So I'm lazy and didn't go around on a bike when the nuisance fireworks started the last couple of nights, because I was already in bed. But I still intend to do it, if I actually stay up past my current bedtime.
As it turns out, the Brooklyn borough president, Eric Adams, has been going around for several nights now in a low-key way, informally meeting many of the people setting off the fireworks and trying to convince them to stop. Though a former cop, he doesn't want anyone calling 911 if there's no direct danger, and hopes to expand his efforts into a community policing approach that foregoes arrests, stops the noise, collects the contraband peacefully. He reported about it at length on the radio yesterday. Very believably, I found.
Jun 24, 2020
Eric Adams, Brooklyn Borough President, talks about his call for handling the spate of fireworks without calling 9-1-1 and his new plan for a recovery plan that fixes some of the City's long-standing inequities.
https://www.wnyc.org/story/seeking-equi ... -fireworks
No transcript but here are the basics: Overwhelmingly they're male (shocker!), teenagers or 18-24. They've had no in-person school (if they were still enrolled), no jobs (no summer jobs this year, obviously, if there ever were enough), no places to hang out, no youth centers of any kind open, nothing to do for the months of the pandemic lockdown. They sleep late and look forward to setting off some boom-boom at night. So, in part, possibly in the main, this is more Corona Lockdown Fallout.
As we've seen on this thread also, the goods are legal, corporate product, sold at high discounts due to the fireworks industry coroneconomic crisis. In our case these are largely coming from directly neighboring counties, since the prohibition on fireworks sales applies only to the NYC five boroughs.
A well-spoken caller made the case for coordinated psyop, asking how can these supposedly impoverished kids afford it? How come it seems to be happening everywhere in the country at once, she asks, and for hours at a time, traumatizing people and simulating war acoustics? Why is it so loud, compared to what we remember from the old days when summer fireworks were a more common feature of NYC life? Isn't this an intentional plan to keep everyone up and call for police action?
Adams responded by talking about how cheap the goods are right now, and reporting he has collected many print ads offering epic sales discounts, including from his interlocutors in Brooklyn. Many of these offers are from companies as far afield as Alabama.
He thus made the point, but I was hoping he'd add that this is happening everywhere in the country at once for the same reason that the price of gasoline, whenever it changes, goes up and down in similar proportions everywhere at once. This is a national market. The industry is currently depressed and has massive excess inventory. The apex fireworks consumers, these kids, currently have little else to do, at least in their minds.
Another point that could be emphasized is that it does not take many people at all. It needs only a tiny proportion of the youth to engage in this activity for everyone to hear it, all night long. Once it became a thing, I think that tended at first to encourage it. By now it may be engendering reluctance and a sense of greater risk. I think I've been hearing a lot less boom-boom the last couple of days due to the attention.
One answer for the noise is they make a greater variety of louder crap nowadays. In the old days, I remember seeing basically the same three or four items in wide circulation for years, with piles and piles of debris from these same items to confirm it on the ground on the morning of July 5.
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