Crime

It's time to move the seat of federal power to a Republican-run city until we can figure out what is going on. Monday night, Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar was carjacked at gunpoint in Navy Yard, a Washington, DC neighborhood just blocks away from the Capitol building. Cuellar's chief of staff Jacob Hochberg said that three men held up the congressman. Police recovered the vehicle, a white Honda, but are still tracking down the suspects. Cuellar is the second member of Congress to be the victim of random violent crime this year. In February, Democratic representative Angie Craig was attacked in an elevator at her Capitol Hill apartment building by a homeless man who demanded to be let into her home to use the restroom.

Police must investigate every theft. This is the message from the Home Secretary as the government heralds an agreement from all 43 police forces in England and Wales to follow up on any evidence where there is a ‘reasonable line of enquiry’. In practice, that means the police should investigate low-level crimes such as stolen bikes, phones and shoplifting when there is reasonable lead such as a GPS tracker, CCTV footage or a doorbell video. As I noted earlier this month in a cover piece for the magazine, ‘investigate every crime’ doesn’t sound like a particularly novel concept. It raises the question: Why weren’t police investigating every theft? Over the past few years, forces – including the Metropolitan Police – have largely given up on low-level crime.

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.

“If I wanted to, I could have had sex with people all the time,” said Kevin Spacey in court this week. Cockburn isn’t sure how the disgraced actor thought that would land during his cross examination for his London court case, where he pleaded not guilty to a dozen charges that include sexual and indecent assault counts and one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent. During his time in the witness box, the House of Cards actor had his final chance to convince jurors that he never assaulted anyone. The outcome of this case could affect whether he’s able to make a career comeback after sexual misconduct accusations. It isn’t exactly going swimmingly so far.

Ah, Seattle, that environmentally obsessed city where all is decorous, the sidewalks immaculately swept, the parks rigorously trimmed, proverbial for its shimmering lakes and charming rows of variegated tents housing those of no fixed abode — and recently, too, for a municipal government with much the same level of restraint as a bus being driven downhill by the Marx Brothers. Readers may be familiar with the strange phenomenon of a civic treasury that marries heady rhetoric about its prudent stewardship of public money with a cynical disregard for the suckers who actually foot the bills.

Political years are the opposite of dog years: they pass by in a blaze, with entire epochs elapsing in the course of a few news cycles. Ideas, even movements, fade abruptly, recalled only years later when you clean out your garage and stumble on that old tricorn hat from your Tea Party days. If you want to know how jarring political change can be, consider that at this time in the 2016 election cycle — around the late spring of 2015 — the predicted frontrunner for the GOP nomination was Rand Paul. This was no coincidence. In those days, we were said to be in the middle of something called a libertarian moment. Voters were leery of Barack Obama’s deficit spending, Washington’s endless wars, the NSA surveillance that had been unveiled by Edward Snowden.

Philadelphia will choose its next mayor tomorrow. The election isn’t until November, but Republicans don’t stand a chance in the City of Brotherly Love these days. So tomorrow’s Democratic primary is all that matters.  In this big-city race, crime and public safety has dominated the campaign, pitting moderate Democrats against progressives. If you feel like you’ve read that sentence before, it’s because you probably have, in relation to any number of major US cities in the last three years.  Since 2020, America’s metropolises have been the scene of blue-on-blue political fights over the interlocking issues of crime, homelessness, public order, criminal justice and Covid restrictions.

The mixed verdict delivered by the jury in the Donald Trump civil rape case will be interpreted differently by those who support and oppose the former president.   On the main count that Trump raped E. Jean Carroll, the nine-person jury unanimously found that he did not. The plaintiff could not even satisfy its low burden of proof, namely proof beyond a preponderance of the evidence. In so finding, the jury apparently disbelieved at least part of the plaintiff’s testimony. She was very specific about being raped, not merely sexually abused or molested, as the jury did find.   It’s a strange verdict.

Most of those who follow the news have already seen the distressing video. A black man, Jordan Neely, walked onto a New York subway train screaming obscenities and ranting about his own destitution. Another passenger, a former Marine called Daniel Penny, came up behind him, took him to the ground and placed him into a chokehold. Neely lost consciousness and died. A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist could not create a better scenario that perfectly exemplifies everyone’s societal meta-narratives, a Rorschach test onto which we can map our assumptions and biases. It resembles a “what do you see? Two women or a wine glass?” kind of picture. Is this a black man, destroyed and choked by oppression, or the inevitable result of societal decay?