At a time when crime is soaring in New York, the Democrats running the show there decided that now would be a good time to slash $1 billion from the New York Police Department's $6 billion budget. 

Hello, crime wave, hello 'Shattered,' that famous Mick Jagger anthem of New York's slum-of-a-decade, the 1970s. It doesn't take a genius to know that's exactly what's going to happen. New Yorkers, after all, are fleeing. The only people left are the ones who can't get out.

Naturally, the far-left is outraged. Police cuts, mere cuts? They wanted the entire police force cut. "Defund the police," after all is their battle cry.

But in a Tom Wolfean pot-boiler of conflicting interests, just getting that lunatic cut has put these rabid leftwingers up on a collision course with Black interests in New York, who know whose ox is about to get gored as the radicals virtue-signal.

According to the New York Times's piece delicatedly titled "Nearly $1 Billion Is Shifted From Police in Budget That Pleases No One":

Mayor Bill de Blasio and the Council speaker, Corey Johnson, had agreed in principle to cut $1 billion from the Police Department’s $6 billion operating budget, but doing so successfully — especially when crime and shootings are rising — would be a tricky “balancing act,” the mayor said on Tuesday.

Sure enough, the details seemed to please no one, and the budget passed the City Council early Wednesday with more noes than usual, in a 32-to-17 vote.

The city decided to cancel the planned hiring of roughly 1,160 officers, and to shift monitoring of illegal vending, homeless people on the streets and school safety away from the police.

Here's the take of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who's suddenly taken a newfound interest in the municipal affairs of New York:

“Defunding police means defunding police,” Ms. [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez said. “It does not mean budget tricks or funny math.”

Politico notes that Ocasio-Cortez's Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are in fact leading the charge.

But buried deep in a series of stories from both Politico and the New York Times is news that Black people who have to live in these places, now stripped of police protection, are furious. Here's Politico, citing multiple sources, emphasis mine:

Complicating matters for Johnson and de Blasio is that the Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus is not aligned with the DSA and has been arguing about the nature and size of police cuts with some of the body’s left-leaning Democratic members in private negotiations over recent weeks, multiple people have told POLITICO.

On Friday, the caucus issued a statement slamming the DSA after some of its members showed up outside the homes of two Council members.

“We reject efforts by those who seek to appropriate our message and gentrify [code: white] our movement with their ideologies, rather than our realities, and denounce their attempts to menace a Black mother and her baby, and bully an ally and community leader by threatening entry into his home,” the caucus tweeted on Friday.

“When others retreat to their privilege, our Black, Latino and Asian communities will be left to contend with budget cuts, police brutality, and recovery from devastation of COVID-19, and it will continue to be our responsibility to illuminate the path forward for our movement,” the statement continued.

Which is a deadly indictment of the far left, including a call-out of its Alinsky tactics, marching to people's doorsteps. It makes perfect sense, though. Rich whitey virtue-signals and makes the policy, Black people get stuck living with the results. And it's clear they know what the results are about to be, who's going to get the short straw.

Here's what the New York City crime picture looked like a few months ago even before the budget cuts:

To date, there have been 299 homicides versus 275 for all of 2018 – an 8.7% increase. There have been 12,100 robberies to date versus 11,880 for all of 2018 – a 1.9% jump. Felony assaults are also up with 18,966 this year to date versus 18,682 last year – a 1.5% spike.

Since then, the hoodlums have been let out of jail, cash bail has been abolished for stalking, assault, burglary, drug dealing, and even some arson and robbery, and it's pretty clear the place going to hell. Combine this with the huge demoralization of New York's police force, which had nothing to do with the police brutality incident in Minneapolis, and tough luck trying to get a cop on the phone when your house is being cat-burgled or someone's setting your car on fire. 

Vigilantism, anyone? The rich, including the Park Avenue-ers who vote for Bill de Blasio, have private security, the Black people who are now going to be rained with this crime wave are quite likely to have do-it-yourself private security.

And as this hellish scenario plays out, rest assured, the rift between the rich mostly white radicals and their minority puppet-people who speak on their behalf for the cameras, dictating lunacies such as cutting the police, and the Black and other minority people who have to live with this nightmare is going to grow sharper, deeper, and more explosive. Blacks are the ones who are going to have to live without the security, whites, including the Antifa-ites who increasingly dominate the Black Lives Matter protests, can retreat into their money and all the private security it buys, even as they are going to keep calling for more cuts, if not joining the criminals themselves and 'getting paid' that way. 

It signals that all's not well with the left as its radical branch claims ascendency over America. Some very big problems are clearly brewing for those who aren't so willing to be socialism's guinea pigs. They're all blue, of course, but it presents a golden opportunity for Republicans to get out ahead of the nightmare the left has planned for Black people and start courting their votes. 

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of image by Bert Verhoeff (ANEFO) via Wikimedia Commons, public domain images from Needpix, Pixabay, and UIHere.