New York City doesn’t have a relatively high crime rate since the Giuliani-Bloomberg-Bratton era, but it needs a really low crime rate because its density and mixture of classes and races (the subway system makes it easy for anybody from public housing projects to hang out in even the richest neighborhoods) make NYC peculiarly psychologically stressful. Not surprisingly, the BLM era of locking up fewer dangerous men because most of them are black and encouraging racist anti-white hate is taking its toll on New Yorkers, especially when many trained themselves to try not to notice what is actually going on.
From the New York Times news section:
Sexism, Hate, Mental Illness: Why Are Men Randomly Punching Women?
It doesn’t look so random: it mostly seems to be black men punching white women, although everybody is going out of their way to not talk about the racist aspect of it.
Conversation about the attacks on the streets of New York have [sic] centered on mental illness, but the offenses seem to have their roots in hatred of women.
By Ginia Bellafante
Ginia Bellafante writes the Big City column, a weekly commentary on the politics, culture and life of New York City.
April 12, 2024
… What was provoking all this? Fourteen women have reported getting punched out of nowhere by strangers since mid-March, leaving at least one of them with a broken nose, according to the police and city officials. So far there have been two arrests: In each case the assailant was charged with misdemeanor assault, a category in which judges are generally barred from setting bail and one that has risen 13 percent over the past two years even as major crimes have fallen.
The man arrested in the case of Ms. McGookin, a 40-year-old occasional fringe political candidate from Brooklyn named Skiboky Stora, has a criminal record and his own active internet presence, maintaining an Instagram page with provocative images of young women and pictures of himself standing in front of a “Trump: Make America Great Again” sign. He wears a baseball cap with an inscription that claims he is the great-great-grandson of Marcus Garvey.
Marcus Garvey… that name rings a bell, but I can’t picture him. He sounds like some white racist Jim Crow Southern politician, just like Trump.
And Skiboky Stora, what kind of name is that? Russian? He’s probably employed by Putin to help Trump.
Were women panicking needlessly? It was hard not to interpret these recent offenses within the broader context of a roving and seemingly ever-more-insidious misogyny. In 2022, the most recent year for which there is available city data, women were killed by intimate partners at a rate 30 percent higher than the previous year. Reports of domestic violence also increased during that period, and nationwide, between 2018 and 2021, incidents of domestic violence involving guns went up by more than 7 percent. According to a survey from the Pew Research Center, a third of women under 35 report having been sexually harassed online. And this is to say nothing of the less manifestly aggressive, if pervasive, abrasions—the distillation of any middle-aged woman who complains about anything to the favored signifier of oblivious bourgeois entitlement, the “Karen.”
Like all conversations about crime in New York City these days, the one taking hold around these attacks over the past month has quickly defaulted to questions about mental illness and whether the men walking around impulsively hitting women in the face were merely disturbed—as if it warranted no consideration that a psychological malady might find such brute expression in an antagonism directed at women….
The Police Department surely does not have as part of its remit the eradication of sexism across the culture. None of the reported assaults have been “deemed” hate crimes, though when I asked the department if any had been investigated as such, I received no answer.
Virtually all of these recent attacks appear to be white (or perhaps Asian) women getting punched by black men. That would seem to boost the argument for hate-crime charges for attacks motivated by both sexism and racism, but the New York Times isn’t going to go there. They’ll leave it to you to figure out what race somebody who claims to be Marcus Garvey’s great-great-great-grandson is. Marketing has determined that the one thing loyal subscribers don’t want is news that might make them question who are the Good Guys and who are the Bad Guys.
Even back in the comparative good old days of the mid-2010s, a nice young lady I know got punched in the head in the 42nd Street subway station by the long-notorious Free Hug Thug, Jermaine Himmelstein.
