There was never supposed to be another Central Park Jogger. But yesterday morning, a 27-year-old woman out for a run was attacked from behind, choked out in broad daylight and raped.
She had been jogging in Central Park, near Swan Lake.
In 1989, the brutal rape of a woman known as the Central Park Jogger — attacked randomly and left to die — jolted the city out of its surrender to crime.
As then-Gov. Mario Cuomo told the New York Post, the fact that the woman was attacked in a place “mythologized as the city’s verdant, democratic refuge” was unthinkable.
“The people are angry and frightened,” Cuomo told The Post. “My mother is, my family is. To me, as a person who’s lived in the city all of his life, this is the ultimate shriek of alarm.”
The Ultimate Shriek of Alarm.
Who, the girls and women of New York City ask, is heeding the alarm now?
Please, spare us the cherry-picked crime stats. Statistics are cold comfort when girls and women can no longer walk down the street or enter a subway station or an elevator or an ATM vestibule or, yes, go for a morning run in Central Park without fearing random assault, rape or worse.
Ask any woman you know. They are likely to feel as I do: The anxiety and worry — just walking down the street or taking the subway — is palpable.
Another woman was attacked yesterday near 103rd Street and FDR Drive, just 45 minutes after the Central Park rape. Her assailant, a convicted rapist released from prison a few days ago, was caught.
Should the women of NYC take comfort in that?
It’s hard to when we have bail reform that no longer allows judges to use their discretion in risks to public safety; when a stretch of Midtown Manhattan is surrendered to drug addicts and the homeless as an open-air shooting gallery; when the retreat from broken-windows policing leads to men openly masturbating in broad daylight — as I saw just three weeks ago outside Grand Central Station, as a colleague saw outside the main branch of the New York Public Library, and as my sister-in-law saw at an ATM down near the courts, where she works.
Our feckless, useless mayor shrugs.
Is it any wonder that sex offenders and rapists feel emboldened?
A 13-year-old girl was raped on her way home from school on Wednesday, in Crotona Park.
Such a vicious crime apparently isn’t enough to outrage Bill de Blasio. After all, he’s got home renovations to oversee.
On Wednesday, police released video of a woman inside a subway elevator, randomly assaulted by a man who punched her in the face three times, pushed her to the floor, grabbed her by her ankles and dragged her to the platform, where he robbed her and fled.
That she could be considered lucky — that she wasn’t raped or stabbed or left for dead — shows how low the bar has sunk for New York City’s women.
Bill de Blasio, our worst mayor ever, refuses to heed this Ultimate Shriek of Alarm.
Eric Adams: Will you?