Here are 12 resolutions for avoiding crime in 2025, especially in big cities like New York.
Don’t set people on fire. Drunk and previously-deported migrant Sebastian Zapeta-Calil murdered a woman on a New York subway days ago by igniting her clothes with a lighter and fanning the flames. The only consolation, given the apparent indifference of the watching cops and other citizens, is that this incident becoming well-known may bring to an end 60 years of pointing to the outdoor stabbing murder of Kitty Genovese as the most disturbing example of New Yorkers failing to intervene to stop a crime. In that famous case, it may have been unclear to people nearby—in apartment buildings in the night—where her screams were coming from and what exactly they implied. I don’t rush to blame victims or bystanders in a world that all too often forgets to blame the perpetrator. But video of the Zapeta-Calil incident at least looks worse—for the whole city. Onlookers merely shouting things like “That’s a person yo!” don’t inspire confidence that an upsurge in manly heroism will rescue us, either.
Don’t expect help from the police. As the video embedded within the piece linked in the paragraph above shows, police—perhaps unjustly hated by one half the political spectrum but certainly unjustly loved by the other half—often believe they have better things to do than their jobs. If you dare watch the video, you’ll see what sure appears to be at least one cop strolling nonchalantly by the woman on fire, who isn’t curled up in an inaccessible corner but rather standing upright in the middle of a stopped subway car, brightly blazing away. The cop seems somehow both psychologically and physically unfazed, amazing not just because of his ostensible professional and basic moral duties but also because of his sheer proximity to the fire. He must’ve felt the intense heat. You’d think that would stir some small instinctual reaction, at least a twinge, even if morality and compassion didn’t. Maybe this is the mental impact of advanced, late-stage left-liberalism: waiting for some other part of the bureaucracy, or society in the abstract, to do something, though it obviously won’t.
Don’t pretend Daniel Penny is the real threat. He was recently acquitted in a criminal trial in Manhattan for tackling and accidentally killing a deranged homeless man who’d been loudly threatening to kill fellow passengers on the subway. Even in this left-liberal city, most people were grateful to Penny and glad he was found not guilty, but he still faces a civil trial on behalf of relatives of the deceased. More troubling is the fact that numerous left-liberal op-ed writers and no doubt many a society-analyzing Ph.D.-holder in colleges across the land pretend that rare Samaritans like Penny, not murderous homeless lunatics, are the reason people live in fear in urban environments. If only. The Ph.D.-holders will do nothing to prevent violence against innocents but may gift the world with more papers on topics such as how Batman inspires fascism.
Don’t assume Luigi Mangione, who killed the CEO of UnitedHealth Group’s insurance division outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel, was trying to be a Robin Hood. It’s taboo to mention how mobbed-up major mainstream businesses are, but Mangione’s family allegedly has ties to both Baltimore-area crime and a rival health insurance company that had been vying against UnitedHealth just weeks before the murder to absorb a company that ended up going to UnitedHealth even after a Department of Justice warning that such a merger might be an antitrust violation. Mangione was reportedly arrested in a McDonald’s with a lefty manifesto conveniently among his possessions, hinting at an apparent motive, but not only should we not trust him to be forthright about what was on his mind, we shouldn’t assume the throng of young female admirers at his courtroom appearance were all leftists—as opposed to, say, Jersey girls who love and have longstanding ties to violent bad boys. Depravity takes many forms, some of them alarmingly organized.
Don’t assume criminals are isolated individuals. A mob of the simpler, more old-fashioned kind—a huge, violent, frenzied horde—will nowadays sometimes rush into and raid a store, often a department or convenience store, a phenomenon seen from Queens to L.A. and in all cases combining the worst elements of individual greed and social coordination, sometimes via social media. That’s troubling—and in some big coastal cities probably in part a side effect of word getting out that some prosecutors and police will effectively ignore crimes below a certain threshold of economic damage but, as if to twist the knife, will zealously prosecute store owners who try to defend themselves with unauthorized weapons, even if the store owners have tried all the officially permitted remedies, such as calling some of those aforementioned cops. For decades, perhaps especially among Gen Xers like my peers, talking about morality, nihilism, or social breakdown as real issues with visible consequences was considered old-fashioned, superstitious primitivism. But as YouTuber Cash Jordan suggests here, ignoring or permitting crime isn’t doing the residents of urban areas any favors.
Yet don’t be an “urban conservative” (or urbancon, as I call them). Even as I plug Cash Jordan videos, I can’t help suspecting he buys into the idea common among big-city conservatives (an idea toward which both Giuliani and Trump gravitated until their national-level constituencies strenuously objected) that gun control is beneficial and “sensible,” or at least Jordan firmly counsels against “vigilantes” and urges waiting for the cops to show up and handle things. That beats complete passivity but often not by much, as his own videos show. Sadly, in major cities, it now takes a crusty, rebellious, trends-bucking personality merely to say burglars should be arrested, never mind say that an occasional real-life Charles Bronson character might be educational.
Don’t pretend respect for police unions is a substitute for respecting the Constitution. There’s something especially sad about some of the aforementioned urbancons—you’ll find a few at the New York Post and the Manhattan Institute/City Journal, useful though those institutions sometimes are—talking so tough, and lately so populist, while being as dismissive of the Second Amendment as any of their liberal neighbors. One unspoken reason for their mushiness on that issue is that the urbancons love cops, and while cops have guns of their own, their unions often promote gun control for the lowly and untrustworthy masses. Authorities like to have monopolies, and government is first and foremost a monopoly on force, whether rationalized in left-wing or nominally right-wing ways. If you get disarmed by a government that says it hates crime, you’re still disarmed. Don’t fall for it (not that I’m telling you to break the law).
Don’t assume Trump will be reliable in preventing violent crime. Does he really love your right to self-defense—which at this stage in history must logically imply reducing the power of cops to search your person and possessions for weapons—as much as he loves the semi-useful cops? He’s a product of the same bureaucratized, morally bankrupt, gun-grabbing, left-liberal city that gave us crusading gun-banner Michael Bloomberg, after all. Their records differ, but both are wired to think more like executives than like a poor, lonely sap manning a drug store counter late at night and wondering if the next visit from gang members may require him to take matters into his own hands.
Don’t assume most of the population has even absorbed basic anti-crime insights dating back to the Nixon era. Nixon—arguably a criminal himself—at least recognized that with the blessings of liberty come plenty of opportunities for malevolent people to hurt others. It’s not mean to prevent the malevolent people from harming the innocent people, including hippies. That’s so obvious to some of us that it almost needn’t be stated, but in a world of simplistic, binary thinking, there really are plenty of people who think that if they’re nice and tolerant, they must be supportive and non-judgmental toward the murderers and thieves as well. That way lies a world without cash bail or prisons, perhaps, but also a world with more blood in the streets and shorter lifespans. Just because it starts out sounding like Jesus doesn’t mean it’s kind in the end.
Don’t become New York City police chief and then pressure your subordinates for sex. You’d think that would go without saying, but this town has developed all sorts of very innovative ideas about how to run things over the past several decades.
Don’t beat a man to death—on camera, no less—if you’re a group of on-duty corrections officers. Murdering a criminal is still crime, hard as it is for some to grasp that idea.
Finally, don’t indirectly create the Taliban if you’re ostensibly trying to prevent communism and terrorism. This is a recommendation inspired not by some notorious right-winger gone astray—a Bush, perhaps—but rather by the late former President Jimmy Carter, almost always rhetorically invoked in recent years either as a symbol of left-liberal economic failure or left-liberal foreign policy failure. Those charges are fair, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that he was also an occasional advocate of economic deregulation (even noting that burdensome regulations help no one) and, perhaps more surprising to young ears, was the president who got the ball rolling on U.S. military funding of radical mujahadeen fighters in Afghanistan, a strategy that would come back to haunt us in multiple ways, from that big hole in the ground in downtown Manhattan to Biden’s ignominious and sloppy but necessary withdrawal from Afghanistan. Was The Simpsons all that wrong when it dubbed Carter “history’s greatest monster” (in an episode Carter reportedly watched)? No matter what the law says, initiating violence is a crime, even when a president does it—regardless of party and regardless of post-presidency acclaim.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey