New York had a sanctuary-city payday Thursday evening, when a shoplifting, pistol-packing 15-year-old “migrant” allegedly opened fire in a Times Square store — wounding a tourist before bolting into a crowded street, squeezing off a few more rounds and disappearing into a subway station.
Really — does it get more out of control than that?
More terrifying?
More thoroughly predictable?
All that was missing was an OD’ed junkie with a needle in his arm — and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg off in a corner mumbling about the incarceration state.
Oh, sure, the big fellow finally got around to indicting the migrant mini-mob that kicked two cops around Times Square last month.
Good luck with convictions, though.
All seven suspects are MIA at the moment — after Bragg’s socially sensitive assistant prosecutors declined to request bail for the four who actually were arrested.
Cause and effect is murky stuff, for sure. But when people who beat up cops are walked through the door — and into the wind — as a matter of routine, why would a mere shoplifter fear consequences?
Obviously Thursday’s merchandise booster — tentatively identified by police as Venezuelan Jesus Rives-Figuero, 15, a suspect in a Bronx robbery — wasn’t concerned: He was carrying a gun — and suddenly the cost of Bragg’s restorative-justice regime sharply escalated.
That it wasn’t a fatal escalation was not for lack of trying; whether it signals a trend — are illegal immigrants now arming themselves? — will become more clear time passes.
Here’s the latest on the Times Square shooting
- A tourist was shot in the leg at a retail store in Times Square on Thursday night by a shoplifter. The shoplifter then opened fire at an NYPD officer in Midtown, according to police.
- NYPD has identified Jesus Lejenadro Rivas-Figueroa, 15, as a person of interest in connection to the Thursday night shooting, Chief of Patrol John Chell said.
- The NYPD has offered a $10,000 reward for anyone with information leading to the suspect.
- A security guard at JD Sports at West 42 Street and Broadway approached a group of young males to stop them from stealing when one pulled out a gun, fired it in her direction and missed, hitting the nearby tourist.
- Sources said Friday that a 15-year-old and a third person were taken into custody and later released.
And not much time.
Meanwhile, Thursday’s outburst was a four-fecta of urban disorder:
* There was the migrant overload — a debilitating burden on the city both physically and fiscally;
* There was the shooting — a sanguinary phenomenon traceable directly to Gotham’s abandonment of broken-windows policing;
* There was the shoplifting — a post-pandemic plague that is driving retailers to distraction and, in many cases, out of business altogether, and;
* There was the heavy hit to Broadway and the tourism trade in general — critical both to the city’s economy and to its already-shrunken tax base.
(It’s not hard to imagine how the wounded tourist’s Big Apple Yelp review will read.)
The migrant mess is Washington-centric, of course — even if the city’s virtually all-Democrat congressional delegation seems content with it.
All the rest is on New York’s uber-progressive political culture, the policies it produces and the politicians it elects.
Exhibit A is Bragg: Put a nickel in his ear and he begins to burble about criminal-justice “equity.”
Elect him DA, and he immediately announces his intent to avoid incarceration for anything short of murder and rape. (And, one suspects, not always then.)
Not to haul out an old chestnut, but elections do have consequences — in this case, Thursday’s violent Times Square mashup, most of what has happened since Mike Bloomberg left office and all that’s lurking down the road.
Gov. Hochul could kick Bragg to the curb, but she won’t even challenge the Legislature to get serious about crime.
Now all honest New Yorkers can do is hunker down and wait for summer.
It should be a hot one.
Email: bob@bobmcmanus.nyc
This story originally appeared on NYPost
