Hung out to dry
in the Big Apple

Things aren’t good in New York, my home for 26 years, and a city that, despite its parking hassles and general vexations, remains very close to my heart. My son and his girlfriend abandoned their Upper West Side apartment to hole up in the safety of her parents’ home in civilised Connecticut. As for my ex, she’s having an intruder bar installed on her apartment’s front door. It’s a device — an iron bar fitted at a 45-degree angle into a notch in the door and another embedded in the floor — making it impossible for the unwanted to get past. It would have been in place already if not for the installer being inundated with scores of other orders. “I haven’t felt so unsafe since the bad old days,” she said over the phone. “It’s like everything Giuliani did to make this town right has been obliterated.”

Another New Yorker, an old friend, wasn’t at home when I called. “He’s gone upstate to get his rifle from the cabin,” his wife reported.

How could the world’s greatest city have come to this? In the video above, starting at about two minutes in, Pat Lynch, president of the New York City Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the union for rank and file cops, lays it all out in glorious ‘dem’ and ‘dose’ nooyawkese. He’s a heck of an orator and the point he makes is tragic: New York’s mayor, his own police superiors, the state’s governor and its legislature have left the thin blue line out there in no man’s land, caught between the mob one side and, on the other, politicians prepared to see their city destroyed rather than incur the ferals’ wrath. Across America in Democrat-run cities and states — and the hardest hit are all Democrat-run — the same looters, the same fear, the same cowardice.

Lynch speaks for about 10 minutes and every second is worth hearing. One man, at least, is prepared to tell the truth.

And at National Review there is this roundup from Dan McLoughlin, who explains one facet of the game plan behind the slogan of the moment:

The hot protest slogan and hashtag of the moment is “Defund the Police.” At times, it’s also framed as a call to abolish or disband the police. Ordinary speakers of the English language would naturally assume, listening to people chant “defund the police” in the streets, carry “defund the police” signs, and literally paint “defund the police” on the streets of D.C., that such people mean “defund the police.”

But not our media! There’s been an immediate rush to write pieces explaining that, of course, “defund the police” does not actually mean “defund the police.” . . .

Notably, articles of this nature seek to draw the eye towards legislative and think-tank proposals and away from the voices of the people actually chanting in the streets.

There’s another way, too, of hearing the “defund” chant — as a pretext to politicise police forces. The Left, as evidenced by the ABC, our universities, senior ranks of the public service and every other formerly neutral institution that has been colonised, cannot abide any body or organisation it does not control. This is how the plan to make the police partisan enforcers and examples of leftist dogma is unfolding.

— roger franklin