The Adams administration just ditched a new class of rookie school-safety officers — and Hizzoner says maybe parents should step in and take up the slack.
Talk about intersectionality!
Here we have a decline in public safety colliding with a national border breakdown — and, as usual, the collateral damage falls on folks doing their best just to get by.
And the bad news certainly won’t be limited to parents fretting about classroom safety – not with tens of thousands of penniless migrants boring a multi-billion-dollar hole in the municipal fisc.
Specifically, the city just deep-sixed a class of 250 new school-safety officers – civilians who work with the NYPD to maintain order in city schools.
Not surprisingly, this has raised parental concern at a time when random violence plagues the Big Apple. Most schools probably are reasonably safe, for sure, but random is random – it’s hard to predict, almost impossible to prevent and fewer officers promises only to compound the problem.
Thus the mayor’s proposed, um, solution: “We’re going to be leaning into parents and parent groups to do some volunteerism,” he said Tuesday.
Really?
After all, former Marine Daniel Penny “did some volunteerism” last May, stopping a violent vagrant on behalf of endangered F Train straphangers, and he’s under indictment for manslaughter. Has Adams vetted his scheme with Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg?
Extreme? Maybe.
But a formal public safety system is meant to discourage private citizens from settling their own beefs; promoting what amounts to vigilantism, no matter how it’s gussied up, is a very bad idea.
Or maybe Adams is just trying to scare the bejeezus out of New Yorkers, prepping them for tax increases and related chicanery?
Pols regularly threaten to shutter libraries and firehouses just to soften the ground; permanent cuts rarely happen, but tax hikes often do; pols quietly congratulate each other on their cleverness, and everything is peachy until the next time the dough runs low.
But if that’s the plan, this time it’s unlikely to work.
This time, sanctuary-city bushwa has intersected with the inability of cities to print their own money.
This time, the progs have dug a hole too deep for trickery to fill – as will become clear when New York’s governmental budget-writing season begins in January.
The pain will be deep, real and lasting. That is, libraries, firehouses and – yes – school safety are likely to go, but they won’t be alone.
If the border hopping stopped tomorrow, New York City would still be looking at an estimated $12 billion migration-driven budget gap –too wide for tax increases alone to fill.
Sure, the solution lies in Washington, with a restoration of national border integrity.
But when Adams started talking about that, he found himself up to his ears in FBI agents — a stark fact unlikely to have gone unnoticed elsewhere, by the way — so it’s much safer for him to shut his mouth and dig deeply into school safety.
For starters.
Think of it as the fruit of progressive politics.