The Sworn City: Thin Blue Line Gets Thinner in Newark

On Tuesday, the city of Newark unconscionably laid off 167 police officers.  That is a stunning amount of shields no longer protecting a killing urban core and we are immediately propelled back to the death days of August 2007 and Murder at Ivy Hill.

The police union was right not to give concessions to Mayor Booker to reduce or avoid the layoffs.  The police offer their lives to the line every day, and to give back what was already won from a city, would have been a psychological and emotional betrayal in the memes of the body in situ that no officer should ever have to abide from its sworn city.

Now, Mayor Cory Booker will learn the hardscrabble truths of the street for his malfeasance against an entire city that will be quantified by the amount of innocent citizen blood shed into the gutters and qualified by clogged police funeral processions.

People can make do with lesser schools and fewer social services and a crumbling city infrastructure — but citizens cannot collect the fruits of their day if they feel they are under attack or threatened with increased assaults.

Newark’s decision to play cutthroat with its police force creates febrile, menacing, tendrils that reach out to prick surrounding law-abiding communities:

According to neighborhoodscout.com, 49.6 crimes committed per square mile is the median figure in the United States. Newark has 626 crimes committed per square mile, or 1262 percent more than the national median.

“Without the presence of the police officers in Newark, there’s going to be less arrests there, which in turn leaves the criminals out on the street and gives them the opportunity to commit crimes in the surrounding towns,” said Belleville Police Chief Joseph Rotonda. …

“We have our own residents, too,” Rotonda said. “But yes, a large portion of our crime is people from Newark that we do arrest.”

Crime comes in waves and gels in niches where enforcement is weak and resistance is symbolic. Newark has now made a fool’s wager against the future as the city will, once again, become a hotspot for death because of malingering leadership that will only prove to Mayor Booker how wrongheaded he was to diminish his enforcers in the midst of an economic breakdown that threatens the very soul of his now very dangerous city.

Cory Booker now wears the crown as the king of the criminal element, because he has now publicly, and so wrongly, come down rightly on their side of the realm.