Read on Twitter
This sharp 45 sec video illustrates what the last month of endless eyerolling has been like for those of us on NYC community boards, as we watch the Post and local TV “cover,” and retired cops on LI wail about, an imaginary emergency. https://twitter.com/johntrowbridge/status/1296470147075657731
I’ve had 10 conversations in 2 weeks with friends in the NYC suburbs (and further) who either 1) worry for my safety because of Everything That’s Happening (??) or 2) drove in from Westchester and everything seemed normal, they were wondering where the wreckage and peril are.
(And I’m forced to scroll past Trump ads on YouTube about how New York City is on fire and uninhabitable (lol) and don’t let Them do that to the Suburban Housewives in your neighborhood!!1!)
Meanwhile, in most of actual NYC, serious crime is down (burglary and auto theft are up, and shootings are up but on a very low 2019 base). Every part of town I’ve been to (and I get around) seems pretty much ... normal *for the people who actually live here*, allowing for covid.
Neighborhoods like Midtown that are occupied in normal times by office workers (many from outside the city) and their service businesses, or tourists, are quiet. That’s an economic and social problem. It’s not a public safety problem (arguably it’s the opposite!).
We will have to deal with the economic fallout. But honestly, making Midtown and Soho fun playgrounds again for people who own West Village row houses and Williamsburg penthouses and Chappaqua 5-bedrooms is not a priority!
Most small businesses are struggling. Many are struggling a lot. Some have closed, or will. That’s bad. It will mean changes to the experience of living in the city, including for the worse. But it’s not a public safety problem.
And there are more homeless NYers, as in every US city at a time when people are (wait for it) losing their homes. NYers with nowhere to live is a bad thing! Which we should deal with! But the fact that you have to notice those people is not in itself a public safety problem.
Now, we do have problems, don’t get me wrong. The NYPD are butthurt because people called them out after watching them beat people for two months, and some officers, like angry peacocks, are (allegedly) performatively declining to do their jobs. That’s a public safety problem.
The mayor has watched drivers get more and more reckless, after four months of empty streets changed behavior; watched bicycling explode despite limited and strained safety infrastructure; and decided not to do anything. That’s a public safety problem.
But when I sit at a bar and listen to a guy complain that “multiple stabbings night after night are making it impossible to stay” in our quiet neighborhood, my only response is (open arms gesture) “enjoy Tucson” (the place he’s “threatening” to move to).
People are allowed to leave NYC! It’s not a minimum-security prison! And as we all know, NYC often sucks! But when so many people lie, abetted by the Post, and say they’re “forced to” leave due to an imaginary safety problem, they contribute to an *actual* safety problem.
Among other things, people propagandized into seeing danger where none exists will demand, and get, more cops, and give them leeway to be abusive (which is why the NYPD unions are fomenting this). And, folks... there’s milk in my fridge old enough to remember where that leads.
One more thing: my point is not “real NYers suck it up, back in the day the streets were full of authentic hoodlums the way we liked it.” My point is that 8 million people (3 million families) *live here.* Telling a made-up story about how bad it is here doesn’t serve us!
Hearing "Soho House" reminds me that in 2011, a friend visiting from Milwaukee and I were kept out of the Ace Hotel bar on 29th St on a Thursday night for being too Midwestern and too fat, respectively. Some things some people miss about NYC this week were never for everyone.
(And I'm not bitter! Who cares? I can go to that festering pit of techbro conference-calling at 11:30 in the morning if I want. But it was kind of embarrassing for me to bring my friend two miles across town, at his request, and then not be able to get us in.)
