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Armed thugs brazenly rob customers at coffee shop across the street from ‘defund police’ Dem’s office

August 19, 2022 | | Print Article

A far-left, anti-police New York City councilmember is facing backlash after a group of diners were robbed across the street from her Astoria office this Tuesday afternoon.

The robbery outside the Under Pressure Espresso Bar occurred around 3:15 pm when two black-clad, motorcycle-riding suspects pulled up outside the restaurant and flashed their guns at the establishment’s outside diners.

The pair proceeded to rob “two or three” customers of “some jewelry and some watches,” an unnamed restaurant employee told Patch.

“Two guys on a bike robbed two or three of our customers,” the employee said.

The suspects then fled the scene and remained on the loose as of Friday.

See surveillance footage of the robbery below (*Graphic content):

Here’s where the story takes an unusual turn: It occurred across the street from the office of NYC councilmember Tiffany Cabán, a rabid anti-cop Democrat who’s a staunch advocate of defunding the police.

Back in February, she wrote an open letter bashing the New York Police Department for deploying an anti-gun unit to her neighborhood. Furthermore, in the letter, she accused local cops of being murderers.

“Our district is already home to some of the highest stop-and-frisk rates in the city. Now we will also have to contend with the unit that, despite containing roughly 5% of the force, committed nearly 1/3 of all police murders in the 20 years before it was disbanded,” she wrote.

“It’s time to abandon the failed strategies of the past. Roughing Black and brown kids up, throwing them against walls or into the streets, surveilling and harassing our Muslim neighbors, making low level arrests to feed the pipeline of mass incarceration and cycles of criminalization and trauma — these didn’t make us safe before, and they never will.”

But locals aren’t so sure about her rhetoric.

One Under Pressure Espresso Bar employee who spoke with the New York Post straight-up called her a “clown.”

“I should go talk to her. Is she serious? She‘s going to defund the police? Ha! She got no good reason, bro,” the employee said.

Yes, she’s serious. So is every other so-called “progressive” Democrat in America.

The employee also called on local cops to “find” the suspects responsible for Tuesday’s robbery and do what’s necessary to “prevent this from happening” again.

That would require funding the police, no?

Cabán’s staff members, meanwhile, mostly refused to speak with the Post, telling them only that the lawmaker “is not here right now.”

The robbery Tuesday comes amid an unprecedented NYC crime wave that critics say is being aided and abetted by left-wing lawmakers and law enforcers like Cabán.

Most recently, a convicted sex offender knocked out a random restaurant patron last Friday, leaving the victim with a fractured skull.

Yet despite nearly killing the victim, the suspect’s original attempted murder charges were dropped to just harassment/assault misdemeanors, and he was subsequently released back onto the streets. His victim remains in a medically induced coma.

Not every local Democrat supports the lax-on-crime laws and treatment that have allowed for criminals such as this to run wild.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams, to his credit, is a former cop who absolutely opposes defunding the police and weakening the criminal justice laws on the books.

“Time and time again, our police officers are making arrests, and then the person who is arrested for assault, felonious assault, robberies, and gun possessions, they’re finding themselves back on the street within days, if not hours after arrest, and they go on to commit more crimes within weeks, if not days,” he said during an Aug. 3rd press conference.

“Under the current law, judges are not allowed to consider whether someone is a threat to public safety when deciding whether or not to hold them in custody. This is a big mistake. New York, as the commissioner stated, is the only state in the union that is not unified on the power of public safety as a prerequisite to how we judge these cases.”

He added, “As a result of this insane, broken system, our recidivism rates have skyrocketed, and those who say that the predicted wave of recidivism wouldn’t happen and the studies that claim to show that the rate of arrests for violent felonies has not changed since the reforms were passed, I have one word for you: wrong. You are wrong.”

But “progressives” like Cabán don’t appear to care, and so the cycle continues unabated, with more and more New Yorkers being victimized on a daily basis …

Vivek Saxena
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