NEW York City is heading back towards the dark days of the 1970s and 80s amid a terrifying surge in violent attacks and other major crimes, the founder of Guardian Angels has warned.
Curtis Sliwa, who founded the revered citizen crime-watch group in 1979, told The US Sun that the current wave of crime and unruly behavior – particularly in the city’s subway system – is in danger of rotting the Big Apple at its core.
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“Well the city is certainly sliding back into the abyss,” Sliwa, 67, said in an exclusive interview.
“Current crime levels are not currently anything like what I dealt with 40 years ago when I started the Guardian Angels, or at the height of the crack epidemic in the 1980s – but we’re certainly heading back in that direction, which is worrying.
“Criminals are seeing that there are no ramifications, no consequences, and are just running rampant,” Sliwa added.
“Until city officials and cops actually start doing their jobs, it’s just going to continue to get worse and worse.”
TROUBLING SPIKE IN CRIME
Statistics released by the NYPD earlier this month showed that in the first months of 2022, major crimes have spiked a staggering 45% when compared to the same period last year.
That includes a nearly 44% increase in robberies, a 61% increase in grand larceny incidents, and a 35% increase in rape reports.
Murders are down 7.3 percent overall but spiked by 10% in the month of February, while hate crime attacks have surged by more than 113%.
Before the pandemic, crime rates in NYC reached historic lows for more than three decades before the numbers started to increase at the beginning of 2020, where they’ve continued to climb at a steady pace for the last two years.
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Sliwa warned that the Big Apple’s skyrocketing crime rates may seriously hinder the city’s attempts to recover economically post-COVID, suggesting the key to curbing the troubling trend may lie with an emphasis on subway safety.
New York has struggled in recent months with an uptick in subway attacks, including the murder of Michelle Go, who was pushed in front of an oncoming train in Times Square back in January in a suspected hate crime attack.
Other concerning incidents have included a man throwing feces into the face of an unsuspecting female straphanger in the Bronx, and an attack on an Asian man who was assaulted with a hammer in Manhattan last week.
SUBWAY VIOLENCE
Already in 2022, a total of 467 transit crimes have been reported, which is an increase of 80 percent on this time last year.
With ridership starting to increase as workers return to offices, Sliwa says if New York City has any chance of bouncing back to its pre-pandemic glory days, then it must seriously overhaul its subway system, starting by increasing security measures and cracking down on homeless sleepers.
“The subway is the heart and veins of the city, so if the subway can return, then the city can return,” Sliwa said.
“That means placing all the emotionally disturbed persons down there into mental health facilities, getting the homeless out of there and into shelters, and making sure transit cops are doing their jobs.
“Because if the veins and arteries of this city are clogged or problematic, then the city cannot properly return because that’s how workers get to work. That’s the free flow of this city.”
Sliwa added: “Right now, the number one reason people don’t want to return to work in the city or come and visit the city is because of the mentally disturbed and the homeless, it’s not because of COVID.”
HOMELESS CRISIS
Sliwa said one-third of the Guardian Angels’ time patrolling the streets is spent on the subways dealing with the emotionally disturbed and the homeless because “nobody else wants to deal with them, because they’re afraid.”
While Mayor Eric Adams last month unveiled a new plan to clean up the subway and crack down on rule-breakers, Sliwa believes the measures do not go nearly far enough to tackle the root causes of transit crime.
Had he won the mayoral election last year, Sliwa said he’d be forcibly removing the homeless and emotionally disturbed persons (EDPs) from the subway, implementing stricter security measures at the turnstiles, and better supervising transit cops entrusted with patrolling the city’s trains and platforms.
“Mayor Adams has this homeless outreach effort but it’s not good enough,” Sliwa said. “We’ve seen them sometimes [on the subway] and all they do is ask the person whether they would like to go to a shelter.
“Well, guess what?” he added. “They say, ‘F-you, I’m not going,’ and then they don’t forcibly remove them.
“Even when they could have forcibly removed them under the law when temperatures plunged below freezing – something [former mayors] Mike Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani took advantage of – both Bill De Blasio and Eric Adams haven’t done it.
“They could’ve taken them to shelters and held the emotionally disturbed for psychiatric evaluation to get them the help they need, but they didn’t – and other New Yorkers are left to pay the price.”
‘LAZY COPS’
Sliwa suggested that Eric Adams, a former NYPD lieutenant, and other elected officials should be barred from taking private transport to City Hall and instead be forced to ride the subway to experience the extent of the problem for themselves.
The presence of senior politicians beneath the ground, Sliwa believes, may help ensure transit cops stay more alert, vigilant, and active during their patrols of subway stations and trains.
In an emailed statement, the NYPD said that, in accordance with Adams’ new measures, the department has added “station inspections” to “create an omnipresence that riders, at all hours, can see and feel as they make their way to school, work, or home.”
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That includes over 1,000 extra officers strategically placed at stations and lines where there are a higher number of riders and reports of crime, the NYPD said.
But Sliwa says the increased number of subway cops will count for nothing unless the NYPD radically changes the way its officers approach subway patrols.
“I’ve seen it so many times, the cops like to act like they’re busy without actually doing anything,” he said.
“The problems continue to grow. How could you have more crime when you supposedly have more uniformed police in the system? How does that work?
“You never see a police officer on a subway train walking up and down anymore, and that used to be one of the standard methods of operation, helping people to feel as though there was a certain level of protection on moving trains.”
Instead, Sliwa claims that instead police often tend to stand in clusters or large groups on the platform or elsewhere in a subway station, “looking at their cell phones, texting, and sexting.”
“What are you guys doing?” he asked, highlighting that when Michelle Go was fatally pushed in front of a train back in January, the NYPD said it had officers stationed on an adjacent platform.
“What were they doing? There’s a very good chance they were adding to their social media profiles and updating their friends on what they had for breakfast, doing everything except proactively patrolling,” he wryly theorized.
“Police officers should be patrolling by themselves, none of this two, or three, or four cops at once, and their cellphones should be left behind at the station.
“If you’re going to be a police officer, you have to respond as a police officer – but nobody seems to want to do it right now.”
‘INTELLECTUALLY DUMB’ OFFICIALS
The subway’s decline, Sliwa suggests, is also partly due to the lack of control over the turnstiles, with the homeless, EDPs and criminals hopping gates without bothering to pay a fare.
Failing to gain control of the turnstiles means losing control of the subway system as a whole, he charges, likening unfettered subway access to “pouring water into an endless hole.”
“You’re gonna have this endless continuation of people coming in and out of the system and bringing with them the problems that are happening in the streets,” Sliwa said.
“So to do anything else just skirts around the issue. It starts with a zero-tolerance policy on fare evasions, but the mayor and everyone else doesn’t seem to want to address it.
“If you don’t do that, you’re basically signaling to everybody that the subways are open season for criminality.”
Even for those who are prosecuted, Sliwa believes that New York’s “soft-on-crime” bail laws do little to deter criminals from reoffending, including Frank Abrokwa, the culprit behind the subway feces attack last month, who was released just hours after being detained.
“It makes a joke of our criminal system,” Sliwa blasted. “And our elected leaders, many of them who graduated college with fancy degrees, have been guilty of being intellectually stupid. They have no common sense.
“Eric Adams is now three months into his term and the honeymoon is over.
“Crime hasn’t improved, it’s just continued to increase. Nobody thought it would get worse but it has and it shows no signs of stopping.”
INCREASED PATROLS
In response to New York’s troubling crime wave, the Guardian Angels will be increasing its number of patrols across the five boroughs of the Big Apple in a bid to stem the tide.
For more than 40 years, the citizen crime-watch group has patrolled the city’s subway every night from around 6pm to 3am in their iconic red berets and matching jackets to bring a sense of calm and security to dangerous neighborhoods.
Sliwa set up the group in 1979 when New York City – or “Fear City”, as it was known – was so ravaged by violent crime that residents fled the city in record numbers, nearly causing its economy to completely collapse.
To tackle 2022’s crime wave, the Guardian Angels will be diverting their attention towards the outer boroughs, such as the Bronx and Queens, where police presence is low but crime remains high, Sliwa said.
Increased patrols will also be introduced in predominantly Asian areas, following the sharp uptick in hate crimes against Asian Americans.
Speaking to any New Yorkers living in fear of rising crime rates, Sliwa said: “Just look at what the Guardian Angels have done over the years. We’ve never depended on elected officials or the police – whether they were at peak efficiency, or peak inefficiency as they are now.
“I’ve always been of the opinion that if you want to see improvement you have to fight for what is right.
“They aren’t fighting for us; they’ve surrendered. They’re surrendering our city.
“So we need to fight back.”
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