Crime

Tuesday

Cockburn

Charles Barkley wants to wash the crime out of San Francisco

From our US edition

While nursing a cold pint, Cockburn felt glad for the first time in his life to catch a game of basketball. More specifically, he felt glad to hear commentator Charles Barkley say, “You know the bad thing about all this rain? It’s not raining in San Francisco to clean off those dirty ass streets... y’all gotta clean that off the streets… San Francisco needs a good washing.” Being quite the worldly man himself, Cockburn has heard the phrase “as California goes, so goes the nation” before. However, since San Francisco is the only place to have a fecal matter map, this brought with it a subtle worry that only more alcohol could assuage. However, Barkley may be right. San Francisco is certainly in need of a good washing. Rampant homelessness, crime, and drugs flood the streets.

Monday

Peter Wood

A flag under foot

From our US edition

On my way to work in Midtown Manhattan each day, I pass down 50th Street. Near the corner of Broadway, not long ago someone glued an American flag to the sidewalk and set fire to it. The scorched remnants cry out in resistance to the attempted insult and erasure. I have no idea what protest prompted this indignity, or whether the person who sealed the flag to where pedestrians would trample it was the same who decided to set it on fire. I haven’t noticed any passersby taking special note of Old Glory reduced to such an inglorious state, surrounded by cigarette butts and other debris. This isn’t New York City’s fault. We are amid more pressing crises. The subway entrance nearby — one of the main points of access to Midtown — reeks of urine and sometimes worse.

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Thursday

Gilbert T. Sewall

Chesa Boudin’s soft-on-crime policies will doom him

From our US edition

California’s ballots went out early this month, and the drawn-out mail-in primary election ends on June 7. Turnout looks to be low, as there are no competitive statewide races, and November elections are a lock for the Democratic incumbents. Governor Gavin Newsom has one eye on the camera and the other on the White House. Senator Alex Padilla — appointed last year by Newsom to fill Kamala Harris’s seat — is a reliable placeman for the ruling Democratic junta. The contest that politicos will be watching is an up-or-down recall vote for San Francisco’s district attorney Chesa Boudin. It would be a major upset if he kept his job. He might be deposed in a landslide, as was San Francisco’s zany school board, or lose more narrowly.

chesa boudin
Taki

Welcome to post-truth America

A couple more weeks in the Bagel and then on to dear old London. I’ve had a very good time partying with young friends here, but the place reeks, literally as well as metaphorically. The rate of violence is creeping up, with gangs shooting at each other even on 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, right where the poor little Greek boy grew up. Where a commemorative plaque marking young Taki’s residence should have been put up long ago for services to American women, there was a corpse. The next day, it was forgotten, as an 11-year-old was gunned down in the Bronx. What used to be extreme radicalism is now the reigning ideology of every major American city. Speech patterns have changed, and the meanings of words are perceived not in the way they were intended.

Thursday

Nate Hochman

Oregon’s nasty woman

From our US edition

Tina Kotek could be well on her way to being the thirty-ninth governor of Oregon. The Democrat, who previously served as speaker of the state’s House of Representatives, won her party’s primary this Tuesday. And with a Democratic supermajority in the legislature and a governor’s mansion that hasn’t housed a Republican since 1979, that’s likely a one-way ticket to victory in November. Kotek is, in many ways, a creature of the state Democratic establishment. Yet in Oregon — and in blue states like it — “establishment Democrat” means something very different than it once did.

Douglas Murray

The dishonesty of how we respond to tragedies

It isn’t hard to notice that some crimes are more important than others. Or at least more politically advantageous. It is six years since Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered in her constituency by somebody who appeared to be a sort of aspiring Nazi. Back then, various campaign groups and newspapers in this country had no problems with claiming that guilt for that attack could be liberally spread around. Some said that everybody on the political right bore responsibility. Others claimed that anyone who was leading Britain’s ‘Leave’ campaign in the EU referendum shared the blame. It was different in October last year, when Sir David Amess MP was murdered – also in his constituency.

Wednesday

Gilbert T. Sewall

Fleeing dysfunctional America

From our US edition

America is sorting itself out by class and kind, back to blood and political pedigree. The demographic trend favors the so-called red states and the metro nodes inside these dominions. Austin, Reno, and Nashville beckon. Meanwhile, academic towns like Eugene, Chapel Hill, and Burlington draw gentry blues trying to escape crazy and crime but who are not in tune with Tulsa or Fargo. For big-city emigrants, fatigue with misgovernment, ill-spent government largesse, and racial disorder are part of the picture. As much as they are seeking uncrowded real estate, runaways are searching for courts, authorities, teachers, and stable neighbors whom they can trust.

Friday

James Snell

How Syria became another narco-state

From our US edition

There is a drug war brewing in the Middle East, and Syria is at its center. The country has been destroyed by its eleven-year civil war, and in the ruins of what was once a prosperous country, an entirely different economy now takes shape. It’s an economy of poverty and privation, where food and energy prices are perpetually high, and supplies of basic commodities are uncertain. The regime of Bashar al-Assad, now unlikely to be overthrown, has become the Middle East’s biggest moocher — a rent-seeking entity that begs for “reconstruction” funds from nearby monarchies to keep its own corrupt machinery in operation. Wartime brings its own economic calculations.

Thursday

Taki

The glory days of Central Park

I celebrate two Easters every year, the Catholic one and the Orthodox one, which means I get very drunk on two successive Sundays. Both days were spent with very good friends, which is a prerequisite at my age when under the influence. The Orthodox Resurrection ceremony at midnight in the cathedral was followed by a sumptuous Greek dinner at a gastronomic Hellenic restaurant, hosted by George and Lita Livanos, that ended around 3 a.m. Then it was time for a Southampton outing and yet another Greek lamb Easter lunch at Prince Pavlos’s not so humble seaside abode. And then it was time to hit the gym non-stop for the next 96 hours in order to get rid of the tonnage devoured in this most Christian of holidays.

Thursday

Taki

The sad demise of Brooks Brothers

New York Our own Douglas Murray is the canary in the Bagel coal mine as of late. The left controls culture, education and technology over here, but a few canaries are still free to warn the rest of us that we’re being taken for a ride. Here’s a warning to those multimillionaires who get down on one knee every weekend to make themselves feel better for getting lotsa moolah for playing a game in the sun. It has to do with black lives and whether they matter or not. Black lives do matter, but not to those who run the racket that goes by the acronym BLM. According to Murray, writing in the New York Post, the biggest lie is the racket behind the rhetoric. One year ago the details of BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors’s real-estate empire emerged.

Tuesday

Kara Kennedy

Criminalising ‘cyberflashing’ is a waste of time

It’s a fact of life that at any given time, a woman’s social media messages will be filled with three things. Young Ponzi schemers asking if you want to earn £500-a-month from the comfort of your own sofa; an unknown jewellery brand with 15 followers begging you to be their new ‘brand ambassador’; and blurry photos of a man’s penis. The men who send these pictures are weirdos, obviously. But if the government gets its way, soon they’ll also be criminals. The Online Safety Bill, going through parliament today, makes so-called ‘cyberflashing’ a criminal offence.

Thursday

Amber Duke

The Democrats’ twisted priorities on crime

From our US edition

Crime is on the rise in cities across America and the left is asleep at the wheel. Democrats are set to be routed in the upcoming midterm elections, but instead of getting onboard with tough-on-crime policies, they've focused their efforts on measures that are wildly out of touch with even their own voters. To start, Democrats have their pandemic lockdowns to thank for at least some of the crime crisis. Carjackings are up in cities, which experts attribute to teenagers who are not in school or extracurricular programs. James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, said that the pandemic has given people too much free time, which can lead to an uptick in crime.

US President Joe Biden holds a 9mm pistol build kit (Getty Images)

Tuesday

Teresa Mull

Biden cracks down even on green energy

From our US edition

We know that government’s knack for finding something wrong with everything rivals even the most stereotypical mother-in-law. But the relentless fault-finding’s latest victim may surprise you: federal prosecutors have fined a green energy company $8 million and slapped on a five-year probation period after bald and golden eagles died on its wind farms. There is now no such thing as “clean energy.” Even so-called “green energy” is tinged with the blood of birds. Just when you thought the war on energy couldn’t get any more ridiculous, Joe Biden's Department of Justice has sucker-punched one of its own golden boys.

i did that biden sticker
Cockburn

Is the Biden gas pump sticker arrest 2022’s greatest artwork?

From our US edition

Who is the most intriguing political artist of the Biden era? Cockburn is happy to welcome a new contender to the fray: Thomas Richard Glazewski of Manor Township, Pennsylvania. Glazewski is part of a daring street collective who have been posting stickers of Joe Biden on gas pumps. They show the president pointing with the caption “I did that!” and are placed next to the price of gasoline — which has risen significantly in the past year or so. The vinyl stickers — available on Amazon — are manufactured in China. Just like the Biden presidency, right? But Glazewski took his piece to a whole new level: risking his freedom last month, he turned his sticker protest into performance art by getting himself arrested. A viral video shows the artist’s arrest.

Thursday

John R. MacArthur

The descent of New York

New York When Will Smith strode to the stage and slapped Chris Rock, I was surprised by how many of my friends thought the violence had been staged to rescue the Academy Awards from its years-long ratings decline. I instantly recognised it as authentic rage, not because I know anything about Hollywood or Will Smith, but because I witness similar ugliness so frequently on the New York City subway. For me, Smith’s outburst was shockingly familiar – emblematic of a simmering, pre-volcanic atmosphere in the country that no one seems to be examining or attempting to explain.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Dick’s departure is Sadiq Khan’s victory

Sadiq Khan forced Cressida Dick out of her job as Metropolitan Police chief. Both made that very clear this evening, with Dick saying 'the mayor no longer has sufficient confidence in my leadership to continue', while Khan said he was 'not satisfied with the Commissioner's response' to his ultimatum for changing the Met's culture of misogyny, racism, homophobia and bullying. The Met is clearly an institutional basket case The Mayor of London has played a political blinder on this. Unlike Home Secretary Priti Patel, who has the ultimate authority on the appointment — and exit — of the Commissioner, he has been quick to respond to last week's report which revealed appalling messages exchanged by some officers at the Charing Cross station.

Casey Chalk

The deep conservatism of Agatha Christie

From our US edition

Some fiction, regardless of how intimately tethered to a time and place, is timeless. And the work of Agatha Christie certainly seems that way. Christie's novel Death on the Nile is now receiving renewed cinematic treatment under the expert hand of Kenneth Branagh, with the film scheduled for release on February 11. This follows the success of Branagh’s 2017 adaption of Murder on the Orient Express, which grossed $351 million against a production budget of $55 million. “Rest assured," says Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in Christie’s novel Five Little Pigs. "I am the best!” The same might be said of Christie herself, the world’s all-time bestselling fiction author.

Kevin Hurley

Anti-police spin is tearing the force apart

The police watchdog, the IOPC, has recently released a report into social media conversations between officers — and it makes for uncomfortable reading. Some of the comments are appalling, full of arrogance, racism and misogyny. But as we get ready to shower disdain on serving officers once again, I’d like to raise the question: what effect do you think this constant castigation of all police officers has? The offending messages were exchanged three to five years ago between half a dozen foolish or morally weak young officers. They were a small part of the successful, crime-busting, 120-strong West End Zone Impact Team. Yet politicians from all parties — Sadiq Khan, Diane Abbott, Priti Patel — reacted by berating the whole force.

Saturday

Grace Curley

The year left-wing ideas came home to roost

From our US edition

2022 is proving to be the year in which progressives’ genius ideas come home to roost. Instituting far-left policies in cities across America has resulted in disastrous outcomes. All this raises the question: which Democrats will stay loyal to the far-left “transformational” agenda and which will jump ship? Most liberal politicians have enjoyed this country’s tidal wave of wokeness up until now. Posting Instagram infographics and hash-tagging activism on Twitter plays well with younger voters. Real news has become almost indistinguishable from the Babylon Bee’s satire. In a single day, you can read about snowplow equity, M&Ms becoming more inclusive and students identifying as cats. Say what you will about the perpetually offended, they certainly are entertaining.

Wednesday

Robert Jackman

This year’s best crime dramas

You've got to hand it to Ozark, Jason Bateman's showy crime series about a slippery financial adviser who becomes immersed with Mexican drug cartels. In the years since its debut, the narco drama (whose final season arrived on Netflix last week) has been on somewhat of a journey. And then some. When it premiered back in 2017 – with an opening episode in which Bateman's character, Marty Bird, goes from sexless marriage to a near-death encounter with a drug kingpin – its shtick felt too obviously derivative to be taken seriously. Here was a drama, you felt, that had been commissioned for one purpose: to serve as Netflix's 'next up' show for viewers who'd just binged Breaking Bad and couldn't be bothered to reach for the remote.