Brooklyn Citizens Are Taking a Bite Out of Crime

Not really.

Suzy Weiss writes, amazingly, of an effort to create a Guardian Angels type program to protect very affluent, very white, and very SJW Park Slope, Brooklyn from an unwelcome surge in vicious crime.

The problem is, of course, that SJWs do not want to fight crime.

They can only bring themselves to talk about "root causes." And they're almost too afraid even to talk about those any more.

This is amazeballs.

What prompted the interest in forming the group was a series of robberies, and especially a vicious attack on an old man and his dog by "a homeless man with a stick."

The old man survived -- but his beloved dog succumbed to injuries.

The attacker was never caught.

A few weeks later, on August 20, Kristian Nammack issued a call to action on Nextdoor, a social media site for local organizing: "Do we want to organize a community safety patrol, and take our park back? Think what the Guardian Angels did to take back the subways in the 70s/early 80s. We may also get to wear cool berets. I'm being serious."

Nammack, 59, had been part of the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, and his financial consultancy firm focuses on themes of "climate, renewable energy, gender lens, racial equity, economic advancement." "How about PARK SLOPE PANTHERS as a group name?" he suggested.

Suzy Weiss saw the fliers and went out to meet with the nascent neighborhood watch.

When Nammack began pitching his plan to reduce crime in the neighborhood, the would-be crime-fighters were clear-eyed about the issues of rising criminality and disorder.

But then... they remembered they weren't allowed to be anti-crime.

The Venn diagram for Park Slopers and Democratic voters is pretty much a circle. No one wanted to be labeled Park Karens. This made the whole crime-fighting thing a bit awkward: "It's about finding a way that's non-biased to report these things and have people feel like it's safe here," said Emily, one of the Panthers."You don't want to fall into that stereotype of privilege."

A non-biased way to report crimes to police?

The anti-crime group quickly faced pushback from pro-crime residents.

A group of four who looked to be in their early twenties--three women and one man--rolled up about 15 minutes into the meeting. "Are y'all the Park Slope Panthers?" The one who asked was dragging a speaker on wheels and playing electronic music, presumably to drown out the meeting. "We are super not into you guys having your meeting or doing anything in the park."

The young activist--who was white, wore glasses, grew up in Park Slope, and had a medical-grade face mask on, like his three comrades--was also super not into the cops, or anything resembling the cops. When Nammack told him we were taking turns introducing ourselves, the activist informed Nammack that he wasn't "super into abiding by the structure that you're setting up."

Another "Interrupter" had an objection -- to culturally appropriating the name "Panther."

"What's with you calling yourself the Panthers?" said another dude who had just appeared wearing a black hoodie and looking to be in his forties. He seemed more of a weathered activist, a bit more hardcore than the kids, and he didn't want to wait his turn.

He was told that the reason the name "Panthers" was chosen is because the "park" for which Park Slope is named features two panther statues at its entrance, which had been there since 1898. (Most likely sculpted by Hwite men, but that's a side-issue.)

This did not quell dissension about culturally appropriating the "Panther" name from the Black Panthers of 1968.

Didn't matter. "Using the Panthers as your group's name is kind of abhorrent to me," said one of the girls. She was white, wearing cut-off jean shorts, loafers with socks, and a Baggu purse. "It feels antithetical to what the Black Panthers would stand for." The next girl to speak said her name was Sky. She, too, was white, and had also grown up in the neighborhood: "It's easy to be wrong about who you're going after, particularly when those are some of the few black people still living in the neighborhood, and they've been pushed out on the streets by all white, ultra-wealthy people."

"We can be the tigers!" suggested Dionne, the middle-aged woman next to me. Sweet Dionne.

Back to the matter of the homeless man with the stick who had beaten the man and killed his dog:

He'd reportedly been spotted swinging a stick on Flatbush Avenue, chasing down another woman and her dog in the park while screaming, "Let's see some action here!" The kid with the speaker spoke up: "So, it sounds like this person has been pushed out of an unimaginable amount of systems." He added that the assailant was probably "neurodivergent."

"Crime is an abstract term that means nothing in a lot of ways," said Sky. "The construct of crime has been so socially constructed to target black and poor people."

...

Damien--the one black guy here, who had emigrated to Park Slope from Trinidad and Tobago--chimed in. "Just to levelset the room, we're not here to cause harm or be vigilantes to anyone. Maybe we could work together to find a solution, because I don't fucking know what the solution is, but we all want the same thing." Do we?

A woman in a blue jumpsuit approached the group, pulling her gray hood over her blue cap that read "ACAB" (as in, "All Cops Are Bastards") in big white block letters. Her name was Cece.

She suggested we could build a community where we all took care of each other and no one ever had to call the police.

Read the whole thing. It's a kick and a half.

Meanwhile, in Chicago: the Scream.

As John Kass writes, the video and the woman's scream as she is beset by armed muggers during broad daylight on a leafy street is so arresting and such an indictment of the city and state government that there is only possible response: Direct all city and state resources towards fighting crime and locking up criminals.

No, just kidding. The only possible response is claiming that anyone who is sickened by that footage is a racist.

And by the way: The state is about to pass the "SAFE-T Act," which will let even more killers out on the streets, and stop cops from... removing trespassers from your property.

So if there's a thief in your house... oh well, just offer him a drink and a snack and hope he doesn't get too handsy with your wife and kids.

There is nothing that curdles the fortunes of Gov. JB Pritzker and his ally Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot quite like the scream. It exposes them for what they've done.

It is a woman's scream, a real scream of fear that was randomly captured the other day on a Ring doorbell security camera as she was attacked, pulled to the ground, and robbed by thugs as she walked on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in Chicago's "mostly peaceful" and leafy Lakeview neighborhood.

Within that scream of terror hides another, buried sound, part of what the writer Matt Rosenberg, senior editor at wirepoints.org, brilliantly calls "the great unravelling."

It is the sigh of a once-great but thoroughly exhausted city, a Chicago bone-tired, spent by decades of political corruption, hammered by the brutal application of race card politics in a city of tribes, and in 2020 Lightfoot's City Hall failed miserably to stop the riots and looting that grew out of the George Floyd protests, and then Lightfoot endorsed the Soros-backed State's Attorney Kim Foxx for re-election.

It is a city drained by street gang violence and political indifference, where police have been weakened and demoralized, even as private security forces crop up, paid for by those with means who demand protection. In this, Chicago is like Rome.

The city where Cook County judges release violent criminals on low or no bail--or electronic monitoring--only to see them be arrested again and charged with other violent crimes, where there aren't enough cops to handle emergency calls. A city where one-party Democrat rule and fading corporate media shield Foxx, the prosecutor who is more social justice warrior than a state's attorney.

And the people know it as police are attacked, as the rule of law breaks down, the people now feel so unsafe that they talk openly of carrying guns to perform their daily errands.

Through this unravelling comes that woman's screams, she could be any woman, from any neighborhood. And Pritzker and Lightfoot have no response other than to pull out their greasy race cards, trying to gaslight the public even though most victims of violent urban crime are not white and middle class, but poor and black and brown.

If you live in Chicago, you've probably heard that scream on the news. It is now the focus of a powerful political ad by conservative Dan Proft and his "People Who Play by the Rules" PAC. That PAC supports conservative Republican State Sen. Darren Bailey for governor in the November general election.

The Proft ad is simple, yet devastatingly effective. There is no narration, only that video and scream and a photo of Pritzker with Lightfoot. And there is copy: "Pritzker. Lightfoot. How much worse does it have to get?"

But the ad has another purpose, to call Pritzker and Lightfoot to account for support of soft-on-crime policies and the Illinois Democrat Party's damaging and controversial "criminal justice" centerpiece:

The Democrat Safe-T Act, supported by party-line Democratic vote in Springfield and signed by Pritzker. The Safe-T Act is vehemently opposed by most law enforcement and by 100 of the state's 102 county prosecutors. It does away with cash bail on Jan. 1, and prosecutors are in panic.

So is Pritzker. He signed it. Seemingly unsatisfied by the way his political water on this issue has been enthusiastically carried by the Tribune, Axios and other media outlets, Pritzker went public, lashing out at the ad, claiming the spot intentionally uses racial imagery.

"It's a terrible commercial," Pritzker told reporters the other day. "They've chosen a particular crime in which there was a white woman who was the victim and apparently black perpetrators. That's the ad they want people to see, particularly in the suburbs."

Then he walked away. So, he played his race card and smeared the messenger and escaped before media could ask him to explain specifically what was so "racist" about the ad.

The attackers in the video have their faces and hands covered. Their races cannot be identified.

How does Pritzker know what race they are?

Is he just racist himself? Is he assuming the race?

But what else can they do? They're about to release half the prisoners from the jails:

100 state's attorneys are opposed to the Safe-T Acts elimination of cash bail, which will put more violent offenders on the streets. Only Democrats Cook County's Kim Foxx and Lake County State's Attorney Eric Rinehart support the Safe-T Act

Among the many prosecutors who oppose it is J. Hanley, the State's Attorney of Winnebago County. The other day in the Rockford Register Star, he wrote:

"On Jan. 1, 2023, it is estimated that more than half of the inmates in the Winnebago County Jail will walk out the door. Approximately 400 criminal defendants will be released back into our community because our Illinois legislators passed the "SAFE-T Act" back in 2020."

This is from September 12th, but it remains true: Unless voters want to continue being beaten, knifed, shot, and killed, they must make Democrats pay heavily for their embrace of criminality, chaos, and murder.

posted by Ace at 03:07 PM

| Access Comments