GOAT Maureen Dowd's night out with Batman.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd waited for Mayor Eric Adams at a (vegetarian!!!!!) restaurant. She sipped her mojito and was “vibing to a salsa band” when …
I pulled out a notebook, getting ready to interview Adams. But Maxwell Young, the mayor’s communications director, announced, “We have to go.” The mayor had pulled up outside in his black Suburban, but plans had changed. We ran out to the motorcade and headed to the Upper East Side.
The change of plans is that Adams is heading to a crime scene, and Vicky Vale comes along for the ride. It’s hard to make fun of this self-parody. And it’s truly amazing how good Adams is at flattering and manipulating prominent media people. Batman sweeps up the intrepid young lady reporter and takes her to a horrific crime scene in the center of Gotham. Sirens wail, steam rises from the gutters, Det. Olivia Benson flashes her badge and stomps past the police tape, and Mayor Batman shakes his head and tells the intrepid young lady reporter, furiously scribbling in her notebook, “If only Alvin Bragg and AOC would let me do something about crime.”
Or at least that’s what I imagine happened, because that’s Dowd’s takeaway after seeing the crime scene of the horrific murder of 20-year-old Azsia Johnson.
She details Batman’s efforts to battle gun crime, including lobbying Congress. But …
But it is tough going for Adams. He is pinioned from the left by the State Legislature, whose bail reform laws made it harder to keep criminals prone to violence in jail, and by district attorneys like Alvin Bragg of Manhattan, who deprioritized jail time even for certain low-level violent crimes, and by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others who are demonizing the police, deepening morale problems.
Wow, two sentences, six lies. Even for the Times opinion page, is this some kind of record?
Adams is not “pinioned” by the State legislature’s bail reforms. The recidivism rate for people who are out on bail is miniscule. According to the Brennan Center, 2 percent of the 100,000 cases of people under community supervision due to bail reform resulted in a rearrest for a violent felony. You can argue that’s still bad, but you certainly can’t blame 2 percent for the 38 percent jump in serious crimes since Adams has been in office.
You also probably can’t blame Adams. During lockdowns, murders rose while other crimes fell. That’s likely because it’s easier to murder someone when you know they’ll be at home all day, but you’re also less likely to try to break into a random house to steal shit if you know the owners are home and might have guns. Now that lockdowns are pretty much over, but everyone is still kind of pandemic insane, it stands to reason that murders would fall, but other crimes would go up. It’s the pandemic, stupid.
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