Does it feel some days as if New York– wealthy, successful, seemingly at the top of the world — is slipping back into the bad old days of crime, noise, dirt, rudeness? Like pentimento rising from an old canvas, the traces of New York’s previous misery are appearing on the streets and in the subways — graffiti, aggressive panhandling, open drug dealing, filthy public areas, ear–splitting noise, screeching sirens, a sense of disorder we thought was gone. It’s not “Soylent Green” again, but the old Hollywood sense of lawless New York is rearing its ugly head.
Worse, something menacing seems to be happening with violent crime. The newspapers have been filled recently with stories about horribly vicious cases — the trial, for example, that ended last week in a 44–count guilty verdict against the man accused of the brutal rape and torture of a Columbia University student living in Hamilton Heights, a seemingly safe neighborhood.
Then there was the bicyclist, said to live in a flophouse in Greenpoint, who plunged a knife into a woman in Long Island City for no apparent reason. The assailant had served nine years in prison for random stabbings in 1994. That date should bring New Yorkers up short, since things were already starting to turn around for us then. Psychotic attackers are back in our lives — and also, apparently, living at public expense in shelters.
Is this current violence an aberration? Or is it something that will prove to be more routine and serious? Is this an example of what Jeremy Travis, the president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, calls the problem of prison re–entry: They all come back?
Could it all come back?
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The NYPD’s CompStat data indeed show upticks in violent crime since last year. The city has had 238 murders so far this year (as of last Sunday), up 7.6 percent from 221 last year, and 664 rapes, up 6.2 percent.
Should we be worried? Queens Councilmember Peter Vallone, chair of the council’s Public Safety Committee, thinks so. “We’re seeing the beginnings of a return to the bad old days,” he says. “We should never forget that we’re a thousand percent better off now than we were in 1991, when we had only 31,000 police officers on the street, and we made a decision, through the Safe Cities program, to increase that number by 10,000.
“But 1991 is not where the comparison is anymore. The comparison is with 2001, when we had 41,000 officers on the street. That number has been allowed to dwindle.” (The force is now at roughly 35,700.) New Yorkers are beginning to notice. Vince Castellano, a real–estate broker and community board member who is active in the revitalization of the Rockaways, says he believes that his two precincts — the 100th and the 101st — are down to the staffing levels of 20 years ago. And, indeed, both precincts show disturbing recent upticks in violent crime. The 100th, which Castellano calls the “country club precinct,” has had five murders this year, in contrast to none last year. Robbery is up by 81 percent, to 38 incidents. Burglary and grand larceny auto also are up.
Rashford Mendes, chairman of the Arverne Civic Association in Rockaway, is shocked by the data, and says that the captain of the 100th assured him and his neighbors that theirs was the second–safest precinct in the entire city. Maybe it is. Perhaps crime is up all over.
In the neighboring 101st Precinct, which attracted attention in May with the murders of two teenagers and the shooting of five men during a party in a public housing development, murders so far this year have tripled, up from two in 2007.
Travis says the problem (though perhaps not the solution) is pretty simple: “You can’t cut the police force by 5,000 officers and expect to have the same level of public safety as you had before. We came to recognize that as a city in 1990, and we’ve been the beneficiaries ever since.”
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Certainly neighborhoods are suffering, both because the police aren’t on the street and because they sometimes don’t come when called.
The management company of a landmarked building on the Upper West Side recently started posting harsh “No Trespassing” signs at its entrances because the cops refused to move along street people sleeping in doorways. The local captain said — and the district attorney’s office backed him up — that the cops had no jurisdiction to ask anyone to move off private property until warning signs were posted. Otherwise, how was anyone to know?
The glass windows on these same doorways, by the way, are etched with acid, the relatively new graffiti curse, which seems to be covering New York. When the management firm decided to install cameras to patrol the street in order to protect the building from vandalism and theft, they were stopped by the Landmarks Commission, which threatened to fine the building owners if they persisted.
But why should private property owners have to mar their handsome buildings with unsightly “No Trespassing” signage? Aren’t the cops and the DAs using the same pathetic set of legalistic excuses we used to hear in the pre–Giuliani days for why obvious protections couldn’t be invoked? And why are we tolerating the acid–etched graffiti, which, as Councilmember Vallone points out, is utterly without redeeming value?
“Driving to work this morning,” Vallone says, “I saw that one of our beautiful new bus shelters had a huge etching across all three panels. It wasn’t there last night. This is just sheer, disgusting vandalism.” The NYPD data show a record 81.5 percent increase in graffiti–related complaints from 2006 to 2007. Graffiti arrests jumped nearly 28 percent, which is good, but obviously insufficient.
More important, graffiti is a gateway to more serious crime, says Vallone, both because so much of it is done by 12– and 13–year–olds at three in the morning, and because it’s a gateway for the entire community. “Criminals see it,” he says, “and know that the community will tolerate lawlessness.” Of course, the vandals know that the councilmember is far from tolerant. They etched a large tribute on the Williamsburg Bridge: “F — — — Vallone.” The community doesn’t want to tolerate lawlessness. But when was the last time anyone saw a neighborhood cop? The police are back in their patrol cars, as if this were 1985.
One of the great strengths of the Bloomberg administration is its profound respect for collecting and analyzing data. Thus in 2007, the NYPD began logging 311 and 911 vandalism complaints into a “graffitistat” database. The police also tracked down and recorded the identities of known taggers — a sort of DNA for future arrests.
But a weakness of the Bloomberg administration is that the forces on the ground — whether police officers or crane inspectors — are not deployed in adequate numbers. Nor are they even enough social workers to help the thousands of special–needs patients the city government has placed in SROs on the West Side.
Aaron Biller, a long–time community activist who is president of Neighborhood in the Nineties, says, “There’s general consensus in the west 90s that we’re facing more aggressive panhandling, accelerated solicitation, and deterioration in personal safety and quality of life because the city government has so dramatically increased the supportive–housing population without providing the support services they need. You can’t go very far in this neighborhood without being accosted. Panhandlers deploy themselves three to a block as if they were franchises. Begging here is frequent, ubiquitous and belligerent.” When asked about the police, Biller just scoffs. His precinct, the 24th, which had about 400 officers when he moved to the West Side in the mid–1980s, is now down to about 100, he says. “We’re on our own.” Of course, we don’t want to be on our own. We want to hold onto the strong, healthy neighborhoods we’ve been building since the dark days of the fiscal crisis. But we need the government to start paying attention again to the streetscape — and to give us back our cops.
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The Bloomberg administration has been great for New York in part because our non–ideological, results–oriented mayor understood, before anyone else, that certain things needed to be done. He saw, for example, that thousands of acres of potentially prime waterfront land had been lying fallow for decades under outdated zoning — and he embarked on the largest rezoning campaign in city history. Similarly, he recognized early on that London was rising as a major competitive force and he started pushing to reform the governmental regulations that weaken Wall Street. He also saw that London had a major social drawback: high crime, the kind of sadistic, seemingly senseless crime we had in the old days.
Are we heading backwards? No, but we need to remember our own heritage.
New Yorkers haven’t always understood that some ominous trend was beginning. For example, 1958 was the start of what the late Erik Monkkonen, a historian at UCLA, called New York’s “rogue tidal wave of violence.” Almost no one noticed at the time. It lasted until 1992, when the Dinkins administration, under Commissioner Ray Kelly, began its Safe Streets program. And while Monkkonen was optimistic about New York’s future, he warned of the relentless cycle by which, once some “lower level of violence had been achieved, the mechanisms for control and the value of peace get forgotten, and a slow rebirth of violence begins.” We can fool ourselves into thinking that the New York of the last few years is the New York that will always be. But our city is and always has been a tumultuous place, in which the miseries of the past don’t seem so far away. We need to be vigilant, as we have been since 1992, against the small, unpleasant, menacing intrusions on New York’s quality of life.
We know that New York’s economic engine, the financial industry, is under immense strain, that the mayor’s budget faces severe deficits, and that some businesses are starting layoffs.
Bloomberg has been the right mayor for good times. Now the truly difficult part starts: keeping New York great in hard times.
Julia Vitullo–Martin is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute