Sultan Knish
In Washington D.C., the office of the Honorable Joseph Biden was busy
phoning up everyone from Mothers Against Pointy Things to the Gay
Communist Gun Club of America to Wal-Mart to invite them down for a
serious no-holds-barred discussion about doing to the Bill of Rights
what his boss had done to the economy.
Meanwhile over in Chicago, the 13th corpse was being scraped off the
sidewalk. In just nine days, Obama's hometown, one of them anyway, was
already 15% ahead of last year's whopping murder rate. East of Second
City, in the city that would be Chicago if it wasn't for a lot of money
and a Republican mayor, one of the city's liberal judges gave civil
rights activists a late Christmas present with a verdict against the
NYPD's 'Stop and Frisk" program in the Bronx.
The Bronx is the part of New York City voted most likely to be Detroit.
An ironic fate for a borough that built the city's biggest zoo and
botanical garden as a way of keeping the riffraff out of what was once
an exclusive area. It's the place where you are mostly likely to shoot
or be shot at. The Bronx is the fourth smallest borough of the five,
but it's number one in murders, rapes and robberies.
New York's Finest commute to work from Staten Island, where the homicide rate is less than half that of the Bronx. In the 40th Precinct
(you may know its neighbor, the 41st Precinct from the movie, Fort
Apache, The Bronx) last year there were 12 murders, 21 rapes, 476
robberies, 387 felony assaults, 1,337 misdemeanor assaults, 62 shooting
victims and a partridge in a pear tree.
That's not too bad considering that there were 72 murders there in 1990.
In 1998, after 4 years of Giuliani, 72 murders had become 15. The two
forces that transformed the 40th from a really bad place to just a bad
place were aggressive policework and gentrification. The aggressive
policework wasn't pretty, but it made the gentrification possible and
kept New York City from turning into Newark or Chicago.
Stop and Frisk, which is just what it sounds like, allowed police to
stop suspects and frisk them just on suspicion that they might be up to
something bad. It's one of those programs that upsets people on both
sides of the aisle, but it happens to work because it lets police stop
gangbangers before they bang and lowers the murder rate to something you
can actually live through.
Civil rights groups have been protesting against Stop and Frisk for
years because it's racist, in the sense that it tends to take place
outside dilapidated Bronx apartment buildings rather than Upper East
Side high rises. For the 40th Precinct, civil rights group statistics
show that 17,690 stops were made, and of those stopped, 9.200 were
black, 6,039 were Hispanic, 119 were white, 63 were Asian and 15 were
American Indians. Considering the lack of major tribes in the five
boroughs, it is a testament to the NYPD's dedication to diversity that
they were able to find and frisk that many Native Americans.
Since the only white people in the 40th are hipsters who think
Williamsburg is over and went looking for somewhere edgier to set up
their metal working studios, these numbers are not too surprising. But
to professional civil rights activists who wake up in the morning to the
soothing sounds of WBAI's hosts screaming about racism and drones (and
racist drones) in between commercials for send us money, this, like
everything else, including the sun rising in the morning (followed by Al
Jazeera English News on WBAI 5:30 to 6 AM Monday through Friday, on
Sunday stay tuned instead for Cosmik Debris), is proof of racism.
Water dripping down eventually bores a hole in a rock. Civil rights
lawyers suing and screaming long enough eventually dismantles a police
force. Crime is rising again in New York City, which makes it more
dangerous to move to some formerly dilapidated part of the city and set
up shop in an abandoned warehouse while constructing giant jagged metal
figurines as a protest against capitalism that will one day decorate the
lawn of a corporate office park.
Bronx crime, like most urban crime, is driven by gangs. The Black
Assassins, Majestic Warlocks and the Black Muslim Five Percenters are one of the 70 street gangs
in New York's own Detroit. While civil rights activists call for
fighting gang violence with peace treaties and afterschool programs,
there are really only two things that work. Either a police state of the
kind you will find in the Bronx where the cops monitor the Twitter and
Facebook postings of gang members, and their text messages, or an armed
population that is capable of defending itself against them.
Liberals invariably choose none of the above.
What goes on in the 40th isn't just a New York issue. It's nationwide.
Even while Obama preps a new nationwide gun ban, as if the rest of the
country were Chicago or the Bronx, his Justice Department has waged a
private war against local law enforcement. The NYPD and its Stop and
Frisk policy was just one of the targets.
In the 90s, the Democrats learned that they could be tough on crime or
they wouldn't even be elected dogcatcher. It was a lesson that the
humiliation of Michael Dukakis drove home, and no matter how often
Democrats denounced the Willie Horton ad, they took its lesson to heart.
At least until now.
While Obama pitches gun control, his Attorney General has undermined
local law enforcement at every turn. It would seem that the only crime
that Obama wants to fight is the crime of owning the type of rifle that
those experienced hunters, Barack Obama and Diane Feinstein, have
decided that no hunter needs. But the idea that gun control is a
substitute for law enforcement is laughably insane, even by Chicago
standards.
Urban mayors like to believe that cracking down on rural sporting goods
stores will end the killing. It won't. The real gun culture isn't at gun
shows and Wal-Marts, it's down in the 40th where kids grow up listening
to 50 Cent and where pointing your own gun sideways is a rite of
passage. There's no place in the United States where you can legally
sell heroin, but heroin use is still off the charts in the Bronx. Gun
control nationwide will be just as effective as heroin control in the
Bronx.
Gang members go to school, deal drugs, step outside, recover a gun from
an underage female groupie, shoot down a rival, and then the process
repeats. You can crack down on it with a police state where cops make
arrests to keep down reports and match a Compstat quota. Or you can shut
down enforcement and hope that terrorizing rural gun owners will
somehow fix what's wrong with the Bronx. That's Obama's Plan A. If
there's a Plan B, we haven't heard it yet.
When you scuttle both law enforcement and gun ownership, then what
remains is the hell that the country descended into in the seventies
when civil rights lawyers got their way and major cities, including New
York City, became unlivable.
In 1965,
there were 836 murders in New York at a rate of 4.5 per 100,000 people.
In 1976, the number of murders had increased to a grisly 1,969 to a
rate of 7.2. By 1993, the last year of David Dinkins, New York City's
first black Democrat mayor, they peaked at 2,420 at a 13.3 rate. Only a
little below Chicago's current 15.65 rate. By Giuliani's second year in
office, the city was down to 1,550 murders, a low that it hadn't seen
since 1970. By the time he left office, there had only been 960 murders
at a rate of 5.0 per 100,000 people. Giuliani had taken the city back to
1965 and its murder rate today is, incredibly, at the national average
for the northeast.
The New York City success story was the triumph of prosperity and the
police state. With enough cops on the street, given a free hand, New
York City could have the murder rate of liberal paradises like Austin or
Seattle. Giuliani made it safe for liberals to move back to New York
City and play artist, uptown banker with social justice commitments,
aspiring actress, foodie, tech guru or random trendy urbanite. And once
they were there, the golden fountain began to flow, crime rates
continued falling and the city could be taken off life support.
Reagan cleaned up the economy and allowed liberals to begin safely
getting rich again. Giuliani cleaned up the city and allowed liberals to
safely walk its streets. Both men fulfilled the traditional function of
the Republican as the paternal figure who steps in when baby makes a
mess and cleans it up while allowing baby to believe that it was done by
magic.
Liberals cannot come to terms with what happened in New York City,
because it would force them to acknowledge that their lifestyle is made
possible by either right wing suburban cops violating civil rights or by
fleeing to sheltered cities with low minority populations. And with a
new Carter in office, the cycle of the seventies is coming full circle
again, not just militarily or economically, but also when it comes to
crime rates.
Urban liberals like to believe that it was unthinking city planners and
the automobile that destroyed the city, when it was actually them. The
city planners are still unthinking and the automobiles are still
motoring, but the cities are back only to the extent that law
enforcement has undone some of their worst mistakes. Now with an urban
liberal in the White House, the mistakes are being repeated again,
backed once again by the power of the Federal government.
The rural area is protected by the 2nd Amendment and the urban area by
the police state. The liberal, who is only interested in enforcing laws
against real criminals like people who fill in swamps or make
politically incorrect jokes, would like to take away the firearms of the
rural gun owner and dismantle the law enforcement defenses of the urban
area. Taking away the guns will not fix the problem. All it will do is
allow the gangs, who will always have the guns, to dominate urban and
rural areas.
Down in the 40th, the boys in blue still walk the streets as they do in
so many other cities. It's a thin line here and everywhere else where
everyone wants more cops, but can't afford to pay them. And you can't
put a cop on every single block of every single city and town, not to
mention farmhouse. Gangs, many of them even more dangerous than the ones
you'll find in the Bronx, are spreading across the country. Stopping
them will take more than the police state that Bloomberg still oversees.
The old urban lesson of the seventies is that the difference between
civilization and the jungle is security. And there is no substitute for
security, whether it's the security of one man with a gun, or a very
expensive police department of men with guns carrying out the marching
orders of statistical analysts.
The political left has forgotten the lesson of Willie Horton in its
arrogance and its base of metal working artists in converted warehouses
has forgotten the lessons of that old Times Square that they never
visited, but still nostalgically pine for. And as they work to disarm
the people and dismantle police forces, it is inevitable that it is a
lesson that they will be forced to learn again.
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