Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Wilbert Wilson and Tex Ortiz broke into a house in Queens, New York. The career criminals pried open the back door with a crowbar at night, and took four women and a baby hostage.
Wilson had done prison time 5 times. Ortiz had been arrested 8 times before, including on charges of sex abuse and assault. But even though he had robbed people at gunpoint 2 years ago, he was back on the loose. And both of them were armed and inside the house in Queens.
The thugs zip tied three of the women, one of whom was 92 years old, and used the fourth as a human shield when the cops showed up. Wilson and Ortiz broke into the house on 125th Street because its owner had died after a battle with cancer and they thought he had a lot of money stashed away in the house. They were wrong and their brilliant plan didn’t go according to plan.
With the cops outside and no money to show for it, the thugs held their hostages at gunpoint, one of whom was 92, another was 62, and a third was a young mother with a 9-month old baby.
The thugs pistol-whipped the young mother who managed to call 911 and escape the house.
But that’s when Night of the Hunter turned into C.H.O.M.P.S. when the cops sent in a robot dog.
After prolonged negotiations, the thugs began releasing their hostages, but they demanded pizza. Unwilling to risk officers or a delivery boy, the police sent in Digidog: a robot dog carrying up the pizza. The thugs eventually freed all the hostages and gave up. They were taken into custody, where one of them kept stripping naked, and both have probably been set loose by the Democrats who love criminals almost as much as they love false accusations of racism.
You might think that Digidog would be everything that police defunders want in a cop.
Digidog is unarmed, incapable of racism, and is just a walking drone mounted with cameras. His only real contact with criminals has been to deliver pizza to one of them. But once the NYPD took custody of Digidog and painted him in department blue, he became a racist. In our dystopian future, everyone will be accused of racism for 15 minutes. Even robots.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez accused Digidog of racism for being deployed in “low-income communities of color.”
If they can cancel The Cat in the Hat, what shot did the stainless steel dog in blue ever have?
The Richmond Hill area where the hostage crisis took place is majority Asian and minority Hispanic. The victims of the hostage crisis appeared to be a Hispanic family.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is attacking a robot dog that helped save a Hispanic family.
How would AOC have preferred to handle the hostage crisis? Should Digidog have kneeled before delivering the pizza? Or blared Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States as read by Sean Penn through its speakers before telling the thugs to kill their hostages?
Would AOC have been happier if the NYPD had left a 92-year-old lady at the mercy of a thug with a history of sex abuse, instead of trying to negotiate with him and fetch him pizza?
Last month, two thugs claiming to be plumbers got inside a Bronx apartment. They pulled a gun, tied up their victims, and tortured one of them with a hot iron while demanding money.
The area in question is 71% black. The perpetrators were minorities, but so were the victims.
Digidog was deployed to provide the police with camera footage as they prepared to go in.
The NYPD had used Digidog the same way last year to get footage of a gunman who opened fire over a parking spot and then fled to a basement.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez isn’t alone in complaining about Digidog. The New York Times ran a piece criticising the robot dog. “A dystopian robo-dog now patrols New York City. That’s the last thing we need,” The Guardian ranted. It would be much better if actual human police officers were allowed to do their jobs, but the pro-crime Left is even more opposed to that.
The Guardian column falsely claimed that “already dehumanized Black and Muslim residents” would face the “intimidating non-human layer” and “the brunt of the damage of this dystopian development”. The lefty social justice rag neglected to mention that black and minority residents already bear the “brunt” of the skyrocketing crime rates caused by lefty pro-crime policies.
Home invasions and hostage situations, rare a few years ago, have become commonplace.
Minority homeowners in the areas that AOC academically described as “low-income communities of color” have been investing in security cameras, the thugs in the home invasion tore off the cameras before breaking in, and heavy locks. Not to mention guns.
The NYPD, like police forces across America, have not been allowed to do their jobs. And minority communities are paying the price. That’s why minority residents from New York City to Minneapolis have been the loudest voices against police defunding.
Instead, they’re demanding more cops.
Police defunders like AOC and her racist ‘Squad’ claim that they want deescalation. The hostage crisis in Queens was a model of deescalation with police negotiating with the thugs until early in the morning, putting one of the thugs on the phone with his wife and sending him food.
The hostage crisis ended non-violently when the thugs surrendered after the police scrambled to find a pizza shop open late at night and then used a robot dog to bring up the pizza.
Now the defunders are attacking the robot dog that brought the pizza.
The only way that the NYPD could have deescalated the situation any more was by refusing to respond to the call. Does Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez believe that when a young Latina woman with a baby in her arms ran to the police for help, they should have turned her down?
If so, she should say so, instead of offering up the usual rants about more social services.
The thugs in Queens had been in and out of prison most of their lives. Neither of them should have been out on the street. The only reason they were able to take that family hostage is that the Democrats decided to turn the justice system into a revolving door for criminals.
No matter how easy the cops go on the criminals, it’s never enough.
Protecting people from criminal thugs is inherently racist. The Guardian column insists that, “Black police officers share these biases and often replicate the harm of their white counterparts.” Not only are black police officers racist, but their little robot dogs are too.
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