I once read, in the testimony of a non-Jewish professor who lived in Germany in the early 1930s, that the awareness of what was happening to the Jews was, in his words, “like watching grass grow: You didn’t see it — and then it was over your head.”
I’ve thought of this several times over the past two years, watching COVID slam shut New York’s businesses, watching the subway degrade, seeing rats everywhere, rats that were surely here when I was a kid but when did they become so brazen, when, by their presence, did they insinuate a certain rot that could not be washed away in the morning by the storekeep?
There has also, of course, been political rot. When I asked my mother, who's voted in every New York election since 1960, who would vote for Andrew Cuomo, she said she didn’t know; that nobody liked him. And what in god’s name could explain de Blasio?
“Oh, everybody hates him,” she said.
And yet we were stuck with these people, stuck with the policies they enacted, in the case of the former, leading directly to the COVID deaths of thousands of elderly and disabled citizens, deaths Cuomo evidently thought he could lie his way out of. I am no fan, I might even say I am temperamentally opposed, to having the lever that is #MeToo behavior, gross and disturbing as it may be, be the thing that pries people from power instead of, you know, leaving upwards of 10,000 elderly people to die lonely deaths, deaths for which the Manhattan DA’s office this month decided Cuomo will not be prosecuted, but so be it. And I am not suggesting the former governor should have acted as some sort of soothsayer during the early days of COVID; we knew little and were running scared and doing the best we could. But Cuomo was not doing his best when he covered up the death toll, and I am far from the only New Yorker wondering why we keep entrusting people of his caliber to influence the fate of the city.
Cuomo is gone. So is de Blasio, who in 2020 and 2021 was seemingly more alarmed at the advent of pre-schoolers going unmasked than the spike in murder, rape, robbery, and felony assault, which for the month of January 2022 has so far clocked in at 2,368, including 23 people killed.
One of the murdered was rookie NYPD Officer Jason Rivera. He was 22. His partner, Officer Wilbert Mora, 27, succumbed to his injuries on January 25. On January 19, they’d been on a service call in Harlem, a domestic dispute. The shooter, I am told, came from a bedroom and, suspecting the officers were wearing body armor, aimed for their heads. A third officer ferried others in the apartment to safety and then shot the shooter, who died several days later. “I see every single human life as equivalent,” a city councilwoman said on January 24, drawing a parallel between the officers' lives and the shooter's, which might seem curious or callous; might seem equivocation with a purpose, but is in fact just rather blunt, the perennial antipathy toward law enforcement reformed into a platform from which to signal that, while ALL ARE WELCOME HERE, some are more welcome than others. I have heard “ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS!” chanted more than a thousand times, have seen KILL THE PIGS and DEFUND THE POLICE carved into and spray-painted onto buildings and bridges, and what did the people doing the carving and spraying think this meant? I’ve stood in cascades of window-glass smashed because the smashers thought it was fun, or because they were bored, or because they thought it in service to an ideal, an ideal ratified by the ostensible grown-ups in the room, who’d decided to stop prosecuting certain crimes, to stop holding people accountable in order to bring the picture into different focus, to have the actors swap costumes, so to speak. Hadn’t one side worn the badge of invincibility long enough?
Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer, tweeted the following on Tuesday:
Several people on Twitter got on Moskos’s case, claimed it was “basic journalistic ethics” to not assign guilt to someone who has not been convicted that crime, and I agree, while wondering if acceding asks that we half-see what is before our eyes, that we keep things deliberately hazy.
“It is our city against the killers. It is our city against the killers,” Mayor Eric Adams said to the camera, after the ambush in Harlem. “This was not just an attack against three officers. This was an attack on the city of New York. It is an attack on the children and families of this city.”
He meant this literally. Two days before, an 11-month old baby had been hit in the head with, as they say, a stray bullet. Adams said, then, to another set of cameras, “What is it going to take?”
What is it going to take? I hate having to relay to my daughter the new subway rules: No earbuds, stand away from the platform’s edge, pay attention. This, because two women in the past two weeks have been pushed to their deaths from subway platforms by mentally ill men, part of the legion of mentally ill people now inhabiting the subway. Part of me understands this: it’s cold outside; people with nowhere to go have to go somewhere. But it’s always been seasonally cold in New York, and I never seen anything close to what we are seeing now, in every station there are people shouting, passed out, nodding out, one man follows me up the subway steps at Grand St. with his face up the back of my skirt, and when I jump and yell at him to get away, he shouts into the street, “I’m gonna smack that pussy! Smack that pussy!” The West 4th Street subway station, where I am several times a week, is thick with grime and populated always by dozens of people, screaming, shuffling with their pants around their ankles, making beds on the filthy concrete. I recently saw a man chase down and eat some meatballs that had dropped from a takeout container. A homeless guy whom I have seen many times in the entry to the Carroll Street station last week tried to push a woman onto the tracks. I see all this and think, if this were someplace I were visiting, if this were, say, the transit system in Berlin, I would wonder, what is wrong with this city? I would be lying if I did not admit to fantasies of scrubbing down the subways, of aiding people rather than keeping them, through our misguided if good intentions, in a kind of static hell, of helping restitch a social safety net that currently allows babies to be shot in the face.
“He was exactly the kind of young person you want to see on the job,” commented a friend who works with the NYPD, when I posted Jason Rivera’s WHY I BECAME A POLICE OFFICER letter. “A kid from the city who saw the problems with policing and wanted to make a difference anyway.”
Yael Bar Tur, who’s worked with the NYPD, and I hopped on YouTube last week with Det. (Ret.) Steven Weiss. Weiss is the Director of Research at the Officer Down Memorial Page. We talked about New York’s current crime wave, what citizens might do to be part of the solution, and the tragic death of Jason Rivera, who was married and with a new baby. Mora, also married and a father, was still clinging to life when we recorded.
Rivera's wake will be on Thursday, with a funeral the following day, both at St. Patrick's Cathedral. I will be driving these days from Pittsburgh to Memphis. Please go if you can. And let me know if you do. Mora's wake will be on February 1, with a funeral the following day, also at St. Patrick's. May both men rest in peace.
Thank your for a writing about these two police officers, young men, people who were killed. (Formerly) very liberal mom of a cop here, and worried always about my son's well-being. Yesterday, I made two posts on Facebook -- one about the flowers on my mantelpiece; another citing the death of Officer Mora. Sixty "likes" already on the flowers; three on the murdered officer.
I pretty much lived in New York for two years from 2018-2019, and this kind of thing was pretty rare. The subway was a bit dirty and there were some homeless people around, but there wasn't the sense of danger. Now, almost everyone I know who lives in New York has a story of being harassed by vagrants. It's shocking how quickly it's deteriorated.