So wait, the story the NY state Dems are telling us is the subways of NYC are so dangerous they need to send in the troops, but they’re *not* firing the police chief or cops who are unable to keep them safe with $5.44 billion?
I could be ok with more bodies on the platforms to have a stronger security presence, if warranted, for a limited period of time, but soldiers brandishing M4 automatic rifles!?! That’s nothing but dangerous and could escalate in very bad ways causing the scenario they want to prevent.
The problem is when you send a person into a space to look for trouble, they start to find trouble even where it doesn't exist. And we already know that stop and frisk, which was already a violation of the Fourth Amendment, was not proportionally executed across racial groups.
That’s fair. Certainly don’t want “stop and frisk” back. Unless there was a very specific reason for searching bags from a very specific threat, I don’t think they should be looking at anyone’s bag either. But I see the point, ala “to a hammer, everything is a nail.”
It wasn’t just the campaigns, it was a district map so shitty that it gave the R’s extra seats. It’s okay though because we can fix the map this year and… oh actually they made it worse and gave the R’s more seats, never mind
Then we face the consequences together.
Fuck this overexcited fear-mongering. Improve social services for the homeless, impovrished and mentally ill instead of trying to throw them in prison all the time.
You and I are in agreement, I’m
Just pointing out you can’t fire a mayor, but you can in theory fire cops. Except, of course, that seems to be incredibly difficult to do in this country.
Then let's do that! Let's get involved and make sure this buffoon--who I think is worse than Guiliani and THAT'S saying something--doesn't even get near a second term.
Inaction only serves the status quo.
Read the comments on the NY Times articles on crime. There was an article about Louisiana cracking down on crime, and the vast majority of the commenters were cheering and decrying the “leftists” who let out all the criminals.
We are in a full bipartisan national moral panic about imaginary danger.
When you have liberals joining with conservatives to punish minorities (bc that’s what “tough on crime” means in Louisiana) to spite “leftists” by proxy, then the election just becomes a battle of who has the worst vibes.
Then we have to take the power that was provided to us and use it to create real change not just let the entropy that's been affecting politics to continue decaying ..
our state congress is about to make sleeping on public land illegal so they can throw our unhoused in concentration camps where alcohol and drug use is highly criminalized 🫠
Then maybe we should rethink the merger...
And maybe we should consider reorienting the cops to weed out the psychopaths and power addicts and create ways of resolving situations with something other than ammunition and force.
This is the move. This right here.
Put *them* on the hook for their own behavior, not the citizens. They'll clean up their act very quickly once they figure out who among their own number is costing them their retirement.
The NYPD and LAPD (two infamously bad actors) have a fund put aside for these lawsuits and the moment that gets redirected to something like the OT budget is the moment things will probably start moving differently.
I'm so out of it this morning, I had a brief moment of "Wait, Sam Adams is mayor and there's shenanigans involving the police department? What year is this?"
Of course! The answer to the failure of policing is "add more police." The answer to success of policing (on those rare occasions it occurs) is "add more police."
And yet the same people, when faced with failures in education, never say "we need more teachers and spend more money on schools." It's like a fetish they have left over from playing with green army men and GI Joes in their youth.
Since crime has been in the decline and you're more likely to be killed on the streets than the subways it seems like there are two main possibilities.
1) There is a different threat they're looking for but don't want to tell the public.
2) It's just some stupid political stunt before November.
It is in fact a stupid poltical stunt, motivated by an actual rise in attacks on the transit owrkers. But they don't state it as such, and it doesn't solve that problem. You cannot underestimate the shittiness of NY state Dems.
"Late last night, an autonomous group of activists placed posters throughout the subway system, blocking out advertisements with their own materials protesting Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza."
hellgatenyc.com/artists-repl...
Interesting but I doubt that's all it was to start posting National Guard troops, unless they're being *extremely* paranoid. I'm thinking more along the lines that maybe they got some intel of potential a terrorist plot but don't want to scare the public.
We can only hope they aren't putting armed military on subway platforms because of anti-Zionist graffiti artists, but I wouldn't put it past them. The groupthink both parties are pushing on that topic is over the top.
As a non-NY resident, this move really makes one question Hochul's political judgment. This is going ro be paid by the state, further impovershing public services. And Hochul spent pol capital trying to appoint a judge that was at odds with the NY Dems and NY in general.
Really how does Hochul win?
Yeah. And I've regularly ridden the NYC subway for 35 years without being a crime victim, but one ride on the Paris Metro last week, I got robbed. These guys. (The problem is that it's the Mayor who needs firing as well as the police hierarchy)
Did something happen to the subways in the decade since I've been in New York City to all of a sudden turn them into the demilitarized zone they weren't in the 2K-teens, aughts, or 90s?
The best (i.e. most aggravating) part is Hochul states the reason is to *make NYers feel safer* so her explicitly stated justification is that it’s a propaganda move. And not for nothing but I don’t feel safer seeing soldiers with M-16s at the station.
if the cops were capturing criminals in the subway, who would be protecting the deodorant isle at Duane Reade or keeping the bookworms from rioting when they close the libraries?
