New York, New York

Looks like Chirlane McCray de Blasio has a major problem. In the umpteenth pathetic attempt to justify the existence of the city’s THRIVE mental health program and administrative office, Chirlie’s idiot husband has decided to draw back the NYPD from responding to emergency complaints regarding people having dangerous mental episodes replace them with “violence interrupter” social workers and counselors to quell these situations. Just one problem, the city is having trouble hiring people to take this job, even with the decent government salary and guaranteed health insurance.

Well, Chirlie’s got to answer to that little conundrum and has decided to add another mission to her program by also having people interrupt violent outcomes from racial and xenophobic bias attacks. Apparently, because of the low interest to work for THRIVE, she is outsourcing these tasks to citizens and gave a brief orientation on her government twitter account. Sourcing instructions from some account she follows, she lays out 5 D’s in what to do when the situation arises as you are commuting to work, waiting for your train on the subway or hanging out on the street or strolling through the park one day.

If there is are D’s to describe this, they are obviously, Dumb, Dangerous and ultimately, Disaster.

Dumb: An aggressor/harasser, whether mentally ill or a regular bully, is going to ignore you if you ask him/her the time and if there was an authority figure around (she can’t just say a cop, because the city is trying to abolish and defund them) that aggressor would be hesitant already.

Dangerous: If you tried to film the situation/attack on your phone, the aggressor would smack it out of your hand and probably attack you or has seen in thousands of viral videos, filming with your celly doesn’t deter crime nor people from settling down. Besides there will surely be other people filming too, because they are not going to call the cops.

Disaster: Obviously, you have to consider the size of the aggressor and see if you want to stand up against him/her. And if you tried to “direct” the attacker would not only have assaulted or killed his target, but would demolish the violence interrupter too. Might as well add a fourth D for Demise.

If there is anything transparent about this, it’s not only that people are not going to risk their health or lives intervening in violent situations without a way to defend themselves unless they know how to beat someone up with an Ipad, is that the billion dollars Chirlie spent on the THRIVE program is bone dry and her husband can’t siphon money from other services to justify it anymore, mainly because of the pandemic and getting millions vaccinated. And now she expects the people of New York City to bail her dumb ass out and to take passive vigilante advice from some twitter account.

Sage hand-me-down wisdom from a disconnected elitist that has benefited immensely from government nepotism with the luxury of having a police escort.

UPDATE:

This is pretty rich, the activist account Chirlie cited for you to heed as unpaid volunteers to interrupt violence is tied to make up monolith corporation L’Oreal. So if you get your face bashed in middle of utilizing their 5 D’s against a person having a psychotic episode or try to step in front of a gang of racist bullies about to get a little ultraviolent, their products can come in handy covering up those bruises and stitches.