New York City’s latest experiment in sidelining law enforcement rolled out last week in Brownsville, where the NYPD handed over a two-block strip to community groups for patrolling. The stretch along Mother Gaston Boulevard, between Sutter and Pitkin avenues, operated without uniformed officers from noon to 6 p.m. each day from October 7 through 11. Instead, about 20 members from outfits like Brownsville in Violence Out took charge of low-level calls, dishing out food and social services while keeping cops at the edges unless a shooting or stabbing demanded intervention.
This setup, dubbed the Brownsville Safety Alliance, traces back to 2020 when former Mayor Bill de Blasio greenlit it as a twice-a-year trial. Now it’s ramped up to quarterly runs, funded through city contracts funneled to nonprofits like CAMBA, which has pocketed over $915 million since fiscal year 2020. Program director Dushoun Almond, known locally as “Bigga,” runs the show, claiming his team’s street cred helps de-escalate dust-ups that cops might inflame.
“We use our credibility,” Almond said. During this round, things stayed mostly quiet—a gas main leak was the highlight, with Almond calling it “real good news.”
Yet an unauthorized NYPD flyer that circulated warned officers to stay out unless facing “an extreme police emergency (e.g. person shot, stabbed, etc.).” The department yanked it, insisting nothing changed in operations, but the memo’s mention of monitoring at the Police Commissioner level raises eyebrows about who’s really pulling strings here.
Retired cop John Macari spotlighted the flyer on his podcast, fueling chatter that this is more than a feel-good initiative—perhaps a calculated move to test how far anti-cop policies can go in a city still reeling from rising crime.
Queens Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a socialist eyeing the mayor’s office, showed up at an April session and gave the program his stamp of approval. Almond noted Mamdani “believes in what we do.”
Police insiders aren’t buying it. One source fumed that top brass are “trying to appeal to him,” labeling the whole thing “insane.” Another veteran cop from the Bronx put it bluntly: “If this is what these politicians want, let them have it. Let it burn down and then they’ll want us back.”
Brownsville’s no stranger to trouble. The 73rd Precinct has seen murders plummet 83% this year compared to last, and shootings down 40%, but robberies jumped 23%, felony assaults 26%, burglaries 40%, and grand larcenies 30%. Just last June, stray bullets hit two young girls in nearby Hilltop Park, a grim reminder of the area’s volatility. Christopher Hermann, a former NYPD supervisor now at John Jay College, called it one of NYC’s most dangerous spots historically.
“I am not sure how designating this as a police-free zone will help residents feel or actually be safer,” he said.
Locals are split. Hardware store worker Jose praised the patrols for talking sense into people: “People listen.” But Jamixa Alvarez, a 28-year-old at the Cricket Wireless shop right in the zone, stressed the basics: “But right now we need our cops.” Even as the week ended without major incidents, a Saturday evening brawl involving teens with metal pipes and scooters erupted, scattering only when an NYPD cruiser rolled by.
Republican mayoral hopeful Curtis Sliwa slammed it as “a reckless experiment that invites chaos and puts residents and businesses at risk,” vowing to scrap it on day one if elected. The program’s originator, ex-precinct commander Terrell Anderson, got bounced to a housing unit in May amid an Internal Affairs probe for allegedly keeping over 70 sketchy recruits at the academy, including one tied to a sex-for-overtime scandal. Coincidence? Or a sign of deeper rot in a system bending over backward for leftist visions?
Whispers online and in podcasts suggest this “alliance” might be a Trojan horse for broader schemes, letting gangs embed deeper while politicians like Mamdani push a no-cops utopia. As one Instagram post put it, Brooklyn now has “POLICE FREE ZONES” where officers only show for the worst—echoing fears that such zones could spread, creating havens for unchecked crime under the guise of community care. With President Trump restoring order nationally through executive actions on energy and cybersecurity, New York’s drift toward these experiments stands in stark contrast, begging the question: who’s benefiting from the chaos?
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.