The deterioration of America's major cities isn't new to anyone who has been paying attention for the past few years. Sometimes, it seems only a matter of time before "Escape from New York" becomes a reality, but it wasn't the fictional Snake Plissken that the father of a New York University student hired to protect his daughter, but instead a "security consultant."

In other words, a bodyguard.

A protective Maryland father concerned about crime in the Big Apple hired what he called a “security consultant” to keep a watchful eye on his 19-year-old daughter — a freshman at New York University in Greenwich Village, where crime on or near campus has surged in the last three years.

“I was very apprehensive of New York, and I am worried about her,” confided the the 52-year-old real estate investor, who spoke on condition of anonymity. NYU was her “first and only” choice when it came to schools.

The father in question here is certainly justified in thinking this:

Over the last couple of years, crime has been on the rise across all of NYU’s locations.

So far in 2024, NYU security has recorded 771 criminal incidents at the university’s Greenwich Village, Brooklyn Commons, Midtown Center, Upper East Side and Kips Bay campuses — up 27% from the 606 reported at this point in 2022.

From Jan. 1 to Sept. 30 this year, there have been nine robberies, 10 felony assaults, and five rapes on and around the five NYU campuses.

Those are not comforting statistics.

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The real question here is why anyone would choose to attend one of these urban universities in any case. It's not just the criminal incidents; a quick look through the media coverage of New York City will also reveal rampant homelessness, open-air drug use, and what would seem to be an increasing atmosphere of hopelessness. Presumably, this father is picking up part of the tab for his daughter's education, and in the case of NYU, it's a pretty hefty tab - $93,184 per year. When I attended the University of Northern Iowa in the early '80s, I remember tuition being around $700-and-change a semester; oh, how things have changed, although I'll bet that even then, NYU was more expensive than UNI.

So almost six figures to send a kid to a college in a city that's so screwed up, so out of control, that one would feel the need to hire her a bodyguard? That's just absurd.

The United States used to have the greatest cities on the planet. I'm not a big fan of cities myself. I get a little claustrophobic in Wasilla, for crying out loud. But not all that long ago were I asked what city would be picked as the capital city of the world, I would have said New York - not only was it one of the world's great cities, but it was also a primary hub for finance and business. Which city could have been better?

Now, though, I can harbor no such notion. New York isn't alone in any of this; San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit - all of our major cities are deteriorating, and it's hard to see any way back. Not as long as the electorate in those cities keeps voting the same lunatics back in charge of the asylums.