Crime

New York attorney general Letitia “Tish” James has a lot on her plate just now. Sadly none of it has anything to do with fighting the surging crime throughout the state and the nation’s largest city. Instead James has her sights narrowly set on a civil lawsuit against Donald Trump and his family. She even found the time last week to fire off a tweet angrily complaining that a Yankees game was not being broadcast live. Clearly keeping New Yorkers safe is not on James’s agenda. In fairness, James’s persecution of the Trump clan is a campaign promise kept. On the night she won the AG race in 2018 she told her adoring crowd that, “I will be shining a bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings, and every dealing, demanding truthfulness at every turn.

Cockburn is partial to a murder mystery, but in some cases it seems that the mainstream media are going out of their way to hide relevant facts. The Associated Press, for example, serves the important function of scribbling up neutral versions of smaller local stories and syndicating them nation- and worldwide. It's intriguing, therefore, that when the wire service reported on the trial of the Clark County public administrator Robert Telles allegedly killing a Las Vegas investigative journalist, they conveniently forgot to mention that he’s a Democrat. While Cockburn is sure that the AP made an honest mistake, like every yuppie he has found himself on his fair share of crime scenes. Getting a sense of things is generally pretty easy: Colonel Mustard with the dagger in the library.

Throughout the Covid shutdowns, I felt like Wendy Kroy in The Last Seduction. If you’ve never seen the movie, the only thing you need to know is that a running theme is that the protagonist, hiding out upstate after stealing a lot of money, has got to get back to New York. Even the alias she uses is “New York” spelled backwards (sort of). For nearly two years, every morning I’d wake up thinking, I’ve got to get back to New York. Well, I’m back, and this isn’t what I meant at all. I wanted to be in the city that never sleeps, where I could walk around carefree, even at night, take the subway, and live within a few blocks of every possible convenience. Instead, this happened.

Donald Trump headlined CPAC Texas, delivering a series of broadsides to the Biden administration to a packed arena at Dallas’s Hilton Anatole. The more than 2,500 seats were filled — with even more guests lining the aisles. Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, was supposed to introduce the 45th president — but found herself bumped at the expense of Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, for reasons that remain unclear. Prior to the former president’s speech, a short film played on the large TV monitors. “We are a nation in decline,” a Trump voiceover began. “We are a failing nation.” Gloomy black-and-white footage followed, accompanied by thunder and rain sounds. A screenshot of Trump’s suspended Twitter account was perhaps the most moving image.

This week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made another shrewd political move, showing why many Republicans think he is their best shot to win back the White House. DeSantis suspended Tampa’s woke prosecutor, Andrew Warren, for failing to do his duty and enforce the law. The governor didn’t just assert his power. He laid out a clear, detailed, substantive case for why he is suspending Warren from office. DeSantis’s move was both smart politically and sound constitutionally (assuming the courts uphold his suspension). Let’s take the politics first. Poll after poll shows rising crime is one of the country’s top issues, second only to inflation. What DeSantis’s suspension of Warren did was to make crime and punishment his own issue — one he was willing to act upon.

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.

On Thursday, a man jumped onstage and tried to kill one of the two candidates running for New York governor. Fortunately, he failed. Even so, the incident was terrifying, not only because it endangered Representative Lee Zeldin but because it underscores two grave problems facing America. One is the failure of our law enforcement system to treat serious crimes seriously, both to deter them and punish the offenders. This failure makes it a misnomer to speak of our “criminal justice” system. It’s not providing justice, and it's not deterring crime, especially violent crime. The second is the danger violence poses to our established constitutional order, beyond its danger to any individual.

Austin Simon, the thirty-five-year-old convicted felon who assaulted a bodega worker in the Hamilton Heights section of Manhattan earlier this month, might still be alive today — if it weren’t all but impossible for law-abiding New Yorkers to obtain a firearm. Simon — dressed in diamond jewelry and a $300 T-shirt — stepped behind the counter to assault sixty-one-year-old Jose Alba, after Simon’s girlfriend’s EBT card was declined when she attempted to purchase a bag of potato chips. A single shot to the leg would have neutralized Simon long enough for law enforcement and paramedics to arrive. Instead, a gory, now-viral, confrontation ensued.

There are two ways to think about Chicago. The depressing one is to follow the news. These days it’s pretty bad. In mid-May, two people were killed and seven wounded when a gunman fired into a crowd outside a McDonald’s restaurant on the Near North Side. I know the McDonald’s well. I went to high school nearby, and my three children attended the elementary school across the street. Once scruffy, the area is now affluent. Overlooking the murder site is a seventy-five-story tower where condos sell for up to $6.1 million. The building’s developer described the shootings as “isolated to [that] location.” If only. In fact, it was the tenth mass shooting in the city this year, CBS News Chicago reported.

There’s a new federal gun law in the works and it's being heralded as a “bipartisan breakthrough agreement on gun violence.” I can’t even get past the first sentence without issuing an objection, your honor! Because the proposed gun control package is just more manipulative language aimed at eroding Second Amendment rights. “Gun violence” makes it sound as if the guns are the ones causing the violence. The same goes for “gun safety” — a term President Biden used in response to this proposed legislation, which will not make guns any safer or less violent. Guns are inanimate objects, neither violent nor safe. They don’t spontaneously combust. People do.

President Joe Biden delivered a speech yesterday in response to the Uvalde school shooting that can be summed up in one sentence: “I don’t trust you.” There are at least 20 million so-called “assault rifles” in the US, and in proposing to ban these weapons, Biden and his supporters are purporting that the very presence of guns causes people to be violent — that in the absence of laws making it illegal for us to kill each other, we will all inevitably become mass shooters. An assault weapons ban and increased background checks are the only things, they say, capable of stopping us from becoming one of the demented gunmen who inflict tragedy and evil on our world.

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.