New York City Is Coming Undone

The report was issued by mayor Bill de Blasio’s very own administration. It tells us that under de Blasio’s hard leftist and grossly incompetent administration New York City has, as the New York Post describes it, become undone.

It is worth emphasizing that the mayor, like many leftist politicians, thinks that it’s all a matter of perception and interpretation. That is, de Blasio thinks that it’s a public relations problem, requiring more briefings by him. 

And yet, while de Blasio has declared war on the police, gangsters tried to rob a group of restaurant patrons on the notably trendy East 60th St. and Madison Ave. last week. And a group from Texas attacked a hostess at a Times Square restaurant because she asked them to show their vaccine IDs. As of now, as might be expected, the hostess and the restaurant are being accused of being racist, because the prospective patrons were black. And let’s not forget the man who pushed a woman down an escalator for saying, “Excuse me!”

So, the New York Post reports:

New York City has come undone in Bill de Blasio’s final year as mayor, with even his big-ticket initiatives proving disastrous while Hizzoner continued to focus on his public image with daily briefings about a pandemic even he acknowledged the city was ready to put in the rear-view, stunning new statistics show.

The Mayor’s Management Report, released late Friday, reveals a city that is fundamentally unsafe due to police cuts and failure to enforce laws already on the books — all against the backdrop of a big dip in school enrollment amid a push to scrap advanced classes for gifted children.

Obviously, New York has been suffering a crime wave. Since the crimes are almost always being committed by people of color, the mayor merely pretends not to care. Or else, he blames it on the pandemic.

City streets — the mayor’s No. 1 priority under his keystone initiative, “Vision Zero,” are less safe as 275 people – including 133 pedestrians – were killed in traffic accidents, a 30-percent jump over the previous year and the most since 2014

Meanwhile, the NYPD managed to arrest just 13 drivers for striking pedestrians with their cars, despite recording nearly 1,800 such collisions. And the number of speeding and failure-to-yield summonses issued by cops dropped by more than 27 percent and more than 63 percent, respectively.

In the meantime Comrade Bill has been fighting climate change. This is pathetic and embarrassing. 

Despite the mayor’s frequent pronouncements about the urgency of fighting climate change, the city added no new Select Bus Service miles this past fiscal year – and the number of new bike lanes was the lowest since 2016.

As for the crime wave, here are some of the numbers:

While the number of major felony offenses in the city increased just 0.6 percent over last year, some crimes were far more prevalent than others. There were 489 cases of murder and non-negligent manslaughter in fiscal year 2021, a 38.9 percent jump over the same 12-month period last year.

Fiscal year 2021 was also a bad time to bring your car into the city, as the number of grand larceny auto cases increased by 47.2 percent.

The number of traffic deaths in the city soared in the past 12 months as 275 people — including 123 pedestrians — were killed in crashes, a 30-percent jump from the 211 traffic-related fatalities reported during the same 12-month period in 2020 and the most deaths on city streets since 2014 when 285 people died.

Obviously, the crime wave correlated with less policing:

Despite the carnage, the number of summonses issued by cops dropped an astonishing 57 percent from pre-pandemic levels.

The NYPD reported writing just 298,377 violations of driving laws between July 1, 2020 and June 31, 2021, the twelve month span covered by the report.

That’s just a fraction of the 696,012 summons cops handed out over the same time period in 2019, when the Big Apple clocked just 218 traffic-related deaths.

And then there were the fires, also on the rise:

The number of serious fires per 1,000 structure fires jumped above 70 for the first time since fiscal year 2017, and some of those blazes proved deadly.

In fiscal year 2021, 64 civilians died from injuries sustained in fires, a 20 percent increase from Fiscal 2020.

The FDNY also saw an increase in total service-connected injuries, with a 12 percent increase in firefighter injuries and a 15 percent increase in firefighter burns.

When it came to jails, the de Blasio administration was more likely to catch and release than to incarcerate and indict. This has not improved conditions in the city’s prisons:

About 70 percent of current inmates are awaiting trial for a violent felony offense and gang members now make up 23 percent of the jail population, up from 17 percent last year. Violent incidents in city jails also spiked from 80 per month last year to 98 this year, a 23 percent increase.

The report blames the violence on two of the mayor’s favorite bogeymen — the pandemic and the backlogged state court system.

The DOC is trying to quell the chaos by breaking up housing of gang members and cracking down on “serious violent actions” by inmates, but the staffing shortage is so dire that there aren’t enough correction officers to bring inmates to the infirmary. Health clinic visits decreased by a whopping 68 percent from last year.

Keep in mind, these are the mayor’s own statistics. Quality of life has declined in New York. Crime has been on the rise. The good news is that within a few months the radical leftist de Blasio administration will be gone. We can only hope that the new mayor, Eric Adams, will be more competent. It would not take very much.