NYC Leftists Horrified After Iconic Park Turns Into Drug Den: 'We May Be Liberal but This Has Gone Too Far'
New York City has devolved from a once-thriving metropolis into a crime-infested slum thanks to the disastrous leadership of Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio and the left’s destructive anti-police rhetoric.
The situation has gotten so bad that even some liberals are alarmed by the rampant public drug use, homelessness and violent crimes in many parts of the city.
However, liberal New Yorkers have only themselves to blame because they continue to vote for incompetent Democrats as local leaders.
In downtown Manhattan, liberals who live in trendy Greenwich Village — a noted hippie haven — are apparently horrified that the iconic Washington Square Park has morphed into a squalid drug den.
“We may be liberal but this has gone too far,” longtime local resident Steven Hill told the New York Post. “There have always been drugs in the park, mostly pot, but what’s emerged this spring is like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”
Washington Square Park is located right next to the campus of New York University, one of the most expensive colleges in the world.
The park has been featured in numerous popular films and TV shows celebrating Manhattan.
Get ready to say, “Wow!” #WashingtonSquarePark pic.twitter.com/603aqNRLKj
— Washington Square Park (@WSPEcoProjects) May 27, 2021
Under the soft-on-crime “leadership” of NYC’s Democratic mayor and local politicians, lawless vagrants are openly doing cocaine, crack and heroin all around the 9.75-acre, tree-lined sprawl.
“The zombies are now near the fountain, as well as next to the chess [southwest] corner,” one angry resident wrote in an email to the Post. “They’ve simply moved up about 200 meters from the now shuttered end of the park.”
The individual, who wants to remain anonymous, fears the lawlessness will get worse.
“I think all hell is going to break loose,” the resident said.
Ruth Wyatt, who has lived near Washington Square Park for 25 years, is outraged by what has happened to her neighborhood park, where locals exercise, socialize and play with their children.
“The situation in the park and its surroundings has gotten out of control,” Wyatt told the Post.
In a text message to the Post, she said she recently “[p]assed by the benches of addicts, one smoking crack or whatever [and also] a young man shooting up into a vein in his arm without a care who was watching, drawing blood into the barrel of the syringe, shaking the syringe, before he pushed the blood back into his vein.”
A group of angry neighborhood residents recently wrote a letter to local politicians, demanding they fix the snowballing deterioration of their park.
“We are fed up,” the letter read.
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The missive blasted “the lack of enforcement of basic long-standing laws and illegal activity”; the “urination, defecation, spitting, discarded drug paraphernalia, alcohol bottles and cans and general filth in those areas of the park”; and “junkies sleeping, having sex, generating trash and intimidating patrons of the park.”
Brian Dube, who has lived near the park since 1981, said a May 21 meeting with state Sen. Brad Hoylman — a Democrat who’s running for Manhattan borough president — was totally unproductive.
“It seems clear to me that he doesn’t want a law-and-order solution to anything,” Dube told the Post.
It’s unclear what Dube’s political affiliation is, but he blamed most of the problems at Washington Square Park on the lack of police enforcement.
“All the issues we’re looking to address can be fixed in 15 minutes by NYPD,” he told the Post.
“But they’re no longer interested in enforcing anything. I’m pretty disgusted with the entire situation.”
Dube also slammed NYC’s outgoing mayor, who’s wildly unpopular among a bipartisan consensus of residents.
“De Blasio seems like the worst mayor ever,” he said. “The city is just going down the sewer.”
Police in Democrat-run cities across the United States have been demonized, handcuffed and pulled back amid the left’s inane “defund the police” hysteria.
The result has been catastrophic crime spikes in liberal cities, especially Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Washington and Portland, Oregon.
It has been a year since the death of George Floyd and American cities are plagued by skyrocketing crime. https://t.co/fuQLuUFDNS
— The Western Journal (@WestJournalism) May 25, 2021
The race-baiting “defund the police” movement was launched by the blancophobia anti-cop Marxists with Black Lives Matter.
Their hateful, divisive agenda was then amplified by the establishment media, corporate America and clueless, virtue-signaling Hollywood “celebrities.”
4 mo’s into Biden’s presidency and violence & homicides in Democrat controlled cities are soaring;
+22% in LA/Chicago
+23% in NYC
+43% in Philly
+59% Atlanta
+120% in Minn.
+800% in PortlandCrime is a feature of Dem control, not a glitch. Midterms can’t get here fast enough pic.twitter.com/1MgumHtGIs
— Kip Herriage (@KHerriage) May 31, 2021
Instead of achieving its alleged goal of helping the black community, BLM’s anti-police protests and riots have only made black people and all other Americans less safe.
However, BLM did accomplish its unspoken goal, which was to stoke race wars and enrich the grifters who founded the opportunistic, faux “social justice” movement.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
