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Rep. Ritchie Torres (NY-15) is happy to piss off the political establishment — even if they are wearing the same Dem jersey as him — because he’s certain that “80% of New Yorkers agree” with him on quality of life issues.
Earlier this month, Torres tweeted a video of a vagrant taking a leak on the 7 train.
“A mentally disturbed person is publicly urinating in the subway, pissing on a public transit system that pisses away $700 million a year in fare evasion,” Torres wrote on X, adding, “Why do we accept this? New York can do better than what a broken system can deliver.”
In more civilized times, a politician sharing a urination video might not seem like the stuff of gravitas — but this subway rider felt good old-fashioned relief that Torres did.
Finally, a pol is telling a simple truth: That our city, the greatest in the world, has accepted woefully subpar conditions on our subways and streets.
Someone in power is willing to acknowledge and diagnose the disease, not tell the patients that they’re imagining symptoms.
“The lesson learned from the last election is that the American people aren’t stupid — and gaslighting doesn’t work,” Torres told me this week.
As for his blunt tweeting style, the aim is to send a particular message: “We don’t have to accept what is unacceptable.”
That means demanding cleaner, safer trains; clamping down on fare evasion; and removing the severely deranged from our streets to help cut down on random violence.
But also: Voting in new leadership that’s in tune with reality — not far-left interest groups.
“We’re in the midst of a pendulum swing back to a rational center,” Torres said. “Those of us who are Democrats can no longer afford to treat public safety and quality of life as Republican right-wing positions. This is simply the core functions of government.”
After all, our great city has squandered nearly two decades of law and order by allowing what Torres called a “perversion of compassion” to infect our policies. It’s an approach that prioritizes criminals and the violent mentally ill over the law-abiding citizens.
Torres, a former city councilman who was first elected to the US House of Representatives in 2020 and reelected in November, has risen on the national stage for his staunch defense of Israel in wake of the October 7, 2023, massacre by Hamas.
“I hope to bring the moral clarity I’ve shown on Israel to a much wider range of issues, like public safety, because there’s a market for public servants who are willing to say what people are thinking, feeling and believing,” he said.
In other words, getting back to a Big Apple that once ran on grit and candor.
Torres’ cure? New leadership. That means giving Kathy Hochul — who he calls the “a creature of a broken system” — the boot. He has spoken unsparingly of our governor, saying that she’s also hamstrung Mayor Adams in his efforts to keep New York safe.
“What we need now, more than ever, is a disrupter of the status quo,” Torres told me.
Is that disruptor Torres himself, who has already made known his intentions to possibly run for mayor or governor? “It can be,” he said.
The Bronx native is hitting all the right notes on all the tough issues — most recently the news that the MTA, which loves to cry poverty, is splashing out $1 million to study the psychology behind fare evasion instead of simply enforcing the fare.
“Fare beaters are rational actors,” Torres said, “and if you signal to fare evaders that there are no consequences to law breaking, they have a perverse incentive to break the law.
“Once you change the incentives, you will change behavior.”
As for the mentally ill roaming our city, Torres said allowing them “to languish on the streets and subways of New York is cruelty cloaked in compassion” — adding that Ramon Rivera’s fatal stabbing spree of three innocents across Manhattan last month, weeks after he was released from Rikers, was “preventable.”
As for the recent Daniel Penny trial, in which the Marine veteran was acquitted in the death of Jordan Neely after putting him in a chokehold to protect F train passengers, Torres believes it exposed how the “failures” of the city and state “are a matter of life and death.”
“The death of Jordan Neely was not ‘a modern day lynching,’ as the far left claims. For me, it was the tragic consequence of a broken mental health system that endangers the health and safety of New Yorkers,” he said. “Jordan should have never been allowed to roam the subways. He should have been in a mental health institution.”
Torres sure sounds like he belongs in higher office. If he keeps telling the truth, he’ll only endear himself to weary New Yorkers.
“We have the tools to stop the problem,” he said. “What is lacking is the political will.”