Along with several other chilling shootings, the bullet that killed 4-year-old Bronx boy Lloyd Morgan has rekindled the anxieties of New Yorkers who have lived here long enough to remember the dark days of grim resignation about violent crime.
It underscores a stark and unsettling truth: Crime statistics are nothing more than a report card of what has already happened. They promise nothing about the future.
Chicago saw homicides cut in half from 1994 to 2004 — but then the reductions stopped and the city is on track for the highest homicide total in more than a decade. Chicago’s hot, murderous summer of 2012 has seen its poorest neighborhoods ravaged and a homicide rate four times that of New York’s. In the deadliest police district, the homicide rate is 30 times as high as the safest.
With 5,000 lives criminally snuffed out over the past 10 years, some Chicagoans are more likely to be killed going to the corner store than if they served in Afghanistan.
New York is far safer, with the murder rate at a historic low. Yet shootings have started to creep up. Five were shot Wednesday night at a basketball tournament at Rucker Park, for instance, while just before the July 4 holiday, 60 people were shot in only one week.
The homicide toll would surely be higher were it not for a combination of everything from cellphones, which allow ambulances to be instantaneously summoned, and first responders with advanced life-saving capabilities.
So, could the amazing turnaround in the safety of New York City face a reversal similar to Chicago?
It’s important to remember that New York’s crime story has always been a tale of 70-plus cities — the police precincts into which the city is divided. Even in the midst of the soaring crime rates of the ’80s and ’90s, many NYPD precincts were quite safe.
What changed during the vaunted “broken windows” strategy is that the NYPD didn’t just concentrate on these peaceful islands.
Police strategies such as “Operation Impact” flooded neighborhoods suffering from crime increases with cops. By taking antisocial behavior seriously, the department strived to make as many public places infertile areas for criminal conduct. Something as simple as the issuance of “open container” summonses and the dispersal of street gatherings on a late summer afternoon can prevent a shooting after the sun goes down.
Four-year-old Lloyd was likely the casualty of a teen turf war, something which is fortunately a rare occurrence in New York.
Gang units, stop-and-frisk initiatives, perhaps even luck have all contributed to keep our gang-related homicides to about 5%. In Chicago, almost a third of homicides are put down to gang activity.
But the biggest difference is how Chicago treats its own mini-cities — the 23 police districts. Large sections of the city are “no go” areas that have been written off. Factors such as substandard and quasi-abandoned buildings have created a sense of lawlessness that allows militia-like gangs to flourish.
The disgust at being abandoned by the city is displayed on block association signs that proliferate, particularly in African-American neighborhoods. One sign I saw warned visitors about the conduct they should desist from: “no loitering,” “no gambling,” “no car washing.”
Last week, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel turned to Louis Farrakhan, who offered a private army from the Nation of Islam to patrol the streets and do what the police can’t.
That doesn’t mean New York’s neighborhoods are all perfectly safe. But NYPD cops, at risk to their personal safety, have made laudable efforts to root out crime and disorder everywhere.
There are people leaving clubs and restaurants at all hours in police precincts like Williamsburg’s 90th and Bed-Stuy’s 77th — where, 20 years ago, such behavior would be unthinkable.
Of course, gentrification has helped. Yet that’s a chicken-and-egg argument — did the neighborhood get safer because housing values increased and retail shops moved in; or did the neighborhood get nicer because it was safer?
One sign of the NYPD’s “whole city” approach is the prosecution of killers. New York police solve about 60% of homicides; in Chicago, two out of three killers are not apprehended, allowing them to kill again if they choose and creating a climate of lawlessness.
The anguished cries of Shianne Norman, mother of 4-year-old Lloyd, show the difficulties that remain in New York. She bemoaned the “don’t speak to cops” culture that led a basketball court full of witnesses to fail to report who did the shooting.
“There were entirely too many people outside to not know who pulled the trigger,” Norman said. “Please, please, there’s no snitching when it’s a 4-year-old boy.”
In the end, though, the police did arrest a suspect — 17-year-old Rondell Pinkerton, who was charged with the murder Wednesday.
We can’t bring back the life of Lloyd. But the successful prosecution of killers, and cops continuing to patrol their neighborhoods, may stop it from happening to another little boy.
Writing in the London Sunday Times last week, A.A. Gill said, “It is safe now in New York, one of the safest cities in the world . . . You can wear pearls in Times Square. You can wear nothing in Times Square. You can go and meditate in Washington Square.”
As always, though, the true measure of our safety is whether a child stepping onto a Bronx basketball court will be every bit as protected as tourists in Midtown. New York is a collection of precincts, of neighborhoods, of boroughs, none of which can be abandoned. It’s a lesson Chicago has not learned — and we cannot forget.
Eugene O’Donnell is a professor of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.