In a post George Floyd world, few residents support petty crime crackdowns
This past weekend I spent an hour exercising in an underground Harlem gym, where the work-out was accompanied by copious amounts of marijuana. Everything about the experience was illegal: the basement of the bustling restaurant where we worked our core as waiters ferried food orders. The pot – although technically legal in New York State – was being smoked in an unlicensed distribution site. What’s more, the marijuana itself was grown in the Pacific Northwest, technically illegal in New York State where all marijuana consumed must be grown, yes, in New York.
There’s a new sense of lawlessness coursing through New York City, and I’m not talking about the city’s well-documented crime spikes. I mean a return to rampant low-level vice that feels at once entirely out of control – yet inexplicably well-behaved – and thoroughly post-pandemic. From the city’s thousands of unlicensed pot dispensaries and the throngs of illegal vendors now crowding the Brooklyn Bridge, to my clandestine Uptown exercising and the dozens of Queens prostitutes now operating in broad daylight, New York’s newest tag-line might as well be “anything goes.”
But this new era of openness is not without consequence, particularly as the police prove ineffective at reigning in the illicitness. Nationwide confidence in law enforcement dropped to a new low last year, including in New York, where the local force has been battered by budget cuts, misconduct probes and accusations of bias. A series of particularly public violent crimes has only added to the city’s discord, as has a nearly 20 per cent rise in homeless numbers just this year alone. Add in the now constant smell of cannabis, flocks of deadly, unregulated electric delivery bikes – along with a 65 per cent decline in new police recruits and thousands of undocumented migrants – and the city is like the Wild West rendered in glass-and-steel. And most bafflingly of all, no one seems to care.
It’s a recipe for disaster – and early figures suggested catastrophe was at hand. Heavily fueled by 2019’s progressive-led bail-reforms, crime rose by double digits across New York in both 2020 and 2021. But something intriguing has begun to emerge: as laws are further flouted, violent crime numbers are actually declining city-wide. Indeed, shootings fell by 17 per cent in 2022 and so far in 2023, serious crimes such as murder, rape and burglary have decreased by double-digits across most of New York. The NYPD may be hemorrhaging officers while felons are increasingly permitted by prosecutors to walk free, but the city has yet to turn into the bloody free-for-all conjured in films such as The Purge.