De Blasio’s Gang Rationale Whatever Happened to ‘Black Lives Matter’?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/de-blasios-gang-rationale-1433287156
Shootings are up in New York this year over last, as they are in many big American cities. So are murders. But not to fret, says Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“I think it’s clear that what we have primarily here is a gang and crew problem,” the mayor said last week. “You know, for those of us who were here in the bad old days—when we had 2,000 murders or more a year—a lot of everyday citizens were getting caught in those crossfires.” He added it’s “equally troubling when, you know, individual gang members shoot other gang members, but it’s a different reality.”
Translation: If young, largely minority men are killing each other over gang turf, then the violent crime revival is no big deal. It won’t hit the trendier corners of Brooklyn.
So whatever happened to Mr. de Blasio’s campaign that “black lives matter”?
It’s true that most of the New York shootings, as in Chicago or Baltimore, have been confined to poor neighborhoods. But one of the secrets of New York’s policing success from Rudy Giuliani through Michael Bloomberg is that it sought to reduce crime in the highest-crime neighborhoods. The main beneficiaries are the thousands of city residents—overwhelmingly young, black and male—who are alive today because New York’s policing reforms brought crime to record lows.
Innocents are already getting caught in the new gang-war crossfire, such as 23-year-old Jahhad Marshall, who was shot this past weekend in Queens. As mayor, Mr. de Blasio helped gut the “stop-and-frisk” tactic used by New York cops. But Marshall’s uncle told the New York Post “we need stop-and frisk” to keep guns off the street.
Mr. de Blasio and the new progressives claim to speak for the poor, but in practice their ideas on education (monopoly schools), housing (rent control) and crime make things worse. The violence revival isn’t yet a crime wave, but then it’s better to stop a social pathology before it becomes an epidemic. Not least because the poor will be its primary victims.
Comments are closed.
