Fireworks fiends killed Shatavia Walls as New York’s leaders wallowed in denial
By David Marcus
New York Post
July 20, 2020
Eric Adams has some advice for New Yorkers frustrated by fireworks exploding through the night, and he’s sticking to it. The Brooklyn borough president doesn’t want us to call the police when laws against blowing up stuff are broken. Rather, he would prefer that we “go talk to the young people . . . who are using fireworks.”
On July 7, 33-year-old Shatavia Walls took that advice. Now she is dead.
Walls was shot eight times after she tried to deal with this quality-of-life scourge herself. On Friday, she died of her wounds. It is a cruel irony, but we can’t look away from it for that reason: So deep is Adams’ fear that police might abuse criminals that he prefers we put citizens in harm’s way. Bizarrely, he seemed to double down on his suggestion on Sunday even in the face of Walls’ killing.
It’s an especially perilous — and mindless — idea amid a crime wave that is fast becoming Gotham’s new normal. Shootings have spiked to levels not seen in nearly three decades, and in response, our hapless City Council and oaf of a mayor have decided to slash NYPD funding. The results have been predictably deadly for poor, minority communities.
In Oscar Wilde’s novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” the protagonist sells his soul that he may stay young, beautiful and libertine. Downstairs, however, a painting of him shows his true age, his bodily and spiritual decrepitude. Mayor Bill de Blasio is engaged in something like the inverse of that: He protects his “painting” — his precious Black Lives Matter art project on Fifth Avenue — while crime cuts short actual black lives.
The constant booming set off by fireworks fiends has become a routine feature of a New York fast returning to the “bad, old days. (By the way, as if the reality weren’t disturbing enough, Pulitzer-winning New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones a few weeks ago urged her Twitter followers to read an insane conspiracy theory alleging that cops are handing out fireworks as part of a false-flag psy-ops operation.)
The fireworks are both a symptom and a cause of radiating disorder. They are symptom, in that only a deeply broken urban political class would shackle law enforcers and allow lawlessness to continue unhindered night after night — and a cause, since the failure to confront this seemingly “minor” nuisance encourages more, and more serious, law-breaking.
Above all, the fireworks are a nightmare for the people who live in these neighborhoods. Actually, nightmare might be a cruel metaphor to use, since no one can get any sleep to even have dreams, good or bad.
What, really, do Adams and likeminded politicos expect police to do? They still want cops to uphold order and protect us against criminals, at least in theory. At the same time, they consider it unacceptable that any officer ever might have any interaction with criminal suspects that is less than Mary Poppins-gentle.
In 1969, as protest swelled in California, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan spoke words that our leaders today desperately need to heed. He said, “All of it began the first time some of you who know better and are old enough to know better let young people think they had the right to choose the laws they would obey, as long as they were doing it in the name of social protest!”
Sound familiar? Adams’ fantasy of a city where neighbors hash things out together and police look away (while still somehow fighting crime!) would be laughable were it not also deadly.
Will activists demand that we “say the name” of Shatavia Walls — or infant Davell Gardner, Jr., shot and killed in Adams’ Brooklyn this month? Or do these lives not count, because they weren’t taken by police?
Owing to the idiocy of leaders like Adams and de Blasio, this city is teetering at the edge of chaos and leaning steeply in the wrong direction. Lives are being lost, as our politicians do everything they can to put out to pasture the greatest, most diverse and most professional police force on earth.
Meanwhile, the next time you see a crime being committed, ignore Adams’ inane ramblings and call the police. Just because our leaders have gone insane doesn’t mean we have to.
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