American Spectator, Jul/Aug 2005
IT WAS SIX YEARS AGO, in New York City, and my wife and I were strolling through Central Park on our way to lunch. It was a beautiful autumn day in October, and there was a parade honoring the winners of the World Series, the New York Yankees. On 72nd Street, just off Fifth Avenue, a young black man passed us, then suddenly turned around and spat right smack on my wife's face. He then continued on his way. After the initial shock and horror, I ran up to him and tried to block his way. There were no cops around and no one paid too much attention to what had just transpired.
Once I blocked his way, the man threw down his backpack, put up his dukes, and began to circle me like a boxer. He threw the first punch, hitting me on the nose and stunning me. That's when I tackled him but found myself under him. He was strong. But muscle memory after 40 years of wrestling and karate came to my help. I eventually got an arm bar on him, neutralized him, and told him if he resisted further I would break his arm at the elbow, a particularly painful fracture. While I held him immobilized, someone eventually called the fuzz. When the officers arrived they saw me on top of an immobile man covered in blood. The officer tapped me on the shoulder and told me to let him go. That is when I explained to him that the blood he was covered with was mine, and that I hadn't thrown a punch, just wrestled.
Once they ascertained that I was telling the truth, he was handcuffed and put inside the squad car. "Why don't you arrest him?" yelled the perp. "He's the one who attacked me…" But the cops were having none of this. Without asking any witnesses to come forward, they knew by experience who was the guilty party. I was bleeding heavily from the nose, whereas he was untouched. I was told to give my address so they could contact me later, after they checked his record, and that was that.
As it turned out he had a very long record, but that's a different story altogether. The point was that the police decided not to play it by the book, in other words, not to arrest both of us, stick us in jail until a court appearance, and avert any charge of favoritism. Had this incident occurred ten years before, I would have been taken straight to a holding cell along with the attacker and then forced to go before a judge. My color, my accent, and the suit I was wearing would have worked against me. This was the New York of Lindsay, Beame, Koch, and Dinkins, until Rudy Giuliani came along.
How did things change? Let's put it this way. It wasn't easy. Rudy inherited a madhouse. The municipal profligacy, the unhinged unions, the fiscal shenanigans, the racial polarization were all out of control. The rot began with Nelson Rockefeller, who as governor allowed organized interests to raid the treasury in the manner his grandfather had raided the earth's surface in search of oil. Gov. Mario Cuomo was even worse. He allowed the lobbyists from the public sector to dictate to the legislature, or else, turning an already shrinking taxpayer's pie into a crumb. The mayors bent over backwards to outspend and outdo the governors in catering to special, especially racial, interests. It does not take a great brain to see why New York was a basket case by 1994, when Rudy took over.
What was his magic potion? He first brought municipal employment down, an act that outraged all the loudmouths who have access to the media, a courageous act that was a sine qua non, as former Mayors Koch and Dinkins had ensured their political base by having hired half the population and put them on the city's payroll. He hired the brilliant William Bratton-who began the famous "broken windows" policy along with the computerized analysis of crime. (Central Park and every high crime area were flooded by cops on foot, not in their cars, for years.) Last but not least, Rudy backed his cops, no matter how loud the race hustlers bleated. This took guts. Which brings me to another city that now resembles the Noo Yawk before 1994, London, and the lack of guts shown by a clown who goes under the name of Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone.
I'VE LIVED IN LONDON MOST OF MY ADULT LIFE, and the quality of life used to be superb. People were polite, criminals killed or maimed other criminals, mostly down at the east end, and, except for the weather, things were hunky-dory. The last ten years, however, have seen London turn into the most violent and dangerous city of Europe, a place full of no-go areas run by Jamaican and Afro-Caribbean drug dealers, a city where even law-abiding youths, and they are rare, indulge in "happy-slapping," which is the term for young people in hoods filming their innocent victims while they're being attacked.
How did this come about? That's an easy one to answer. Local authorities played the PC card to the hilt, encouraging leaders of racial groups who wanted to transfer the habits of, say, Rajasthan or Jamaica into Brixton or Clapham. In other words, diversity became more important than the traditional good manners and civility most English people grew up with. Needless to say, young Afro-Caribbean thugs not only refused to integrate, they influenced poor young whites to act like them. This was made possible by the single most powerful engine for the collapse of civilized values, the welfare state. Britain has the most generous welfare state in the world for immigrants, and is of course a magnet for anyone looking for a generous handout.
The welfare state detaches rewards from behavior. Criminals and law-abiding citizens are seen as one and the same where rewards are concerned. People are encouraged not to better themselves, but to think in terms of rights and entitlements. And the harm done by this collapse of responsibility is most disastrous at the lower levels of society because there people have far less with which to defend themselves from its uncivilizing effects. The results are catastrophic. Robberies and street crime--not to mention the unheard of before shootings in broad daylight--have soared to an unprecedented level. Black gangsters are modeling themselves on Jamaican Yardies battling other gangs for control of the lucrative cocaine trade. No one has the guts to mention that the majority of violent criminals using guns and knives are black. When I wrote in the London Spectator after four blacks shot and killed two black girls in a passer-by shooting that these were sons and grandsons of black criminals, my article was immediately referred to Scotland Yard as a possible incitement to racial hatred, a conviction for which could land me in the pokey for two years.
The result of this PC and welfare culture has divided Britain into those who live in a world of basic civilized codes, and those who are totally disconnected from mainstream life and its values. England boasts the highest teen pregnancy rate in Western Europe, with government policies which emphasize "safe sex" rather than chastity. The result is an eleven year old was allowed by her mother to have sex under her roof recently, and when the child got pregnant, the mother blamed the school for not teaching safe sex.
When I was attacked by three black men ten years ago in Cadogan Square, the safest area in London, a passerby called the fuzz while I grappled with them. No one showed up. Two hours after the attack two policemen came around asking questions. The one thing they didn't want to know was the color of my attackers. They told me processing even a misdemeanor takes days of paperwork. Once I heard them out, I was grateful they hadn't arrived on time. I would have spent the weekend in a cell with my three buddies and, as I had no witnesses, probably would have received a jail sentence as well. Needless to say, I now live most of the time in New York