Well at least New Yorkers have a new hero. I’m talking of course of Ro Malabanan, the black belt jiu-jitsu MMA fighter who detained a madman he saw walking around Soho sucker-punching people.
In recent times New Yorkers have sometimes been criticized for being placid in the face of violent crime. Who could forget that footage from May of a woman on the New York City subway being pulled by the hair by a thug as other passengers just looked on? What were all those men doing as the woman sat in a state of clear and extreme terror? The bravest filmed it on his phone. The rest just pretended to be swallowed up in theirs.
So Malabanan’s story comes as something of a relief. As The Post reported earlier this week Samuel Frazier was walking around the street’s of Soho’s shopping district randomly assaulting people in the middle of the day. After seeing him sucker-punch a construction worker, Malabanan chased after Frazier, jumped on his back and dragged him down to the floor in what is called a seatbelt position. While Frazier squealed and complained about the injustice of it all. Malabanan kept the thug pinned down on the pavement until the police eventually arrived.
“A lot of crazies out there in the street right now,” the hero said afterwards. And he’s not wrong. The trouble is it’s not clear there are enough sane people about to take them down.
The city is now suffering a perfect storm of violent crime. And of course it starts at the very top. Even Mayor Adams admits that “Our criminal justice system is insane.” As The Post reported yesterday, we have a criminal justice system in this city that acts like a revolving door. The “no bail” laws allow criminals to get away with their crimes again and again. Sometimes these are crimes the authorities now seem to think are too minor to bother with. “Victimless” crimes, like, oh, shoplifting, burglary, robbery and car theft.
Some of those who have actually been caught for these crimes have been arrested as many as a hundred times. But on and on their careers of crime go. Because of this city’s crazy bail reform laws. Activists spent years claiming that bail reforms were the key to stopping repeat offending. It turns out they do the exact opposite – acting as an incentive mechanism. Who could have guessed?
But it’s not just on these allegedly “minor” crimes that this city allows people to get away with it. Worst is that it literally allows them to get away with murder. Look at the story that has emerged this week of the Brooklyn McDonalds shooter. Michael Morgan, now in custody for shooting the McDonald´s employee, had no sooner been arrested than he was slapped with a rap for an unrelated slaying back in 2020. Morgan allegedly confessed to the slaying of Kevin Holloman who was shot three times in Bed-Stuy. Just one of the hundreds of murders that happen in this city each year that are random, brutal, life-destroying for the families and swiftly forgotten about by everyone else.
Holloman’s killing would have stayed another unsolved murder had Morgan’s mother not complained this week that she’d been served cold fries. How did this young man respond to his mother’s FaceTime complaint but by marching round the corner and shooting the McDonald’s employee in the neck. The victim is braindead, barely alive. But how did Morgan’s family respond to his evil act? The grandmother of his girlfriend (who allegedly handed him the gun) said that the whole thing would have been solved it ”they just gave the lady some hot french fries.” You can see the kind of value that Morgan and the people around him put on human life.
When this city went through a crime-wave before it was solved by the police being ordered to police even the most minor offenses. The famous “broken windows” policy. The city is sorely in need of that today. Any day you can see the growing number of “unhoused” people in the city making a menace of themselves on the streets. Everywhere you can now smell the stench of legalized marijuana. One more thing we were promised would bring crime down. Well I don’t see that. You don’t have to push through the fog of marijuana smoke off any main street in this city to see illegal drug deals going on in broad daylight. Sometimes I wonder if the police have just given up.
If they had I wouldn´t necessarily blame them. What is it like to be a police officer in New York in 2022?
You’ve just had years of politicians and crowds insisting that you’re a racist. And a would-be murderer yourself. You’ve had to put up with the lowest morale imaginable. You’ve seen unprecedented numbers of colleagues take early retirement and leave the force. And you’ve seen the problem at the other end – which is intake. Is anybody surprised that there is a problem of police recruitment? Who would want to go into a profession where you’re respected so little and treated so badly?
The police get blamed when they don’t do their job. But now they get no satisfaction when they do. They have to put up with seeing the violent offenders they have just caught being let out within the day. It doesn’t take much imagination to see what that must do to an officer’s moral. You do the job you are employed to do, only to discover that a bunch of liberal DAs and others have made your work like pushing a boulder up a hill, over and over again for all time.
I’m glad that we have a new have-a-go hero in New York. I wish the whole city were packed with MMA fighters. But even more I wish we had a police force that was allowed to police this city, and a criminal justice system that could “seatbelt” position the people who so badly need it.