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Commentary By Seth Barron

Jumaane Williams Doesn’t Need to Worry About Policing in His High-Security Gated Community

Cities New York City

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams has made a career of being Gotham’s fiercest opponent of the NYPD. He has campaigned against broken-windows policing, sponsored legislation to restrict how cops do their job and worked overtime to keep criminals on the streets.

No wonder why: It’s easy to want less policing when you live in the city’s safest and best-guarded gated community. As City & State reported in an August profile, Williams and his fiancée now live within the confines of the Fort Hamilton army base. Internet searches confirm his new, sequestered address.

Fort Hamilton, New York’s only active military garrison, sits boldly at the southwest corner of Brooklyn at the foot of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, guarding the entrance to New York Harbor. Its residences, which are mostly meant to house military families, are now open to “qualified members” of the general public.

The Fort is fenced in by a secure perimeter guarded 24/7 by military police, which man its two entrances. Access to the base is tightly controlled; “all visitors and uncleared contractors desiring access to Fort Hamilton must be vetted” through national crime databases, per the fort’s website.

Williams, in other words, is safe as can be. Yet his hard work as an elected servant of disorder goes back years and includes his multiple arrests for interfering with the police. In 2018, for instance, while protesting the deportation of a convicted mortgage fraudster, Williams sat in front of an ambulance on lower Broadway.

Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post

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Seth Barron is associate editor of City Journal. Follow him on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post