Gov. Hochul’s move to deploy 750 National Guard and 250 State Police into the subways sends a decent message: She’s no longer cowering before the loony left on crime, yay!
But it doesn’t address the causes of rising crime underground (which aren’t remotely what the left pretends they are; more the exact opposite).
Nor is it any permanent solution, no more than Mayor Adams’ vow to up NYPD patrols in the system.
Subway crime is up 13% over last year, with blood-chilling incidents piling up:
- A veteran MTA conductor slashed in the neck after sticking his head out of the train car window.
- A 61-year-old man knifed in the stomach on a No. 4 train in The Bronx.
- A 33-year-old mom groped and then stabbed repeatedly by a deranged creep on a Bronx bus.
- A tourist’s throat cut in a Queens station.
So it’s certainly reassuring to commuters that the gov’s sending some help; after all, she’s the same pol who a few years ago chose a “defund the police” fanatic as her lieutenant governor.
But the fact is, she helped surge more enforcement into the system a year ago; it helped — but crime went back up after the surge ended.
Nor will the bag checks her new forces are to perform help victims like the 64-year-old postal worker kicked onto the tracks by a stranger at Penn Station or the 15-year-old girl groped by a creep and then robbed at an L-train station in early February.
As for Adams’ added cops: Where will they be pulled from? When the NYPD has been hemorrhaging officers, the brass are left to play whack-a-mole — with crime popping back up in whatever area loses its patrols.
None of this addresses the recent laws that handcuff cops and guarantee revolving doors for perps; nor the feckless prosecutors and judges who err even further on the side of keeping menaces out of jail.
Think of of Reynaldo Quinones, a well-known subway menace with 54 prior arrests who was busted in mid February for robbing a straphanger.
Or the 23-year-old woman who was freed on supervised release after being arrested for smashing a subway cellist over the head with a metal water bottle — before being rearrested days later for allegedly stealing a $325 baseball cap from a Nordstrom.
Hochul has announced that she won’t even try to make further fixes to the state’s botched criminal-justice reforms this year; the progressives who run the Legislature just won’t have it.
And she’s already shown she won’t make soft-on-crime district attorneys like Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg do their jobs, or lose them: The internal-Democratic-Party politics aren’t good there, either.
So instead she’s trying to show that her Democratic Party isn’t pro-crime, by sending in the Guard — hoping voters across New York won’t slam Dems in this fall’s elections as they did in 2022.
Democrats across blue America are reaping the whirlwind of years of shortsighted, far-left policies that have brought on out-of-control crime and disorder.
They’re only scrambling to “show they care” now because of the impending elections.
But the forces of crime, violence and disorder weren’t let out of some Pandora’s box in one fell swoop, and showy quick fixes won’t magically contain them again.
Really turning the corner on crime requires undoing the disastrous decisions that got us here.