Welcome to Ten Blocks, the podcast of City Journal. This is Seth Barron, your host for today. I'm the

associate editor of City Journal. I'm joined by Nicole Gelineis, a senior fellow at the Manhattan

Institute, a contributing editor to City Journal, and the author of a recent piece for City

Journal called Westside Storm. Nicole, thanks for joining us today. Thank you, Seth.

Good to be on with you again. So we're talking about your articles about the Upper West Side,

and you reference some goings-on in the neighborhood that have sparked a lot of interest in the media.

What's happening in this neighborhood, which happens to be

your neighborhood? Yeah, a little north of my neighborhood, but what was striking last week

is the Upper West Side had two random attacks within the space of 24 hours. A man eating

outside for dinner with his wife was punched for no reason by an apparently disturbed person whose last address was a homeless shelter.

And a woman coming out of the 72nd Street subway station was stabbed also by a random stranger.

And so in a neighborhood where the two police precincts usually have far fewer than one assault a day in a given year,

striking to have two random assaults.

Now, of course, you could have two crimes in one day, just the bad luck of the draw in any time, but it comes on, it comes in the context of crime data that is not very good for the neighborhood or the city.

You know, the same two police precinct, the 20th and the 24th.

Last year, between them, they had one murder so far for the year.

This year, they've had eight murders this year.

And that, that in turn, mirrors the citywide trend.

If we go up to the first week in August, the murder rate for the city overall is up by 31%.

We've had 237 murders this year instead of 181.

Shootings have doubled over the course of the first seven months of the year.

So it's very hard, you know, a lot of the sort of newcomer urbanists who don't like to talk

...