Beatings and sexual assaults making a comeback to New York subways

Whenever you travel to the Big Apple, just remember not to take the subway. The extra cost of a cab is worth your life, even as state and city officials sacrifice the value of your life to street thugs in order to empty the prisons.

Even before the full enactment of New York’s criminal justice reform, the predictable consequence of undeterred violent crime is already rearing its ugly head. Last Thursday, two female tourists were savagely beaten at a Brooklyn subway stop and robbed while nobody did anything to help. Surveillance video shows two suspects repeatedly beating them on the platform stairs and threatening them with a knife and taser before running off with their belongings. Welcome to New York City; enjoy your stay in America!

In a separate incident on a Manhattan subway platform a few days earlier, surveillance video shows convicted rapist George Shaw, 54, sexually assaulting an unsuspecting 18-year-old female. Shaw was convicted in 1996 of raping and sodomizing four females, including three underage girls. He was released from prison last year, and now he is accused of forcibly grabbing this subway passenger from behind. Frankly, we should be thankful Shaw was behind bars even for 22 years. 1996 was at the height of the incarceration era. Today, even someone convicted of four rapes would likely serve much less time in New York before being paroled.

As I’ve reported before, this is part of a broader trend of returning violence to subways in New York and elsewhere. According to NYPD data, there were 1,185 transit misdemeanor assaults citywide from Jan. 1 to Nov. 17, which reflects a 10.9 percent increase from the same time last year. This is largely due to Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s refusal to enforce public order laws and fare jumping, which often reveal perpetrators of even greater crimes. That’s why the number of sex crimes on NY’s subways has increased for four years in a row. The number of subway “hate crimes” is also up 50 percent this year over last year.

This is all before New York’s new “criminal justice reform” law take effect, and anyone accused of transit assault will be out on bail pending trial. Then again, the girl who was sexually assaulted at the subway should be thankful it was there and not in her home, because this same law will now grant the defense the opportunity to return to the scene of the crime during the trial. For a rape victim in her home, that means returning the suspect to the victim’s bedroom.

The breakdown of public order and the escalation of violence in public transit is happening everywhere criminal justice deform has been tried. In San Francisco, where theft and street vagrancy have essentially become a way of life, crime is skyrocketing. The San Francisco Chronicle reports, "Homicide, rape, assault and robbery have doubled on BART [the Bay Area Rapid Transit system] in the last four years -- from 234 incidents in 2015 to 481 incidents last year -- after six years of relative stability.”

As California empties its prisons, the streets are the scenes of criminal behavior. The L.A. Times reports that car thefts in some California cities are at “crisis levels,” as prosecutors say their “hands are tied” thanks to new pro-criminal policies in place. Car burglaries spiked in San Francisco by 24 percent from 2016 to 2017 and by 20 percent in San Jose from 2016 to 2018. So if you want to avoid the crime in the subways by using your own car to get around the city, just remember that the one-sided justice system has given the criminals a long reach into your private vehicle as well.

Subway violence has also increased in Seattle and Minneapolis, two bastions of criminal justice “reform.” The number of serious crimes on Minneapolis’ green line is up 34 percent this year. The Twin Cities have become a stronghold for criminal justice “reform” as crime spikes across most categories, with St. Paul on pace for a record year of homicides. Transit crimes are up 6 percent this year in Chicago, despite the deployment of thousands of new cameras. After all, cameras only serve as a deterrent if those caught committing crimes on the footage are actually punished.

Republicans have a golden opportunity to discuss safe communities and neighborhoods and run against Blue America’s culture of pro-criminal laws and the ensuing consequences of violent crime, burglary, theft, and homelessness. Yet instead of making this a top agenda item, top Republicans continue to support the Soros agenda on crime just as rigorously as Democrats. Bill Lee, the Republican governor of Tennessee, has promised to “empty our jails.” He claimed, “We have to be creative and innovative and disruptive and challenge the way we’ve been doing things forever.”

Actually, Governor Lee, there is nothing creative or innovative about implementing the Soros agenda on crime. We are seeing the innovation in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Seattle, and Minneapolis. Yes, it certainly is disruptive, and perhaps innovative from the criminals’ standpoint. But where does that leave us law-abiding citizens?

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