At the inaugural meeting last week of a community watch organization in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, one resident dismissed the notion of crime, saying it had been “socially constructed to target black and poor people.”
THE QUOTE
Left-wing activist Kristian Nammack’s attempt to form a citizen’s group in response to rising crime in the affluent area faced resistance from other Park Slope residents, journalist Suzy Weiss reported yesterday in the Substack newsletter Common Sense.
- “Crime is an abstract term that means nothing in a lot of ways,” said an activist named Sky during the first meeting of the Park Slope Panthers. “The construct of crime has been so socially constructed to target black and poor people.”
- An unnamed activist argued that a homeless man who had recently assaulted a jogger and killed her dog “has been pushed out of an unimaginable amount of systems” and was probably “neurodivergent.”
- Some days after the meeting, a graffito appeared on the sidewalk outside Nammack’s house: “Don’t be a cop, Kris.”
MEANWHILE
Despite continued progressive experiments in the area of police reform, most Americans prefer conventional policing as a public safety solution.