Crime rates

Daniel Penny is heading back to a New York courthouse today to face charges for the murder of Jordan Neely. Penny, with the help two other bystanders, held Neely, who had a criminal history and mental health issues, in a chokehold after Neely made repeated threats to other passengers on a subway car. Neely died during the incident — and Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg chose to indict Penny for second-degree murder, despite downgrading over 50 percent of felonies to misdemeanors in 2022. Crime has risen in New York City since 2020, and the city has done precious little to address it, though Mayor Eric Adams has been slightly more proactive than his predecessor, Bill de Blasio. Go back a few decades, however, and you find the Big Apple in an almost unimaginably worse situation.

Gavin Newsom is running for president. Sure, he hasn’t announced it and has claimed he’s “all in” for Biden, but he’s increasingly taking time off from personally disrupting the nation’s Dapper Dan supply chain in order to weigh in on national issues, measure the drapes, and attempt to troll Republican governors. His latest salvo, directed toward Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was sworn in as Arkansas’ governor about 15 minutes ago, claims that “While [Sanders] touts public safety, here is what she skips over: Arkansas has the one of the highest murder rates in the nation.” This is, of course, true. In 2020, the last year for which CDC stats are available, Arkansans have a much greater chance of being murdered than Californians.

As grown up as I felt at nine, whenever my parents let me walk to school, the corner store or Prospect Park with friends, I’d have been lying through my teeth if I denied sometimes feeling afraid — even in the little slice of Brooklyn I called home. But it wasn’t the New York Police Department or endemic racism that made me anxious. In the 1990s, getting mugged or beaten up in my own neighborhood always felt like more than a remote possibility. That sense of wariness was dull and could easily be forgotten if I was distracted. But it was always there, just under the surface. That anxiety disappeared when we moved to a mostly white town in suburban Long Island. At school, no one looked like me.