So I heard NY city is having a bit of an exodus. Combination of rising unemployment, crime, and COVID.
COVID and unemployment are basically "what else did you expect from America?" But the crime part is a little more interesting. In lieu of the George Floyd protests, NY city Mayor Bill De Blasio reacted as the people wanted US leadership to do - by cutting funding to the police and moving it to social services. The police responded by retrenching their officers, resulting in a spike in crime.
You see, people fail to understand how corrupt the US police force is. They know that as long as they keep up demand for firearms and military gear, the gun lobbies will take care of them. Force leaders would rather retrench their own men than stop wasting money on guns, knowing that the elected officials will be voted out if people are angry - and they will be angry if crime is high. And police officers are paid high enough to be retrenched with no issue and get rehired later.
But this also presents another piece of insight. The people wanted De Blasio to defund the police - it was literally the slogan. He did. Now they buried themselves in this problem.
What's the lesson? People are very good at identifying issues - this is why politicians should hold town halls, listen to their voter base, address issues directly. But people are pretty bad when it comes to solutions. Despite crowds in the thousands, few realized the solution needed to be more nuanced than just defunding the force - you must mandate a budget to limit unnecessary spending, particularly in the equipment and munitions areas. (Or maybe they did realize, but with the way the system works, everything has to be marketed down to three-word slogans.)
Anyhow, my prediction is NY will elect a Republican mayor soon, and he'll undo the work De Blasio has done, reducing crime and keeping him popular, but bringing the situation back to where it was before. It's all a big ol' circular road to nowhere.
