About a month ago I was in Portland, Oregon, ostensibly to cover the riots outside the ICE facility there. But what struck me even more was the complete lack of order in the harrowing streets of the city center. Don’t look now, but that same kind of disorder may be coming to New York City.
Four years ago, as democratic socialist Bill de Blasio ended his disastrous eight years of shameful mismanagement of Gotham, the New York Post commissioned me to take a walk through downtown Manhattan to document the destruction he wrought.
To be clear, New York City wasn’t as bad in 2021 as Portland or San Francisco is now, but it was very, very bad.
This is how I described it at the time:
WATCH: DESTRUCTIVE REPORT REVEALS WHAT NEW YORKERS THINK OF SANCTUARY POLICY AS MAMDANI’S VICTORY looms
Some lie half-naked, stretched out on the concrete of the sidewalks, some appear in small groups, pooling meager funds for illegal purchases. Others prowl the streets shouting incoherently like Times Square preachers. A man in a long, flowing dress danced seductively through the traffic of taxi-lined Eighth Avenue and landed near a light pole on which he could perform a kind of striptease.
Leading New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is spending heavily on private security for his campaign and personal life, despite past calls to dismantle the police. (Reuters/Brendan McDermid and New York Police)
“Today, the city’s response to all of this appears to be inaction.”
To his credit, when Mayor Eric Adams took office in 2022, he quickly worked with the NYPD to improve much of this. Just a few months into his tenure you could still smell the smell of marijuana between the glass and steel towers, but at least the guys selling it on cardboard boxes with scales were gone.
DOUGLAS MURRAY WARNS RISKS OF LONDON-STYLE BACKGROUND UNDER MAMDANI’S SOCIALIST POLICIES
As a former cop, Adams understood that quality of life crime is a huge threat to a city, and while he eschewed the controversial term “broken windows police,” he did create quality of life teams, or “Q teams,” within the police department to tackle low-level street crime.
These are exactly the kind of efforts that Zany Zohran Mamdani promises to eliminate as he plans to replace police responses with those of social workers and the homeless industrial complex, the very same plan that has destroyed Portland.
A protester reacts as law enforcement officers deploy smoke grenades to disperse people gathering outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters in south Portland, Oregon, October 5, 2025. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)
This week there was a telling life. It’s that simple.”
MAMDANI’S PAST ‘COMFORTABLE CRIME’ FOR POLICE ‘scares MANY NEW YORKERS’ FOR GOOD REASON: NYC CRIME EXPERT
This is exactly the attitude that has caused Portland’s decline. And Vershbow is right. She will hardly be affected. There will still be brunch and cocktails. There will still be Ubers to protect her “privileged AF” self from the subway.
And given that Vershbow has no interest in children, who cares if she has to walk past some drug addicts or stretched out bodies? These are difficult things to explain to our children, but easy enough for us adults to simply ignore.
De Blasio was well on his way to taking New York to that breaking point in 2021. Times Square wasn’t the place you wanted to bring your kids, but thankfully voters rejected his socialist policies in favor of Adams.
It seems unfathomable that the Big Apple is willing to return to the disastrous wages of socialism it so recently experienced and was voted out of, although, to be fair, Mamdani, if he were to win, would likely do so with less than 50% of the vote.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS ADVICE
If that happens, look to Portland to find out what will happen to the quality of life issues. It took de Blasio eight long years to undo the generational lead of Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, but Zohran will hit the ground running.
Like Portland, New York’s wealthy, those who choose not to escape sky-high taxes, will be just fine. Like the communist leaders themselves, they never suffer any hardship under Marxism. To them it’s just a grand and loving experiment, not a death sentence for a once great city.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
It was Portlanders who destroyed their hometown by refusing to police the streets, shelter the homeless and addicts, while driving small businesses into the ground with unpunished theft.
Unfortunately, it looks like New Yorkers are about to follow suit, and things are about to get uglier than ever before in Gotham.
CLICK HERE TO DAVID MARCUS
