It wasn't always this good and it can get very bad again
The turning of the Pax Clintonia
New York used to be a really, really bad place to go. You simply did not go there unless you had to because it was a steaming hotbed of murder, assault, rape, robbery, drugs, vagrancy, whatever, all of it. It was not merely a fact of life back then but also a cultural touchstone of sorts—you can see it in the brutal gritty violent streets of Taxi Driver, for instance, or the aptly named Panic in Needle Park, or even in the brief drunken boat-deck ramblings of Chief Martin Brody in Jaws.
That all got cleaned up a while ago, largely thanks to aggressive, proactive, data-assisted policing that targeted all levels of street crime and essentially made it prohibitively expensive and risky to break the law there. The reason we know New York now as the backdrop of King of Queens and Central Perk rather than Serpico is thanks largely to Rudy Giuliani and Jack Maple and CompStat. It was a good way to fight crime and it worked. It gave us the modern New York City that we all know and love; the place went from a legitimate international joke and a 2,000-murder hellscape to the shallow, boring, materialistic setting of Sex and the City in just about than a decade. That’s nuts.
And yet New York is backsliding. It’s getting bad again—it is once again becoming the place you don’t want ever want to visit and is on the cusp of becoming the place you don’t want to live in. Here, for example, is a representative news report out of Manhattan this week:
Once one of the hottest neighborhood in NYC, the Financial District is now simply a dumpster fire, residents and workers told The Post.
In early September at least four trash fires were set along Cliff, William and Water streets. They were quickly extinguished, but the crime and filth blighting this once-sleepy neighborhood, bound by Chambers Street, the West Side Highway, the Battery and the East River, have only worsened.
Emboldened crooks and vagrants have been robbing and assaulting locals without restraint while businesses are regularly looted by brazen shoplifters.
How bad is it, really, though?
NYPD data for the 1st Precinct, which includes the Financial District, shows major crimes have increased 50% this year, compared to 33% citywide. Burglary is up 70%, robbery 15%, felony assault 16%, and rape 55%.
Those are huge increases, not just at the precinct level but, as the Post notes, citywide. NYPD data show double-digit year-to-date increases in every type of crime except murder. The two-year average also shows increases in all of those categories, and the 12-year average shows the same thing in a majority of them. It’s not just getting bad in New York—it’s getting worse.
There are likely a number of decisive factors contributing to this brutal turnaround: progressive city leaders who either don’t care about crime rates or who see it as politically advantageous to do nothing about them, bail reform laws that allow more violent and dangerous people back onto the street very quickly, a shrinking police force decimated by hostile political forces and cultural hatred of police. Take your pick. The point is this: Most young adults have grown up knowing New York City as a sort of glittery, rich playground, something akin to a theme park where you can go and play and have fun and don’t worry to much about anything. But it wasn’t always that way, and it doesn’t always have to be that way. It can get really bad again. It already is getting bad again.
That’s true of anywhere, not just New York. Younger Americans have grown up in a United States that has been, by-and-large, remarkably safe: Starting in the Clinton years the rates of murder, violent crime and robbery have all declined precipitously. Those trends have come about due to fortuitous choices made by people in authority—the decision to police crime vigorously, to do it proactively, to tolerate no assaults against public order and civic propriety. Those policies have given us safer cities, safer towns, safer rural areas; for a few decades we’ve all been safer from the kind of freewheeling, chaotic crime that used to mark so much of daily life.
But it doesn’t always have to be that way. And indeed we’re getting a firsthand look at what it looks like when the pendulum shifts back. Violent crime is rising in the U.S. again, mostly but not only in big cities. The presumptions we’ve lived with for many years now—that if you go somewhere you’re pretty well safe from being shot or stabbed or punched, that you don’t have to worry too much about your house getting broken into, that your car will still be there when you wake up—are increasingly less certain. The people who make the relevant decisions are now pursuing policies that make these things more likely to happen.
If you want to reverse these trends, you’ll need to demand more from your civic leaders and authorities. Demand proactive policing, thorough criminal investigations, harsher penalties for hard crimes. Public officials, like pretty much everyone else in the world, are really, really scared of Internet discourse; many of them are worried that if they’re tough on crime then left-wing people will say mean things about them on social media. The task is to make their inaction on crime more unpleasant than the negative Twitter reactions of which they’re so scared. Relentlessly petition their offices; mount public protests and campaigns against their pathetic abdication of duty; write letters and newspaper articles; hand out fliers; demand they do their jobs; threaten to vote them out of office, or impeach them, if they don’t; follow through with it if necessary.
The alternative is a fearful hellish quasi-wasteland in which we are more vulnerable to assault, robbery, maiming, rape, and death. This is not something we have to live with. It can be better. Let’s not let it be worse.