CAN THE MAYOR MAKE NEW YORK CITY SAFER?
The Advocacy Newsletter: Connecting.... the Dots
Volume 8 Number 374
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When asked what his first priority is as mayor, candidate Carl Adams answered quickly, “public safety.” That became his mantra, and as a former career policeman he had the credentials to back this up. Unfortunately, a mere two week into his mayoralty something happened that gives New York City pause. A 40-year-old woman, an executive named Michelle Alysa Go, was pushed to her death by a demented homeless man onto the Times Square station tracks.
Image by Bramhall
The mayor rushed to say that he would be adding 500 officers to patrol the transit system and was putting the social service agencies on alert. But the emphasis was certainly on more aggressive police actions and not on social programs, where it is even more desperately needed. There was a call for plastic shields to be put across the platforms, that would only depress when lined up with open doors to prevent this. Others said the cost would be prohibitive and too disruptive.
Following this tragedy, the mayor had been reassuring to the public, saying the City was safe; then he backed off this a day or two later when a statistic of a 65% increase in transit crime was reported. This time, he said he “didn’t feel safe in the subways.” That’s an uplifting statement.
Scarcely a week later, two policemen were shot on duty, one fatally. Incidents keep piling up, and the mayor has come up with an ambitious plan to shore up police protection, while the New York Attorney General weighed in, saying that the City would once again begin to prosecute in punishing minor crimes. The mayor was joined by President Biden in a visit to Number One Police Plaza, where he vowed more federal funds to support this fight against crime.
When we look at the situation objectively, crime was bound to be up from a year ago when no one, neither potential assailants or passengers, were riding the subways– or traversing the streets– because of Covid-19 restrictions. The ridership has increased five-fold from 2020 until now, so crime was bound to be up.
As a matter of fact, it’s a matter of perception. Perhaps the title of this essay is overstated. The issue shouldn’t be whether the mayor can make the City safe, it should be, can he make it safer? In reality, the whole crime scare is overstated. In 2022 Berkshire Hathaway rated New York as the nineth safest city in the whole world. Yes, crime is up from the pre-pandemic year of 2019, but it is nowhere near the levels experienced in 1980 in New York City. That is when the city was truly unsafe.
New York City keeps meticulous records of seven major categories of crime. Comparing 2021, the latest figure available, to that ignominious year of 1980, shows that right now crime is down in the city, an astounding 86%. The two figures that experts watch most closely to determine the situation are robbery (-86%) and murder (-73%). So, if the mayor wanted to calm down the City and not play to the alarmists, he should be throwing some of these numbers around. They tell the true story.
This doesn’t consider misdemeanors like shoplifting, turnstile jumping, petty theft, and spitting, which do increase the feeling of lawlessness. It is also known that these figures undercount because many crimes go unreported, but the bias would be consistent over time, so these numbers should be considered meaningful.
As for needing more police to lower the crime rate, it’s a joke. Catch this: while crime has gone down 86%, the number of police has increased a startling 60% from 1980. There are now almost 36,000 police in New York City. That is an increase of 61% from 1980, when there were just over 22,000 police.
There are those who would argue that the greater presence of police has discouraged crime. Think again. It has been many years since the mythical Officer Krupke of West Side Story walked a beat in New York. For years, police have mostly been driving around in the 9,000-patrolcar fleet. The only cops seen in the streets are the ones directing traffic– or when the President comes to town; then they come out of the woodwork. To his credit, Mayor Adams is proposing to reinstitute having police walking a beat.
The real villain in the whole crime uptick is, of course, unemployment. It is well known in sociological circles that the greatest cause of crime is poverty. When there are fewer jobs, there is more crime. That is what has been happening in New York the last couple of years. And during the last two years, the economy of New York City took a huge hit as most people stayed home, because many workplaces were closed, either by choice or by the mayor’s and governor’s mandates.
New York has been slow to return to a normal employment rate. In March 2020, before the downturn, the unemployment rate in NYC was only 3.8 precent, even lower than the national average of 4.4 percent. At its peak in August 2020, the city unemployment rate was way above the national average, 14.8 percent vs. 8.4 percent. Now that the dust has mostly settled, the national average of unemployment is 5.9 percent, compared to a punishing 9.4 percent in New York City, and the city has lost some 500,000 jobs.
The explanation for all of this is that New York City, particularly the financial Wall Street area, has a large percentage of upscale white-collar workers, more so than most other places. That is, indirectly, why the City was so hard hit. With the coming of the pandemic, these upscale people were largely not fired, but retreated to their homes to continue to work remotely, many in the suburbs and some in the City itself. They work at home today, some permanently, and others in a hybrid home/office situation.
Hardest hit by this exodus were the many support workers around their former workplace: restaurant workers, retail salespeople, leisure and hospitality jobs, construction, laundry, transportation workers, and apparel manufacturing. So, the white-collar jobs were mostly still there, but for all those modest wage-earners who formerly took care of them, their jobs are gone, or they are just holding on, more so than in the rest of the country.
The impact on this out-of-work group, not only to the wage-earner but to their families as well, is the major cause of increased crime. So, if the mayor thinks he is going to improve the City’s security by adding more police power, he has another guess coming. Crime will go down when the jobs come back, not before.
As a matter of fact, the Time Square killing wasn’t a crime. It was the act of a deranged man and having all the police presence possible wouldn’t have prevented it. The sad story is that we have too many tormented souls like the one who pushed Ms. Go walking the streets. The reason why so many are around that they are mostly homeless. This goes back to the 1970s, when Geraldo Rivera broke an explosive story about Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, one of the many institutions that permanently housed and maltreated thousands of the mentally ill in huge facilities in the City and suburbs. A cry went up to close these places down and treat these people in more humane fashion, in walk-in mental health community centers in the City. So, close them they did, and turned these poor souls out.
Except, the alternative programs to take care of them never really materialized, as neither the city nor the state ever allocated the dollars and resources to adequately do the job. New York City is not alone. The same story happened all around the country. So many of these people wound up homeless, living in shelters and on the streets, committing crimes and winding up in prisons. It is estimated that approximately half of those in U.S. prisons are mental cases. So, jail and the street are where many of the mentally ill are now.
In the city, when mentally ill people go into one of the inadequate treatment centers, it is for a short period of time where they are cleaned up and put on drugs to stabilize them. They are then turned loose into the streets again, go off their meds, are seen wandering around dazed, and sometimes commit the kind of terrible act we saw in Times Square. Unless the City is willing to put a tremendous effort of time, money, and resources to provide the necessary social and professional help that these people needs, the problem will not go away. And even if those programs are put in place, it will take years to achieve a turnaround.
The point is, there is no quick fix to what we are seeing: more crime and unbalanced people wandering around. New Yorkers are resilient people, and the city will come back economically, and crime will go down. That is what happened after the 1980s and it will occur again. We forget that it took many years to get down to the low crime level of 2019, and even now. New York will be back, and hopefully with a better way to treat the mentally disturbed.
So, the mayor should make it clear that the situation is not dire, and we will slowly but surely make it better. Instead of concentrating on more police power, the City should be putting more emphasis on providing greater social support to our citizens. New York will be back; it’s just a matter of when.
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“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”
--Aristotle
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