Editors' Note: From time to time the Spy receives dispatches from the planet Zontar in the Remulac galaxy. Although the ways of this alien race are unfathomable to us humans, we occasionally print one of their transmissions to demonstrate the strangeness of other worlds.
KEY CRIME RATE HITS NEW LOW AS
FORMER MAYOR ADMITS ERROR
By Nellie Bly
New Zork Correspondent
NEW ZORK CITY – The news that the number of shootings in New Zork City reached a new low last year has led to what some are describing as one of the most surprising events in living memory: the admission by former Mayor and fun-sized billionaire plutocrat Michael Zoomberg that he was wrong.
According to the usually authoritative New Zork Times, the city's crime rate fell to a recent low in 2016, despite changes in police tactics ordered by current Mayor Bill diBlazio:
Crime has gradually declined since then, and in 2016, for the first time in more than two decades, the city counted fewer than 1,100 shootings in a calendar year, a milestone that officials said on Wednesday was a result of the Police Department’s efforts to focus on serious crimes and mend relationships with the communities it serves.
At a news conference at the museum, the police announced that shootings had fallen to 998 in 2016 from 1,138 the year before. The 2016 total was the lowest since at least 1993, the year before the Police Department adopted a computerized system to track and combat crime. Murders also fell, to 335 last year from 352, after rising slightly in 2015.
The record low, 333, was in 2014. Over all, crime fell about 4.1 percent in the major categories tracked by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to 101,606 in 2016 from 105,921 the year before. There were fewer murders, rapes, robberies, burglaries and grand larcenies in 2016, but felony assaults rose to 20,807, from 20,375 in 2015.
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| Despite an overall decline in the crime rate, experts wonder if more aggressive police tactics could have prevented the theft of Mariah Carey's vocal track in Times Square |
The discovery that manhandling young black and Hispanic men did not in fact fight crime came as news to many, including one of said manhandling's staunchest defenders: ex-Mayor Zoomberg. In 2013, the former Mayor and eternal zillionaire wrote, or hired some poor zhlub to write, a column for the The Zontarian Post stating bluntly that “Stop-and-frisk keeps New Zork safe.”
The column was a classic bit of white privileged male sanctimony, although as it was aimed at one of such privilege's clubhouses, the Post editorial page, it was more like the glass of white wine thrown by one Botoxed cougar at another. Citing no authority other than himself and his billions, the ex-Mayor stated that despite what some federal court had found after a full and fair trial on the merits, he knew that stop-and-frisk was just fine, because, one, he said so, and, two, none of his friends had complained. So far nothing to see here.
Yet in a stunning and as far as we can determine unprecedented event, the former Mayor admitted he was wrong. In a statement released today, he said “The evidence is in, and it's clear we can have a safer city without alienating the majority of New Zorkers. I was wrong.”
The shock waves caused by the Mayor's admission reverberated coast to coast from one end of white male privilege (Northeast Harbor, Maine) to the other (La Jolla, California).
The editors of Zontar's leading publication of news and ideas, Teen Vogue, were gobsmacked by the news. “It's not the admission about stop-and-frisk, which everyone knew; it's the spectacle of a rich entitled white man admitting error,” said Social Theory Editor Sadie Ginsberg-McIlhenney.
“We're wondering here if one white man can admit he was wrong about something, will other white men follow suit?” she said.
Experts are dubious. They note that another former New Zork mayor and proponent of killing and beating black men, Rudy Zombieani, has so far not retreated one whit in his support of the discredited and unconstitutional stop-and-frisk program. Nor has the sorely put-upon spokesman for white privilege, Schlox News host Bill Z. Reilly, yet admitted that calling young female subordinates and offering to soap up their genitals was less than a good idea.
Emma Dubinsky-Lancellotti, Teen Vogue's politics editor, doubts that the precedent set by former Mayor Zoomberg will reach Zontar's capital: “It's one thing for a billionaire to admit he was wrong when it doesn't cost him any money. But any Senator or Congressman who admits that global warming is a reality or or that millions will suffer if the Affordable Care Act is repealed would be cut off by his paymasters without so much as a lump of Koch brothers coal.”
In a terse comment that appeared to confirm Ms. Dubinsky-Lancellotti's doubts, Republican puppeteer Sheldon Adelson said only: “F***in-A they'll say what I pay them to say.”
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