A Brooklyn woman died over the weekend after asking a man to stop shooting off fireworks. This comes less than a month after Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams told residents to “get over” calling the police about illegal fireworks.
In the wake of the left’s anti-police crusade, Adams sought to shame residents into avoiding police interventions when it came to the “nonviolent act” of shooting off fireworks.
“Stopping fireworks cannot turn into fireworks between the police and the community,” Adams said in a June 21 press conference, with the aim of avoiding “heavy-handed policing.”
Rather than call the police, Adams said residents should “go talk to the young people or the people on your block who are using fireworks” and lecture them about the dangers. “What does community policing look like? It’s the extension of everyday residents engaging with people when there are nonviolent acts taking place in the city,” he said.
Adams was not issuing a warning about the upcoming Fourth of July. New York City is dealing with a serious problem regarding illegal fireworks.
While it’s not known if 33-year-old Shatavia Walls was specifically following the advice of her borough president, at the very least she was in spirit on July 7 when she was gunned down after asking a man to stop shooting off fireworks. According to police, she was shot multiple times while trying to run away from the gunman. Walls was with was Kelvin Hernandez, who was also shot. The shooter has not been caught.
July 7 was not the Fourth of July. It was a Tuesday night, a work night, it was after 8 p.m., and Walls was perfectly in her rights to want to put a stop to what was probably an illegal and obnoxiously noisy fireworks display. And this kind of situation is…
Exactly what the police are for.
But instead, this idiot Adams is calling for straight-up vigilantism, for private citizens to police their own neighborhoods. That is not the job of private citizens. We’re not trained for that, and if you want to see a situation escalate, a private citizen without the legal authority to do so, policing another private citizen is a very good way to do that. People resent it whenever anyone plays hall monitor.
I’ll give you a perfect example that is not terribly flattering to me…
This happened some 30 years ago. I was obviously a much younger man then, an even bigger jerk than I am now… Anyway, I was playing the stereo more than a bit loud. It was during the day, but it was a residential neighborhood, and one of my neighbors, who I did not know, came over and politely asked me to turn it down. I did. I was never that big of a jerk, but I resented it and until I matured some, held a grudge against that neighbor for years — even after we had moved.
Had that neighbor called the police… Well, you don’t need me to explain how much different the dynamic would have been had a person with the authority to do so stopped by. This is why we ask the usher to shush people in the movies — it’s not only coming from a place of authority, but you never know who you’re dealing with, how they will react.
We might discover that Shatavia Walls was friendly with the person who shot her, might have had ongoing issues, in which case all of this is moot. I would never call the cops on a neighbor I was friendly with.
Regardless, this obscene idea of soft-vigilantism coming from Democrats is un-American, very dangerous, and a dereliction of duty on the government’s part.
It is not our job or responsibility to police our own neighborhoods. We pay taxes in order to have trained personnel in the form of police officers handle these things. It’s a system that worked just fine, even in New York City, for decades, and one unfortunate incident in Minneapolis should not result in the “fixing” of what works just fine.
The left have gone insane and the idiots who vote for Democrat leaders instead of actual leaders are getting exactly what they voted for. Unfortunately, things are going to get a lot worse before they get bad enough to where these voters wise up and boot the Woke Taliban out of power.
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