violence and chaos we’re seeing now isn’t a side effect. It’s actually the goal…wherever Democrats are in power.” And Democrats, of course, are the only power in New York City, where the PBA and its members have been racking up a string of losses in court and in the court of public opinion amidst persistent rumors that parts of the NYPD, after showing up in force to confront people protesting the police, have been leaving the city to police itself.
In 1989, New York City recorded a then-record 1,905 murders and David Dinkins inched past Giuliani to become New York’s first, and so far only, Black mayor. In 1990, the city hit a still-record 2,245 murders. In 1991 (2,154 murders), when the Crown Heights pogrom further polarized the city as the Dinkins administration, which de Blasio served in, effectively decided to let “the community” vent as police stood by and the New York Times infamously provided cover by framing anti-semitic attacks on Jews as inter-racial clashes between Jews and Blacks. In 1992 (1,995 murders), when Giuliani spoke at a racist police riot at City Hall. And in 1993 (1,946 murders), when Giuliani inched past Dinkins, as a Staten Island secession measure on the ballot helped tip the scales just enough.
Those were the two highest turnout and closest margin races the city has ever seen. Almost no one changed their vote after four years in the polarizing, totalizing conflict between a fairly mild and conventional clubhouse Democrat and an angry and norm-shattering outsider. (One of the rare people who did shift was Trump, who, as Tom Robbins detailed, backed Giuliani’s 1989 campaign shortly after the then-Manhattan U.S. attorney closed without charges a case involving money laundering at Trump Tower. But Trump stayed out of the 1993 race for fear of losing city approval of various pending projects.)
Rudy’s win led to two decades of plunging and then declining crime here after an equally long era of rising crime and vigilantism, one defined in part by the likes of Bernie Goetz and the Guardian Angels.
In 1993, 45,000 votes changed the future of a city of 7,500,000 souls. In 2016, 77,000 votes in three states changed the future of a nation of 323,000,000.
That’s why a vacuous and morally hollow showman and salesman with no law enforcement background focused his convention in 2020 (with 280 murders in NYC as of Friday) on scenes of urban chaos, and warnings about Democrats who’ve often seemed petrified to call that chaos out lest they be accused of betraying a righteous movement and the people protesting peacefully for it.