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Shoplifters are stripping New York’s retail cabinets all however naked lately, and fare-beaters are busting the MTA’s price range. But to not fear — City Hall has acronyms.
Gotham’s finest and brightest have studied these issues for months now, and each City Hall and the MTA simply coughed up proposed options.
The Adams administration presents PROP — the Precision Repeat Offender Program.
This will comprise a list of serial retail thieves and City Hall shall be checking it twice — or three or 4 or 5 instances, no matter it takes to keep away from arresting anyone.
Then there may be RESTORE — or Re-Engaging Store Theft Offenders and Retail Establishments, which explicitly is meant to guard shoplifters from penalties.
Really — who thinks these items up? How about AWS — Actually, We Surrender?
Because everyone is aware of shoplifting is a Crime of Poverty™ and thus to not be prosecuted — even when it has been savaging each big-box drug shops and neighborhood bodegas for years now, driving up costs, inconveniencing prospects and proving to everybody else that obeying the legislation in New York is now a chump’s recreation.
Meanwhile, the MTA — which lost an estimated three-quarters of a billion dollars to fare-beaters last year — additionally isn’t going to take it any longer.
Or so say company bosses — who in all probability imply it, however who principally are shouting right into a darkish subway tunnel. Progressive “prosecutors” contemplate farebeating to be a correct type of social protest they usually deal with it that method.
Thus the company — which is meant to be about trains and buses — simply spent a 12 months and God solely is aware of how a lot cash cooking up a 120-page report making an attempt to resolve w hat primarily is a law-enforcement downside.
And to not be outdone by City Hall’s foolish alphabet soup, the MTA is selling pointless gestures of its personal.
It plans to install thick plastic farebeating barriers in busy subway stations.
And if that appears acquainted, it ought to: The chain drugstores use plastic doors to keep sticky fingers out of the toothpaste and candy-bar bins. (This isn’t precisely working, which largely is why so many chain shops have closed.)
And whereas the obstacles certainly will make the subways appear much more fearsomely claustrophobic, they’ll do little to resolve one other huge farebeating downside: More than one-third of the MTA’s bus riders merely stroll previous the MetroCard pedestals — and drivers who object get punched.
Well, to be honest, they get punched for plenty of causes — however principally as a result of town has misplaced the ethical braveness to slap the ‘cuffs on criminals.
And it feels no disgrace about that, both.
Wasn’t Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, the George Soros acolyte and Gotham’s best-known non-prosecuting prosecutor, current Wednesday when Mayor Adams introduced his Alphabet Initiative — pretending like he cares?
Why sure, he was. Appearances have to be maintained, by no means thoughts that Bragg embodies the issue Adams hopes to resolve with the PROP program — primarily a nonsensical listing.
Let’s be clear: lists don’t work: The late Jordan Neely was on town’s weird Top 50 roster of mentally unwell homeless to observe — a rely ’em however don’t corral ’em method that failed him, Daniel Penny and town at giant.
No critical particular person is pretending that muscular crackdowns will put an finish to petty thievery and turnstile-jumping altogether. That’s not the purpose.
But simply as with unlawful weed shops domestically and border collapse nationally, the shortage of even a pretense of enforcement leads on to socially demoralizing chaos and — ultimately — unlivable cities.
Mayor Adams and the MTA clearly are enjoying charades — in all probability as a result of they haven’t any selection. They’re providing camouflage, not options.
Don’t be fooled.
