Just before the incident: The photo taken by mom Parmita Katkar just before “Cookie Monster” (r.) allegedly pushed the little boy. (
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We’ve just been given another remarkable reminder of just how radically New York City has changed by the week’s big crime story — a creep in a Cookie Monster costume pushing a 2-year-old.
Thirty years ago, there would have been no man in a Cookie Monster costume trying to get tourists to take his picture in Times Square. There would have been no money in it, because parents didn’t take their kids to Times Square unless they wanted to expose them to the marquees of hard-core porn movie houses right there on Broadway, on 42nd and on Eighth Avenue.
Few tourists wandered Times Square in any case. They came by taxi to the theater — and got the hell out once the curtain fell.
Thirty years ago, a single man menacing a mother and child would’ve barely merited a second glance from anyone in this city, so intent were we all on keeping our own heads down and getting where we were going without being menaced ourselves.
Now that crime of all sorts has become the exception and not the rule, we have world enough and time to cluck our tongues at these secondary offenses against good taste and the common good.
This didn’t happen by magic. It was good policy, pursued over nearly two decades, that made New York something of an urban paradise. The policy is called crime prevention, and it takes various forms.
First, and most revolutionary, was the innovative decision undertaken by the Giuliani administration to pay attention to very minor criminal offenses, like turnstile-jumping on the subway, in part because of the likelihood that a turnstile miscreant was probably guilty of other, more serious offenses.
Second was the adoption of the data-driven CompStat system to track the location of crime spikes and redirect police resources to nip new activity in the bud. CompStat also put precinct commanders and officers on the spot every week to explain what was going on in their areas and defend their methods and practices in fighting crime.
Third was the end of so-called 911 policing, the decades-long approach that had teams of cops in cars responding to crimes after they occurred — rather than making their presences known so that would-be criminals would decide the heat was too hot and refrain from breaking the law.
The most controversial aspect of this is the use of stop-and-frisk, in which officers who have reason to suspect a person might be carrying a weapon ask him questions and then pat him down — a policy deemed constitutional by a very liberal US Supreme Court in 1968.
Taken together, these approaches have transformed New York City in a manner almost unimaginable to everyone who lived here under the old police rules, which didn’t seek to nip criminal activity in the bud.
This week, the NYPD issued another startling report about the results. In 2012, 419 murders were committed in New York — the fewest since citywide stats were first compiled 50 years ago. That’s 419 murdered in a town of 8.33 million, making it the safest big city in America by a colossal margin.
Of that number, 57 percent were shot and 21 percent stabbed — a statistic that on its own would seem to justify stop-and-frisk, which is a key tool for keeping guns and knives off the streets.
Most telling is this: White New Yorkers made up a mere 9 percent of the murder victims. That’s 38 people in all — out of a total white population of 3.75 million.
In other words, white people don’t get killed in New York except under truly extreme circumstances, like a psychotic pushing someone into the path of a subway.
But what of blacks, many of whose leaders are the ones who complain the most loudly about stop-and-frisk? Sixty percent of those murdered were African-American — in a city where African-Americans make up 25 percent of the population.
This is yet another indication that those most at risk from violent crime in New York City are black, and that they’re most likely to be harmed by other blacks.
According to Mayor Bloomberg, proactive policing over the years has saved the lives of more than 5,000 people who would’ve been murdered had the policies never shifted, or been abandoned due to political pressure of the sort now being imposed on the 2013 candidates for mayor.
As these stats indicate, the vast majority of those whose deaths were prevented by the city’s crime-prevention regime are black. And if the policies are reversed, the vast majority of those who’ll suffer the consequences will be black as well.
I prefer to live in a city where the crime stories involve a jerk in a Cookie Monster outfit. How about you?