Worried About Crime? Don't Cry, Now There's Citywide Wi-Fi!

Another big round of applause to our very own Mayor Bill de Blasio – always thinking of the commoners, who are so much like his family: diverse, city-loving individuals who just want to enjoy living the best quality of life there is.

C'mon! Are we really living the best quality of life? 

Better answer that call from Dante at the new Wi-Fi booth!

Are you really happy with our magnificent Mayor who keeps adding holidays to the school year so your kids have numerous days off and you don't know what to do with them? Are you loving this Mayor who recently shared a video on his Facebook page of the Sanitation Department hauling fresh produce into a garbage truck from a storefront business so they can crack down on owners placing fruit for sale more than four feet from their establishment? Don'cha just love the fact that he's soon going to enforce a law that requires residents recycle food in those God awful brown compost bins? YUCK!

It's the little things that make de Blasio so productive and...loveable? Yes?? I think NOT!

While he's trying to keep us tech-savvy (allowing us to pay for parking at Muni-Meters with a cell phone app) I think he needs to focus on making the city safer instead of more 'hip'. De Boss Blasio (a new nickname I couldn't resist coining) recently rolled out LinkNYC kiosks, which transforms defunct phone booths into wi-fi hot spots where you can charge your cell phone, make calls and connect to the internet. How nice!

Yeah...Very nice – and in my opinion - very dangerous!

The Mayor, and the lackeys he recruited to put this fine plan in to action, promised the public that personal information would not be compromised while using facilitating these randomly placed kiosks, which will be operated and maintained by an agency called CityBridge - and not the city itself.

Yeah, very nice...NOT...

Let's get real! Think outside the telephone booth box on this one. There's already enough cellphone and gadget theft, pickpocketers and violent criminals who target people all over the streets. As the NYPD notes, crime maybe “down” but if you knew how many people were robbed, harassed and victimized in the city – as the news connotes – standing in some kiosk and sending an e-mail or waiting for your phone to charge in the middle of the street is NOT the safest idea in the world!

Come on! Y'all can't wait until you get home to check your Facebook or your e-mail, so you have to use a gadget in a phone booth that could possibly result in someone looking over your shoulder to steal your personal info and target you for theft? When those phone booths were in service, the telephone companies already ripped you off for a few quarters to make a simple local call to your friends and family!

The New York Post noted that the new free wi-fi service would be available at 7,500 abandoned phone booths and help those who need free internet access on the streets. Yes, the fact that it would help tourists navigate the web on their phones without worrying about roaming charges is great....Wait..What the hell did they do years ago when there was no wi-fi or “hot spots” in public?

De Blasio, I think, is introducing this technology at the worst possible time. We're dealing with an increase in the homeless population - both on the streets and in the subways. Assaults on trains and buses is also on the rise. A bus driver was attacked in East Flatbush by what looked like a mentally disturbed individual and a few weeks ago, a woman narrowly escaped a homeless man who tried to push her onto the tracks in Downtown Brooklyn. Sure, officials tracked these bad guys down after the attack – but in both cases, the NYPD REFUSED to take him off the streets permanently even though reports stated these crazy men were in and out of mental institutions all the time and were simply slapped with a slew of minor offenses over the years. 

Yes! Let the monsters roam our subways and streets but keep the technology going so we can call the police in hopes that they move the bad guys along in the system and continue to commit cowardly acts. Great!

There's also much talk about making the underground wi-fi and tech-friendly too – so soon you'll be able to hear your fellow straphangers' conversations - even if you don't want to - before their cell phones are ripped from their hands. Great!

Every plan has it's positives and negatives – and sometimes one stipulation prevents or helps the other. Yeah, more wi-fi and cellphone access means you can immediately report a crime or call someone in the event of an emergency - ideally, that's the best use for this technological breakthrough. However, getting a handle on the problems and the dangerous people – and not just letting the emotionally disturbed roam in public – should be a priority instead.

Whether or not Dante will enjoy the new wi-fi booths is anyone's guess, but maybe he should use one of these technological advances to give his father a wake up call on what the city truly needs.