New York City

I didn’t meet Davell Gardner Jr. Yet his photo — and the bubbly personality it captures — will forever remain etched in my mind. The picture shows a baby with fuzzy curls; trusting, happy eyes; a beaming, gap-toothed smile. His chubby, loaf-like baby hands remind me of my own kids’ hands, which I often can’t help kissing or blowing raspberries on. There he is, crawling on his dad’s belly, enjoying one of the last playtimes of his life. On July 12 last year, a convoy of three cars pulled up in front of a residential building on Pulaski Street, in Brooklyn. Suspecting potential gang activity, officers in an NYPD cruiser flashed their lights, and one of the cars, a Volkswagen Jetta, sped away. The cops gave chase, exactly as the gangsters had hoped they would.

Though Joe Biden has now accepted that violence is occurring in many major American cities and has started blaming Donald Trump for it, many of his supporters haven't gotten the memo. A new trend among some high-profile left-wingers is to gaslight Americans by posting daytime photos of well-to-do areas of cities undamaged by the riots as proof that the riots aren't real. Meanwhile, tear gas and fires engulf entire blocks at nighttime. Josh Campbell, a former FBI agent and CNN contributor, kicked off the trend by tweeting September 1: 'Good morning from wonderful Portland, where the city is not under siege and buildings are not burning to the ground. I also ate my breakfast burrito outside today and so far haven’t been attacked by shadowy gangs of Antifa commandos.

Walk along the leafy streets of any neighborhood in so-called 'brownstone Brooklyn' — Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Heights — and you’ll see 'Defund the Police' in many a home window. Owners of $3 million brownstones proudly proclaim their agreement with a fringe policy, designed to remove resources from police squads, as a solution to police violence. How exactly less funding for police will result in better policing is unclear, but virtue signaling of the kind that has rich people pushing for fewer resources for poor people doesn’t get tangled up in the details. The details are specifically grim. The New York Post reported on Monday that 'between Monday, June 29, and Sunday, July 5, the city saw 74 shooting incidents with 101 victims'.

New York City was the center of the most severe coronavirus outbreak in the United States, with equally severe lockdown policies to match it. However, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio drew international attention for what seemed to be exceptionally strict enforcement of social distancing measures upon Orthodox Jewish communities.As the Mayor walked shoulder-to-shoulder with Black Lives Matter protesters and turned a blind eye to unfettered looting, his police officers patrolled Brooklyn, threatening Hasidic communities with arrest for attending evening prayers.De Blasio’s uneven enforcement of lockdown policies earned him a rebuke from Eric Dreiband, the US Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division.

Joan Didion wrote that New York is a city only for the very rich, the very poor and the very young. That was in her cult classic 1967 essay ‘Goodbye To All That’, in which she created the farewell-to-New York genre. It’s a quote I carried with me through my twenties, from one grim apartment to the next, each smaller, farther out and more expensive than the last. This is simply the nature of the place, I told myself. If you don’t like it, move somewhere else. Many of us emerged from Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s luxury dictatorship in the aughts with a sense of battle fatigue.

New York City is crumbling into shambolic lawlessness and its citizens are growing more afraid and frustrated by the day.Why?Because Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have once again proven to be categorically incompetent leaders incapable of working effectively together in a time of crisis.On Tuesday, the Governor was forced to confront the glaring issue that the state’s top concern had shifted from COVID prevention to the demolition of its biggest metropolis by unruly riots. During his daily press conference, Cuomo took the opportunity to chastise the Mayor and the NYPD for the turmoil, calling Mayor de Blasio’s handling of it a ‘disgrace’.

Bumbling Bill de Blasio is all thumbs, and not just on Twitter. Slow to respond when Orthodox Jews suffered an unprecedented wave of violence on his streets, the mayor of New York City quickly ejaculated a blanket warning of mass arrests to ‘the Jewish community’ after several hundred members of a Hasidic sect attended a funeral — a funeral, de Blasio now admits, that his office and the NYPD’s commissioned knew of in advance. https://twitter.com/nycmayor/status/1255309615883063297?s=21 COVID-19 is full of nasty surprises. But who would have put ‘mayor of New York City rounds up the Jews’ on their pandemic bingo card? The mayor now threatens to ‘summons or even arrest’ Jews if they gather in ‘large groups’.

If the coronavirus were as deadly as the bubonic plague, which killed about a third of the population of Europe in the 1340s, there would be no doubt about the need for extreme measures. But this virus spares far more people than it kills, and is sometimes mild to the point of invisibility, even as it proves lethal to others. It’s almost as though nature had calibrated the virus exactly to the point where risk-avoiders saw the lockdown as vital for survival while risk-accepters saw it as so economically destructive as to be worse than the disease itself. America is polarized not just politically but in its attitude to risk.