East of Central Park, three of New York’s most prestigious parallel thoroughfares, Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue and Park Avenue are, as usual, lit up with a thousand lights. But they are no longer those of the illuminated signs of the city that never sleeps. It is that of the flames of police cars and luxury shops burning. Anti-police demonstrations by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement have been ravaging Manhattan, the heart of the financial capital of the United States, since May 30. The scale of the phenomenon is unprecedented in the city. “Pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon ”, scream the most excited of the “activists”, throwing objects of all kinds, preferably dangerous, at the men of the New York Police Department (NYPD). Several extremely violent scenes were thus filmed. Among them, the aggression of traders trying to defend their store or those of isolated police officers. More often than not, the other demonstrators let it be or encourage the most enraged among them by their insults to the police. At the heart of the clashes, more than 60 officers were transferred to hospital emergencies. Police officers lightly injured by broken glass and others are not included in this accounting. The nights and weekends of violence follow one another regularly in a city already on its knees by the Covid-19 epidemic.
Since the start of the crisis, more than 500,000 residents, mostly the wealthiest, have fled downtown Manhattan. For four months, the metro, which usually carries 5.7 million passengers a day, remained grimly deserted, restaurants were emptied, JFK airport silenced and hotels became worthy of those of a city. ghost. Unemployment like everywhere else made its appearance while the city was in full employment. On Broadway, the only show that was still on view was of the Salvation Army distributing meals.
On the health front, New York State holds the sad record for the highest number of deaths in the United States from Covid-19 with more than 32,000 deaths, nearly eleven times the number of victims of the 11 September and 17,000 more than its neighbor New Jersey, in second place on this grim podium. This while the circulation of the virus, with more than 50,000 new cases per day since the beginning of July in the country, is still not slowing down and that we fear to be forced to reconfine.
June 28: 11 gunshot wounds in less than twelve hours …
This combination of Covid-19, economic collapse and societal riots will in a few weeks have brought New York back to its cut-throat state, which we would have preferred to see recorded in series B, Kojak to the sticky atmosphere of Hill Street Blues or movie Taxi Driver. That of the years 1970-1990. The one before the election of Rudy Giuliani in 1994, the Republican mayor who, thanks to his zero tolerance policy, made the city a livable place and even the safest of the big megalopolises of the United States.
The NYPD figures speak for themselves: for the first half of 2020, it counts 176 murders, an increase of 23% compared to 2019. The number of shootings between January 1 and July 12, is 634, against 396 at the same period of the previous year. An increase of 60%. Between May 16 and June 12, the metropolitan police recorded 318 shooting victims against 97 during the same period of 2019. On June 28, there were 11 gunshot wounds in less than twelve hours. The weekend of July 11-12 alone saw 34 new injuries and the death of a 1-year-old child. This even as New York City enforces America’s toughest “Safe” law, enacted in 2012, after the attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School. The rest of the statistics are to match: this year, the police were only able to arrest one in four shooters, against one in three usually, there are also increases of 45% for burglaries since the start of the year and 59% for auto theft.
A situation that did not escape the American president, himself New Yorker. From tweet to tweet, he castigates the policies of Bill de Blasio, the Democratic mayor of the Big Apple who succeeded Michael Bloomberg in 2014. He accuses him of having refused the intervention of the National Guard, which severely limited the damage in Washington and several other major cities. He also criticizes him for wanting to reduce the funding of the city police by $ 1 billion out of the 6 allocated to the NYPD (the municipal budget is itself down due to the economic situation, to 88.1 billion). This cut cancels the hiring of 1,163 new officers. De Blasio does it well, having come himself, on July 9, to put a touch of yellow paint on the huge letters “Black Lives Matter” painted on the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue, just in front of Trump Tower. But beyond the opposition between the two men, it is all the lax policy of De Blasio which is today in charge. The mayor of the city has always had his heart on the left. As a student, he campaigned alongside the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and even spent his honeymoon in Cuba. Candidate for the Democratic primary for the next presidential election, this close friend of Hillary Clinton had joined the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. He destroyed almost all of Giuliani’s legacy.
Five hundred suspects freed, committing 846 new crimes
The first step in his policy was to end the “Stop and Frisk” policy, which allowed the police to “arrest and search” any individual on the basis of “reasonable” suspicion. At the height of the riots, some 400 looters were arrested in flagrante delicto, but they were quickly released after an immediate appearance before a judge. In fact, the mayor’s reforms introduced, at the beginning of 2020, a modification of the bail cases for a certain number of offenses with or without violence, including the case of second-degree manslaughter or even aggravated assault against a vehicle. The majority of those arrested who have been charged with third-degree burglary of a commercial building (understand looting) thus fall into category D, which does not require the suspect to pay bail. Just before the city was confined, the figures for March gave the following indications: in the first 58 days of the year, nearly 500 suspects who should have remained behind bars were released, committing 846 new crimes alone, of which 300 fall under the categories of murder, rape, assault and burglary.
This alarming situation and these figures did not seem to change the political roadmap of the Democratic mayor. On the contrary, in mid-June, he proposed to continue reducing the budgets allocated to the NYPD as requested by BLM activists for the benefit of “Youth and social services” . Even more than the budget, de Blasio also wants to limit the judicial police prerogatives of New York agents, particularly against street vendors. It is also planned that the secrecy of the disciplinary file of the agents is no longer protected by law.
For police unions, the situation is not only untenable, but above all unprecedented. The New York police have had difficult times in recent decades, especially in certain areas of the city such as the Bronx or Harlem confronted with ultraviolent gangs, they have also known before the mafias years of prohibition, corruption in more level, but it had never been publicly disowned by its leader, the mayor of New York in person.
Disillusionment is strong among those who, along with the city’s firefighters, had become for many the heroes of September 11, 2001. “What Bin Laden failed to do is De Blasio who will get there”, can we read on the social networks of the metropolitan police.
“Politicians and the media treat the police like animals”
For example, Michael O’Meara, the boss of the New York State Association of Police Benevolent Associations, a federation of police unions, calls for politicians and the media to stop treating his colleagues like “Animals and thugs” He denounces an ideological anti-slam campaign intended to instill fear and hatred of the police, especially in the African-American community. O’Meara says the NYPD has 375 million interactions with the public each year and they are positive. “But what we read in the newspapers all week is that in the black community, mothers are worried that their children will come home from school without being killed by a cop. “
And in fact, de Blasio is starting to tire out certain layers of the big city’s mille-feuille. Thus, in the midst of the epidemic, he authorized and personally participated in BLM demonstrations, but also transgender. At the same time, he was closing for health reasons a park in the Williamsbug neighborhood of Brooklyn, frequented by Orthodox Jewish families, a community with which he is in trouble unlike liberal Jews. Last April, he had dispersed, precisely by the police, a funeral in the Orthodox Jewish community. Two Catholic priests and three Orthodox Jewish worshipers are suing New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo, also a Democrat, and the mayor, for religious discrimination over their attitude against the city’s places of worship, which contrasts with the policy they applied to their friends. These measures are all the more shocking given that the violence committed against this easily identifiable historic New York community has also increased in recent months.
On July 12, NYPD chief Terence Monahan also commented on this chaotic situation, explaining that since the BLM riots, “His men felt they were handcuffed and feared being arrested while protecting the population”.
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