As we move closer to the 2024 election, it is only natural that we are entering the Period of Hyperbole. That’s a polite way of saying the Period of Hypocrisy, Twisted Logic, and Outright Lies.

The Right-Wing Attack on New York

I’m one of those born and bred New Yorkers who finds it maddening to read the litany of familiar right-wing attacks on my hometown, which typically intensify during election cycles. It’s so predictable that I can practically check off all the right-wing talking points in my sleep. Anytime I hear the phrase “New York values”, for example, I know that it’s a code word. No, not for “rude”, “brash”, or “loud”. It’s hurled as an epithet and it’s meant to disparage New Yorker’s tolerance — nay, embrace — of difference. Most Gotham dwellers have a cosmopolitan ‘live and let live’ perspective on the world and for this, they are routinely excoriated.

But since the pandemic and the protests and riots that followed in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, right-wingers have been harping on New York’s ‘lawlessness’. Just turn on Fox News and you’ll hear that crime in NYC is “worse than the 90s”! This meme — an exercise in gallows humor that has been circulating on social media platforms — is not too far from the vision that Fox News presents to the world … even more hilarious because Fox is based in New York City!

The clear pattern is: Don’t just denigrate New York City. Make sure you blame the Democrats for the city’s collapse into “a hellscape of unchecked violence and chaos”. Donald Trump rails against the city of his birth as “one of the most dangerous and violent cities in the United States … where killings are taking place at a number like nobody’s ever seen.” Missouri Republican Josh Hawley asserts that “you can’t go out on the streets without being shot.” And GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley tweets: “Gov. Kathy Hochul has sat on the sidelines while liberal district attorneys like Alvin Bragg turn New York City into a war zone where innocent people are scared to take the subway and criminals get a free pass. Governors are supposed to protect their people. She can send a message to criminals by announcing her intent to pardon Daniel Penny. She can remove Alvin Bragg for endangering Manhattan residents. One thing is clear: doing nothing only continues the crime wave in New York.”

Alas, as James Peron points out: “These false perceptions about ‘out-of-control’ crime are used by Republicans routinely to terrify voters. Like politicians in general they are prone to use fear to rally the terrified.” Yes, all politicians, left and right, use fear as part of their arsenal of Machiavellian manipulation. And in this case, it’s the right wingers who need a history lesson. Any simple fact check would prove how debased their hyperbolic claims are.

History Lessons

Nothing compares to the crime rates of the late 1980s and early 1990s. There were over 2000+ murders per year between 1987 and 1994, reaching a peak of 2,262 murders in 1990. Despite an uptick in crime in the year after the pandemic, 2022 murders numbered 438. That’s about as far from Fox’s Grimm Fairytales as one can get. NYC remains the most densely populated city in the United States; with an estimated population of around 8 million, it is home to more people than the populations of 38 individual states. And if one counts the NYC metropolitan area, we’re talking nearly 19 million people — certainly the most populated metro area in the country and still among the most populated metro areas in the world. But “the NYPD’s historical CompStat figures show that the Five Boroughs [of NYC] are still far safer now than they were back in 2000.” Murders are down, shootings are down. And even though there has been an increase in robberies, burglaries, and grand larcenies, they don’t even remotely compare to the city’s historic heights in 1990.

How about a little dialectical context-keeping? Here’s the historical data:

Overall, crime in 2022 was 76% lower (and lower in every major category) than it was in the peak year of 1990. And, except for a few outliers, it is lower than it was in 1990, 1993, 1998, and 2001.

The city’s declining crime rates were part of a national trend. As Radley Balko explains, even though U.S. murder rates increased in 2020–2021, “they were still well below the rates of the early 1990s.” NPR reports that, currently, New York is experiencing “a downward trend … According to NYPD, in March 2023, New York City saw a 26.1% drop in shooting incidents compared to this time last year. And homicides fell by 11.4%.”

Why Target NYC?

So, the question remains: Why do right-wing politicians target NYC?

As my dear friend Ryan Neugebauer points out with characteristic bluntness:

There are so many cities to choose from in this country. And actually, for the largest city in the country, [New York City’s] crime is massively low, even compared to many U.S. cities pre-pandemic. Little Rock, Arkansas has been shit for a while, way worse than NYC. But no, we won’t talk about that. Houston, my neck of the woods (4th largest city), is also worse than NYC, and has been for a long time. No focus on that. You have to ask WHY a location is being uniquely focused on.

The right-wing focuses on its rise since the pandemic, while neglecting its performance in comparison to so many other cities in the country also dealing with a rise since the pandemic.

The whole issue speaks to right-wing disingenuousness and hypocrisy, as Ryan observes. Indeed, in claiming that the city’s crime rate is uniquely bad today, Nikki Haley, in her tweet above, focuses specifically on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg — who, it just so happens, recently announced an indictment of her former boss, Donald Trump. It’s convenient to focus on the Demonic Democrats, whom Republicans blame for turning NYC into a “warzone” — and yet, they never look at the “warzone” in their own backyards. For example, if we compare Columbia, a city in Haley’s state (which isn’t even the most violent city in South Carolina) to the five boroughs that constitute New York City, here’s what we find:

As Ryan observes: “It’s potent to deconstruct a false narrative with facts, but it’s even more potent to show how that false narrative ignores facts about areas that go counter to your simplistic (in the right-wing case, ‘Democrat-run cities are bad’) narrative.” Current statistics show that red states have higher murder rates than blue states. Eight of the Top Ten “Murder” states are led by Republicans — Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee. But these states also have higher poverty rates and greater economic decay, factors that have more nuanced relationships with crime than, say, the party affiliations of city and state politicians. And I’d say the same thing about New York City, which has seen dramatic declines in its crime rates under Republican, Independent, and Democratic mayoralties.

Still, Ryan adds:

If you are going to make the point that NYC is a warzone, you have to delineate what criteria counts for being a warzone. And comparison is not an unfair thing to use in that discussion. If South Carolina has worse stats in some of its cities, it’s fair to ask “what makes these places NOT warzones?” Why do they have worse statistics and aren’t the focus? What’s so unique about NYC that it has your attention?

I think most New Yorkers know the answer to that question. Save for the singular event of 9/11, New York City has always been the focal point of right-wing hostility. “Anti-New York sentiment is a longtime conservative shibboleth,” explains David Birdsell, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at Kean University. “It’s very popular and easy to demonize New York as fundamentally alien.”

This view of the “alien” nature of New York has been bolstered more so ever since its designation as a “Sanctuary City” in a 1989 executive order, signed by Democratic Mayor Ed Koch. But that policy protecting undocumented immigrants from deportation and prosecution has been upheld by Republicans and Democrats alike. In 1994, upon becoming Mayor, even Republican Rudy Giuliani embraced the policy (as did his successor, Mike Bloomberg). This town has always been a city of sanctuary, a city of immigrants. It is estimated that about 40% of the U.S. population can trace its lineage to Ellis Island, “the gateway to America”. Till this day, NYC is consistently ranked as the most cosmopolitan city in the world. And that makes it a target especially for those who want to close the borders to those troublesome “invaders”—or who seek to overwhelm the city’s sanctuary status by using migrants as political pawns.

The Historic Drop in NYC Crime

Let’s give some credit where credit is due. Crime rates began their decline under Democratic Mayor David Dinkins, but it was during the moderate Republican administration of Rudy Giuliani that New York’s crime rates began to decline precipitously. There has been a huge debate over the causal factors behind this decline. Some argue that this was a national trend and not exclusive to New York City. Others argue that while violent crime declined 28% nationally in the 1990s, New York City’s violent crime declined 56% in that same period, thereby driving those nationwide trends. Some cite better economic conditions as key, while others cite a combination of community policing and “Broken Windows” policies and an increase in the prison population. A Brennan Center Study argues persuasively, however, that mass incarceration had zero effect on crime rates, but that CompStat was responsible for a 5 to 15 percent decrease in crime in those cities that adopted it. CompStat, used to track crime trends, was the brainchild of NYPD deputy police commissioner Jack Maple. In New York City, this innovative tool guided more police and other resources to high-crime areas that most needed them.

Ironically, it was during this period — far closer to the “warzone” metaphor than anything one might find today — that Donald Trump forged his New York real estate deals. One would think that at a time when crime had hit historic heights in this city, a savvy businessman would be less inclined to do business here. But that wasn’t the case. Despite his notorious feuds with Mayor Koch, Trump used his family’s political clout with former Democratic Mayor Abe Beame to bolster his real estate ventures. At the time, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York was Rudy Giuliani, who implicated Trump at the center of a “cesspool of corruption” entailing “the buying and selling of public office” and extravagant real estate deals that clobbered New York taxpayers. Trump had cashed-in on his crony capitalist connections big time. He renovated, built and/or acquired such properties as the Grand Hyatt Hotel (1980), Trump Tower (1980), the Plaza Hotel (1988, which subsequently filed for bankruptcy 2 years later), the Trump Building (1996, of which he’s still, apparently, the landlord), and the 76 acres that constituted the Lincoln Square neighborhood, which, due to his own struggles with debt, were sold off to investors based in Hong Kong in 1997.

The Real Problems in New York City

And this, perhaps, is just a glimpse into what have been the real problems in New York City. Republicans and Democrats alike have done enormous damage to this city’s economy and its social infrastructure. From the days of those epic struggles between big developers like Robert Moses and decentralists like Jane Jacobs, this city has seen enormous changes to its landscape that have led to prohibitively high costs of living and draconian regulatory policies. Rents and housing prices remain high, as do taxes. Those taxes are used to support robust systems of public welfare and public education. The poor and working classes suffer disproportionately as affordable housing has been war-“zoned” out of existence, while wealthier landowners exploit rent stabilization laws for their own benefit. NYC remains one of the most expensive cities in the world in which to live.

It has also been battered by a historic drop in its population. New York State saw its steepest population decline in the last year alone. Part of this can be attributed to the fact that this city was hit hardest by the pandemic. Its population declined not only due to nearly 40,000 recorded deaths — “one of the deadliest disasters by death toll in the history of New York City” — but also to an exodus of 300,000 people during the period from April 2020 to June 2021. An additional 123,000+ people left the city in the July 2021-July 2022 period. And as many began working remotely during the pandemic, fewer people have returned to their offices in Manhattan. Even with hybrid work schedules, workers who are commuting to the city’s epicenter “are spending $12.4 billion less per year than they were before the pandemic.”

Ever the New Yorker, I’d like to think that that statue in the harbor, which lifts its lamp to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, is just as much a testament to this city’s resilience. But this is what makes the right-wing narrative on the New York City “warzone” so tragic. It shifts attention away from profoundly systemic problems and prevents us from tackling the much larger socioeconomic issues that need to be addressed fundamentally. That would require the kind of dialectical thinking that is anathema to ideological rigidity of any kind, right or left.

This article was also published on Medium.

Back on 5 May 2020, in the twenty-first installment of my ongoing Coronavirus series, “Lockdowns, Libertarians, and Liberation,” I wrote about the state of the COVID pandemic in New York:

Today, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in New York state are at a staggering 320,000+ and rising; the number of deaths attributed to the virus nears 25,000. And, of these, New York City accounts for nearly 19,000 deaths. New York state has a death rate of 126 per 100,000 people; the city itself has a death rate of 219 per 100,000. Even if some of my libertarian colleagues wish to dismiss 20% of these casualties because they are typically listed under the category of “probable” rather than “confirmed” deaths, that still means that in excess of 20,000 people in my home state are dead from this virus in two months. We need to put this in perspective because I’m tired of hearing how accidents kill more people in a year or how influenza and pneumonia kill more people in a year, and nobody talks about it. In a typical year, like, say, 2017, 7,687 people died in accidents and 4,517 people died from the flu and pneumonia in New York state. COVID-19 has now killed more than the annual total of these two leading causes of death combined in this state in just two months. It is therefore astonishing to me how any person would indict the state’s healthcare system as somehow to blame for the horrific death toll—whatever problems that are inherent in that system—especially when it has been stretched to its limits, and its doctors, nurses, and first responders have worked heroically to treat and save so many lives.

As a postscript to that installment (25 May 2020), I addressed the issue of  how state governors (such as NJ Governor Murphy and NY Governor Cuomo) were being blamed for having “spiked” deaths in their own states by returning recovering COVID-19 elderly patients to the nursing homes from which they came. I stated:

Well, if you listen to the folks at Fox News, Cuomo, Murphy, etc. purposely sent patients, who previously lived in nursing homes and were subsequently hospitalized for and designated as having recovered from COVID-19, back into the nursing homes from which they came. The Fox Folks claim that this was some diabolical plot to kill off the elderly population and/or to inflate the death tallies in NY and NJ, since many of those who were designated as “recovered” were still capable of infecting others.

But yes, aside from the Fox Folks, there are legitimate questions about the wisdom of the policy of sending these patients back to the nursing homes—though it is not at all clear that the infection rate within nursing homes was strictly a result of this policy. Indeed, it is entirely possible that the spike in nursing homes was as much the result of nursing home residents coming into contact with asymptomatic infected staff.

The initial policy was adopted because the hospitals in NY were being overrun and taxed to a catastrophic degree, and when the USS Comfort arrived, and the Javits Convention Center (along with four other centers in the outer boroughs) were set up, they were opened to take in patients who were not sick from Coronavirus; they were to be places where folks facing traumatic medical problems unrelated to the virus could be cared for under “virus-free” conditions. The private and public hospital network were to shoulder the burden of the growing population of sick and dying patients from the virus, while these other places (the Comfort, Javits, etc.) would provide medical care for those not infected with the virus, but in need of urgent medical care (so-called “elective” surgeries were all postponed, but, obviously, there are many other medical problems that people face, for which they require treatment, in medical facilities that are not death traps for those with underlying pre-existing conditions).

Though the official reversal came at the beginning of May, the policy actually started to change at the beginning of April. It was at that time that the Comfort and the Javits Center were finally opened up to care for the overflow of COVID-19 patients. … [I]t was a policy that was shaped by the exponential growths in hospitalizations and intubations that were happening in late March and early April, until the state hit a plateau of 800-1000 deaths per day. Once it became clear that the healthcare network, as taxed as it was, would not collapse, and that these other facilities could take in COVID-19 patients, the practice of sending recovering nursing home patients back into nursing homes started to change. And extra precautions were put into place at the beginning of May.

Clearly, mistakes have been made at every level of government; but it’s a huge leap to characterize something that was a tragic mistake to viewing it as a criminal act. I live in NY; I’ve lost neighbors, a cousin, friends, and even cherished local proprietors, to this horrific disease. There’s a lot of blame to go around; those most at fault, however, were the folks who denied that there was even a virus at work, that the whole thing was a hoax, and that one could just wash it away with a little detergent or by mainlining bleach.

On 16 July 2020, in the twenty-eighth installment of my Coronavirus Series, “Sweden is Not New York,” I pushed back against those who were comparing New York unfavorably to Sweden in its response to the pandemic. I wrote:

Jon Miltimore’s essay “Why Sweden Succeeded in ‘Flattening the Curve’ and New York Failed” is, sadly, an exercise in comparing apples and oranges. From the article:

If flattening the curve was the primary goal of policymakers, Sweden was largely a success. New York, on the other hand, was not, despite widespread closures and strict enforcement of social distancing policies. The reason New York failed and Sweden succeeded probably has relatively little to do with the fact that bars and restaurants were open in Sweden. Or that New York’s schools were closed while Sweden’s were open. As Weiss explains, the difference probably isn’t related to lockdowns at all. It probably has much more to do with the fact that New York failed to protect the most at-risk populations: the elderly and infirm.

The article goes on to discuss the debate between the implications of different public policy responses to the virus. In response, I wrote:

There is absolutely no comparison between the Swedish and NY cases, regardless of the public policies adopted by either government. First, in NY, the share of COVID-related deaths in long-term care facilities was 20% of the total number of deaths (about 6,500 of the total of 32,000+ deaths in the state of NY). That means that the vast majority of deaths did not occur in nursing homes. Moreover, though damage was done early on, by putting recovering COVID patients back into nursing homes, that policy was influenced by the huge surge in cases at a time when not even the Comfort or the Javits Center were open to COVID patients (a policy that changed at the beginning of April). Conditions were evolving swiftly. Moreover, unlike other states that are experiencing a surge now, therapies based on steroids, plasma, Remdesivir, etc. were not in widespread usage. It’s largely on the pile of bodies in NY that current medical advances have been made, sad to say.

Second, studies have shown that, at least in NYC, the highest transmission belt for the virus was its vast subway system, serving 5-6 million people per day prior to the city’s curtailment of “business as usual” in mid-March and most of the communities that were disproportionately affected by the impact of the virus were minority communities, many of whose members continued to work and crowd the subways and buses, becoming infected and bringing that infection back to their families and neighborhoods. There is no similar density in Sweden (the Stockholm Metro typically serves one fifth the number of people compared to the subways in NYC).

Of course, I got push-back from one commentator who claimed, without offering any evidence, that in New York “COVID-19 has killed at least 11,000 to 12,000 nursing-home and assisted-living residents in New York, nearly double what the state admits to. And as the deaths mount, so have the lies and cover-ups. States like New York exclude from their nursing home death tallies those who die in a hospital. Outside of New York, more than half of all deaths from COVID-19 are of residents in long-term care facilities., even if they were originally infected in an assisted living facility.” To which I replied: “Even if I accepted your statistic—which I don’t—it does not explain the other 20,000 deaths that occurred in this state. Or are those lies too?”

Well, recently, an investigation into the nursing home deaths, completed by New York Attorney General Lettia James, concluded that the state had indeed undercounted nursing home deaths.

I was wrong. There were not 6,500 nursing home-related deaths. Nor were there 11,000 to 12,000 deaths as my interlocutor claimed. In fact, the deaths were more than double the original estimate. Current statistics in an ongoing investigation, combining deaths in nursing homes and nursing home patients who died subsequently in hospitals, now place the total at 13,382, perhaps as high as 15,000, which accounts not for 20% but for around 30% of the nearly 47,000 deaths thus far recorded in the state of New York.

Which means, of course, that my central point stands: The vast majority of the deaths in this state were not nursing home-related; something horrible happened here precisely because it happened here first, in the New York metropolitan area—the densest population center in the United States. None of the newest, scandalous revelations alters this fact.

But these revelations do show that Governor Andrew Cuomo did indeed fail the public trust by withholding information and needlessly endangering lives. Cuomo should have acted differently and decisively in being fully transparent. In thinking about “Andrew’s Next Move,” New York Post writer Bob McManus makes an important point:

“A less fearful, more self-confident governor … would have admitted upfront that a fateful, though defensible, error had been made last March. That’s when the state Department of Health ordered nursing homes to accept COVID-infected patients to clear hospitals for an anticipated wave of new patients. That crisis never came, but that doesn’t make the policy evil or even unreasonable, just tragically mistaken. Cuomo should have owned it and moved on.”

I should state for the record that I am not one of those libertarians who believes that every politician is evil by nature of being a politician. Some do believe, honestly, that they have a calling to public service. And I have no doubt that many politicians, acting during the time of a serious public healthcare crisis, were flying blind and doing everything they could, given the ever-evolving conditions that existed, to meet the challenges before them.

But “flying blind” led to tragedies far beyond the deaths of nursing home patients.

This whole affair has revealed far more about the gaping holes in our healthcare system and in the insidious ways that our medical-science-state-corporate nexus works, often to the detriment of the very thing it is ostensibly supposed to protect: human lives.

Ultimately, what might be the worst legacy of the Cuomo administration’s handling of the pandemic is how the machinations of that nexus have become transparent in all their ugliness. As the Daily Poster reports: Cuomo’s political machine raked in “more than $2 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA), its executives and its lobbying firms,” which funneled more than $450,000 to New York legislators in 2020 alone. Moreover, the administration moved to shield “hospital and nursing home executives from legal consequences if their corporate decisions killed people during the pandemic.” This wasn’t merely protecting frontline health workers from lawsuits; it was a deliberate attempt to provide “liability protection to top corporate officials who make staffing and safety decisions.” Today, 27 states have adopted this policy, granting legal immunity to nursing home executives.

And let’s be clear: This is not a Cuomo conspiracy. It is a policy that has been fully embraced by top Republicans, who often decry Cuomo’s “murderous” response to the pandemic. By shielding from civil litigation (forget criminal prosecution!) politically connected hospital and nursing home executives (who heavily fund political campaigns), patients who have been put at serious risk and the next of kin of those who have lost their lives have no legal recourse for compensation, given a broken healthcare system that can’t provide basic health insurance for the vast majority of people in this country. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell has been calling for a national policy guaranteeing such immunity, especially for corporate executives who might be putting their workers at serious risk, as part of any relief package.

So, like everything else: While some public policies may lead to progress in combatting a serious health crisis, they are still filtered through a system that must, by necessity, corrupt.

From the very beginning of this nightmarish pandemic, governments at every level—city, state, and federal institutions—have played a part in this systemic corruption. This is not an exercise in “What-about-ism.” Let us not forget that Former President Donald Trump admitted to Bob Woodward that he wanted to downplay the seriousness of the pandemic so as not to cause a public “panic.” He claimed credit for a vaccine because of “Operation Warp-Speed,” giving billions of dollars to Big Pharma companies to fast-track vaccine development, fully socializing their risks, fully guaranteeing their profits in a public-private “partnership.” Little thought was given to how that vaccine was supposed to be delivered to the vast majority of Americans, stranding millions of people with no ability to even schedule an appointment. People are standing for endless hours in long lines outside stadiums or massive makeshift fields hoping to get vaccinated, and are often turned away. Big Box stores are being subsidized to participate in the massive effort, but serious shortages remain, even as this country reaches half-a-million fatalities from this pandemic.

Even a simple alteration of policy to allow primary care physicians to inoculate their own patients hasn’t been entertained.

I will take whatever vaccine is available to me whenever it becomes available because I’m a guy with plenty of pre-existing medical issues. But that doesn’t mean I have to like the politicized processes that have poisoned this country’s response to a crisis of such horrific magnitude.