{"id":249540,"date":"2021-05-14T02:28:21","date_gmt":"2021-05-13T23:28:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/saturdays-times-square-shooting-may-mark-a-crossroads-for-nyc\/"},"modified":"2021-05-14T02:28:21","modified_gmt":"2021-05-13T23:28:21","slug":"saturdays-times-square-shooting-may-mark-a-crossroads-for-nyc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/saturdays-times-square-shooting-may-mark-a-crossroads-for-nyc\/","title":{"rendered":"#Saturday\u2019s Times Square shooting may mark a crossroads for NYC"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Saturday\u2019s Times Square shooting may mark a crossroads for NYC<\/strong>”
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Last year in New York City, murders\u00a0rose\u00a045 percent<\/a> and shootings 97 percent, numbers that have continued to\u00a0rise\u00a0in 2021<\/a>. But New Yorkers don\u2019t need statistics to understand that the city\u2019s descent into chaos is accelerating. Saturday\u2019s brazen\u00a0shooting\u00a0in Times Square \u2014 in which three innocent bystanders were shot, including a 4-year-old girl \u2014 may well mark a crossroads.<\/p>\n

During New York\u2019s bad old days, the Crossroads of the World and its pornographic theaters attracted \u201can unsavory and increasingly criminal crowd,\u201d as William J. Stern, former head of the Urban Development Corporation, observed. \u201cBy the eighties, things got worse still, with an amazing 2,300 crimes on the block in 1984 alone, 20 percent of them serious felonies such as murder or rape,\u201d he noted. Times Square\u2019s situation suggested a city spinning out of control.<\/p>\n

The condition of Times Square today similarly reveals the city\u2019s social<\/a>, moral and civic health. The president of the Times Square Alliance, Tim Tompkins, understands this. In 2016, he explained that \u201cthe area then \u2014 and has always been \u2014 representative of what was working or not working in New York City as a whole. . . . Throughout New York City, crime was a huge issue that was making people stay away, and . . . that overshadowed everything else.\u201d Thus, he reasoned, \u201cTimes Square was this symbol of whether the government had either the will or the capacity to make a city safe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mayor Rudy Giuliani\u2019s commitment to tame Times Square helped Gotham restore civic normalcy. Giuliani brought Disney in to take over and renovate the New Amsterdam Theatre, which \u201cled to the resurrection of 42nd Street and Times Square,\u201d in the words of The New York Times.<\/p>\n

Giuliani also targeted smut shops for legal assault in court and had his NYPD proactively arrest quality-of-life offenders: drug dealers, junkies, pimps, prostitutes, hustlers, thieves and con artists. What followed was the revitalization of Times Square \u2014 and New York\u2019s rebirth as the safest big city in America.<\/p>\n

New York\u2019s reversal of fortune is no accident. Mayor Bill de Blasio cites the\u00a0pandemic and closed schools as excuses for the rise in violent crime. He conveniently overlooks four culprits: catch-and-release bail reform; the abandoning of broken-windows policing; the elimination of plainclothes anti-crime units that spent their nights hunting illegal gun carriers; and the movement to \u201cdefund\u201d the police.<\/p>\n

Proactive police officers have no incentive to respond to non-emergency crimes when the mayor has told them to stand down, when they know perps will be swiftly released and when they worry their faces could be the next ones plastered on screens across the country if an arrest goes wrong.<\/p>\n

Which brings us back to Saturday\u2019s shooting. We should be grateful for the heroic police officers who responded, including Alyssa Vogel, who ran nonstop with the 4-year-old victim to the ambulance. The alleged shooter was identified as Farrakhan Muhammad, a 31-year-old CD-pushing pest with a long arrest record who intended to shoot his brother.<\/p>\n

When New York City had a quality-of-life policing regime, CD peddlers who crossed the line from protected First Amendment activity to misdemeanor \u201caggravated harassment\u201d were routinely arrested and removed from Times Square and possibly locked away. But we live in a different city now.<\/p>\n

In 1975, the Council for Public Safety issued an infamous pamphlet titled: \u201cWelcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York.\u201d It advised tourists, among other things, to stay off the streets after 6 p.m., protect their property and safeguard their handbags and \u201cnever ride the subway for any reason whatsoever.\u201d<\/p>\n

The city is still better off than in 1975 \u2014 but that\u2019s far from the standard to which a great city should aspire. De Blasio has assured New Yorkers that \u201cwe\u2019re not going back to the bad old days when there was so much violence in this city.\u201d Three innocents shot in Times Square over the weekend might have a different view.<\/p>\n

Craig Trainor\u00a0is a criminal-defense and civil-rights attorney in New York. Adapted from\u00a0City Journal<\/a>.<\/em>\n <\/div>\n

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“#Saturday\u2019s Times Square shooting may mark a crossroads for NYC” Last year in New York City, murders\u00a0rose\u00a045 percent and shootings 97 percent, numbers that have continued to\u00a0rise\u00a0in 2021. But New Yorkers don\u2019t need statistics to understand that the city\u2019s descent into chaos is accelerating. Saturday\u2019s brazen\u00a0shooting\u00a0in Times Square \u2014 in which three innocent bystanders were…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":249541,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/05\/NEWYORK-SHOOTING_-1.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[105606,5042,4953,7342,70756],"class_list":["post-249540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-5-13-21","tag-bill-de-blasio","tag-new-york-city","tag-shootings","tag-times-square"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}