New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has turned what was once a relatively peaceful tourism magnet into a place where people apparently feel so emboldened to commit crimes, they no longer hide them under the cover of darkness.
That includes attempted sex crimes, according to a now-viral video of a man apparently attempting to rape a woman in Manhattan over the weekend in broad daylight.
Video of the attack on a train platform at Lexington Avenue and East 63rd Street shows a man on top of a woman at approximately 11 a.m. on Saturday.
The man was only deterred to leave the victim alone after bystanders got involved and began yelling at him.
The NYPD identified the suspect as a 31-year-old man named Jose Reyes, WABC-TV reported.
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The victim seen on the video was identified only as a 25-year-old woman.
WARNING: The following video contains graphic images that some viewers will find offensive.
We’re seeking the public’s help finding this man, wanted for attempted rape after this brazen and brutal sexual assault yesterday at the 63rd St / Lexington Ave station- Please call @NYPDTips at 800-577-TIPS with any information on his identity or if you witnessed this assault pic.twitter.com/MYbnW62GKS
— NYPD Transit (@NYPDTransit) August 30, 2020
The woman who was allegedly attacked told police that she and Reyes were on the same train and that he had smoked something before the violent encounter.
Reyes faces charges of assault and attempted rape.
Police said the man has a criminal history and some of his crimes were committed on the city’s subway system.
While the alleged attempted crime is horrifying, the fact that it was prevented from escalating is a silver lining.
This is an additional photo of the suspect- If you were one of the witnesses who stepped in and saved the victim from further harm, we’d like to hear from you- You can DM @NYPDTips (for Spanish, call 888-57-PISTA)- and please call 911 immediately if you spot him pic.twitter.com/kmlMSSs1Wv
— NYPD Transit (@NYPDTransit) August 30, 2020
But what is perhaps most shocking about the alleged attempted rape is that it occurred in broad daylight in what was once an affluent part of the Big Apple.
It is a sign of just how far the city has fallen in such a short period of time.
For example, a current real estate listing just blocks away from the scene of Saturday’s alleged brazen daylight attack asks for $33 million for 6,000 square feet of space in the area near Central Park.
The Upper East Side is an expensive place to live and thanks to New York City’s ineffectual Democratic leadership, even neighborhoods with apartments that cost tens of millions of dollars are not safe from de Blasio’s crime wave.
Since the Democrat turned his ire toward his city’s police officers this summer, New York City has seen a wave of violent crime that is apparently leaving no part of the city spared.
De Blasio’s leadership, or lack thereof, has transformed New York City’s image, eliciting memories of the dangerous place the city was before Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor and began cleaning it up beginning in 1994.
While crime is an issue in every major city, New York City is the country’s largest population center.
For a city its size, New York had experienced a quarter-century of relatively low crime.
But the progressive de Blasio has taken the hard work of police officers and his predecessors and set his city back by focusing his efforts on targeting police and businesses while coddling criminals.
Progress is costly.
In June, de Blasio announced he had disbanded his city’s plainclothes Anti-Crime Unit and had also slashed funding for the NYPD by more than $1 billion, according to NPR.
On reducing the size of the NYPD, de Blasio said, “We think it’s the right thing to do.”
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Since that time, gun crime and homicides have soared as de Blasio has worked on social justice initiatives — such as helping to paint a Black Lives Matter mural on Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower in June.
With a lack of serious leadership, New Yorkers, even those who can afford multimillion-dollar condominiums, are paying the price for de Blasio’s leftist activism.
In July, murders increased by 59 percent while shootings increased 177 percent from the same month in 2019, WNBC-TV reported.
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