The NAACP of Oakland, California has sounded a save our city alarm and we damn well better not ignore it.
The group has had it with the lawlessness, violence and fear that permeates that city across the bay from San Francisco.
The group recently wrote a letter to the elected leaders in that plagued city that said, among other things, “Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who murder and commit life-threatening serious crimes, and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric have created a heyday for Oakland criminals.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/oakland/comments/15bmzxe/oakland_naacp_statement_on_oakland_violence/
Home invasions, carjackings, robberies galore have turned progressive Oakland into a failed city. Call the cops? You’ll wait 45 minutes for them to show up. Longtime residents want out.
The NAACP said it had to speak out. The situation is that bad.
The defund the police crowd got a huge boost after the George Floyd killing. Progressive prosecutors got elected and decided to go easy on crime. State legislatures passed lenient laws letting criminals walk free instead of forcing them to make bail. Crimes were decriminalized. How’s that for an oxymoron.
If you spoke out, you ignorantly didn’t understand the root causes of crime. You were in favor of mass incarceration. You were racist.
But the Oakland NAACP is telling it like it is. In its letter it said, “African Americans are disproportionately hit the hardest by crime in East Oakland and other parts of the city.”
They want a declaration of a public emergency, but the progressive politicians in charge are blinded by their ideology and deaf to the cries of their constituents.
On the other coast, in New York City, Mayor Eric Adams, a former cop who got elected on a public safety platform, is facing pressure from the progressive pussyfooters.
They’re already meeting to find a candidate to run against him in 2025.
The New York Times reported the leftists met in July, ironically in the Republican bastion of Staten Island, to find someone to boot the mayor after one term.
No matter what you think about Eric Adams’ performance so far, just think what New York would be like if say, leftist Congressman Jamaal Bowman takes up a city residence and becomes mayor. If that happens, New York will turn into Oakland.
The good citizens of Oakland have awoken and have spoken. They’ve had enough. They want to feel safe, to be safe. To get there, they’ll have to elect people who are fair, but firm. A mayor, a district attorney who are focused on making their streets safe and not on using their city as a petrie dish for their progressive pipe dreams.
The good citizens of New York need to wake up too and they need to wake up now. They have a mayor whose performance is uneven but at least he’s saying the right things. This past week, in an op-ed piece in the New York Post, Adams repeated that “Public safety and justice are the foundation of an equitable society.” Adams is not a police defunder, far from it. But he’s being undercut by criminal coddlers in the state legislature and in the city council.
Those people, who want to plunge New York backwards, are already organizing. They look at Oakland and say, we need that same progressive philosophy for the five boroughs. Make no mistake, they are true believers. Eric Adams is no Rudy Giuliani or Mike Bloomberg in his policing tactics, but in their eyes, he might as well be Bull Connor.
The Oakland NAACP’s letter is so important because maybe, just maybe, it’s the start of the return to rationality after the takeover of our cities by ideological radicals. Maybe things are starting to change because people who simply want to live without fear are pushing back.
There are glimmers of hope, of common sense. If more groups like the Oakland NAACP make their sane voices heard, the road back from the progressive urban psychosis will be less fraught with danger.
The NAACP’s letter is like an urgent call to 911 to save our cities, our homes, our lives. I pray someone picks up and answers, fast.
1 thought on “City Psychosis”
Today’s WSJ profiles similar anti-crime and normalization efforts in San Francisco to prevent, and possibly reverse further decline in that city. All this reminds me of a journalist’s comment ( I believe it was Caroline Glick) who said some people are so open minded that their brains have fallen out !