By Peter Nanista @Adobe Stock
Heaven Help Anyone Standing in the Way
New York City is where WSJ journalist Allysia Finley lives and works. She graduated Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in American Studies.
Recently Ms. Finley stepped outside her Midtown Manhattan office to find herself smack dab in the heart of a crime scene. As Ms. Finnley reports:
Police had blocked off the street. A helicopter circled overhead. If I (Finley) had left an hour earlier, I might have been sprayed by a stray bullet—as an innocent tourist a few blocks over had been.
“Blood Sport”
This wasn’t the first trauma Ms. Finley’s stumbled upon. A week before this unnerving incident, a man was standing on a street corner a few feet from our intrepid reporter when he was sucker-punched in the head.
There but for the grace of God go I and every New Yorker.
“The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight”
A security guard, for a Times Square sporting goods store, according to media reports, confronted three young me.. Continues Ms. Finley, they were shoplifting. When the security guard confronted them. they shot at the guard, but the aim went amiss Instead of hitting the guard, the shot struck a Brazilian tourist in the leg.
One of the three stayed behind, but the shooter and his other friend ran off. Cops captured the friend. The gunman, however, kept running and shot at the pursuing officers on the block adjacent to the Journal before before the gunman ducked into a subway entrance. Fortunately, the teen’s aim was worse than his intentions, and he didn’t hit any bystanders.
Police on Friday afternoon hunted down and arrested the suspected shooter, a 15-year-old Venezuelan migrant who had been staying at a hotel that was converted into a migrant shelter. He is also a suspect in a gunpoint robbery and another shooting incident in Midtown Manhattan last month, according to police.
Allysia Finley admits to being tempted to blame the city’s crime on the surge of migrants, until she recalls that the bigger problem: New York’s law of the jungle.
Menace from One-Party Rule
Migrants have figured out that shoplifting, pickpocketing, and violence go unpunished. They consequently run wild, as native-born criminals do. Heaven help anyone standing in their way.
Allysia admits it is tough to ignore the “link between the city’s retreat from prosecuting nonviolent offenses—misdemeanor arrests for dangerous drugs plunged by 94% between 2010 and 2022—the end of stop-and-frisk policing, and the rise in violence.”
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is more interested in prosecuting Donald Trump and New Yorkers who bought fake Covid vaccine cards than menacing criminals.
Innocent New Yorkers pay the price, sometimes with their lives. No wonder so many are migrating to Florida.
