A council member in East Fishkill, a town up the Hudson River from New York City, has advised local residents to avoid four out of five NYC boroughs “due to crime,” noting a drastic increase in shootings and homicides.
“Reconsider travel” to the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens “due to crime,” reads the letter by Councilman Anil Beephan, made public on Friday. Violent crime is “widespread” in New York City, he added, and “armed criminals have been known to target and attack individuals, both pre-meditated and at random.”
Beephan attributed the 21-percent increase in homicides and 53-percent increase in shootings to criminal justice reforms – namely, the statewide abolition of cash bail since January, letting many repeat offenders out of jail – and the recent decision to disband the NYPD plainclothes crime unit.
Rather than an official town notice, the letter is a personal advisory from Beephan to residents who commute to the city, noted local outlet News 12 Westchester. East Fishkill is a town of some 30,000 residents, about 60 miles (100km) north of Manhattan.
In addition to disbanding the crime unit, de Blasio has reduced the NYPD budget by $1 billion and painted a giant ‘Black Lives Matter’ street mural on a section of Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower, to curry favor with activists demanding he “defund the police.”
“We now have fewer people in our jails than [at] any time since WWII and we are safer for it,” he said earlier this week.
The East Fishkill councilman obviously disagrees, and apparently so do many New Yorkers. While it is difficult to get the exact number of people who have left the city, whether due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the protests-turned-riots or the spike in crime, rents in Manhattan have reportedly decreased for the first time since 2010.
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