Last week, the N.Y.P.D. made a cheerful and unexpected announcement: on Monday, November 26th, for “the first time in memory,” there hadn’t been a shooting, stabbing, or slashing anywhere in the five boroughs. (One man, a teen-ager from the Bronx, shot himself in the leg by accident; that didn’t count.) There was almost certainly weaponless violence last Monday, and it goes without saying that there’s been plenty of violence the rest of the year. But it’s also true that the city is less violent now than it’s been for nearly fifty years. In 1990, there were two thousand two hundred and forty-five murders in New York. This year, there are likely to be fewer than four hundred.
Throughout the nineteen-nineties, The New Yorker tracked this extraordinary turnaround. Barbara Goldsmith’s “Women on the Edge,” from 1993, gives you a rough idea of how high the stakes were in the early nineties. The article is a grim introduction to the routinely desperate world of New York City prostitution. Goldsmith shadows Dr. Joyce Wallace, one of the first doctors to study the AIDS epidemic, as she single-handedly tries to stop the spread of H.I.V. among New York City prostitutes. Wallace has used government grants and a corporate sponsorship from LifeStyles, the condom company, to cobble together an AIDS-prevention program: she drives around the city in a white Dodge van (the “LifeStyles Care-Van, Sponsored by LifeStyles Condoms”), offering H.I.V. tests, distributing condoms, running a needle-exchange program, and trying, often unsuccessfully, to get prostitutes off the streets and into shelters.
Wallace drives Goldsmith all over Manhattan, and each intersection seems more hopeless than the last. At Fifty-eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, prostitutes wear fur coats over lingerie, take their johns to fancy hotels, and “disdain” Wallace’s condoms. (“Not my brand,” one woman says.) Chelsea is less orderly, and around the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, “parked Nissan, Mitsubishi, and Cadillac cars containing prostitutes at work have become a familiar sight.” On the Lower East Side, on upper Park Avenue, and in Williamsburg, “the line between prostitution and desperation becomes blurred”: there, prices are pegged to the drug market, usually to the price of a vial of crack. Women live in encampments, or in Dumpsters, in the lawless corners of the city’s grid. When Wallace wins a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar grant to open a drop-in center for prostitutes who are looking to get off the street, she leases 175 East Houston, at the corner of Houston and Allen. The year before, it had been a brothel, with iron bars around the stairwell—“so the johns wouldn’t toss the girls down the stairs,” she explains. Leasing the building turns out to have been unwise. In her rush to get the project off the ground, Wallace didn’t consider how the neighbors would react, and they are furious. But that’s par for the course, Goldsmith writes: “As in the early days of the AIDS crisis, when the establishment failed to respond, the burden of activism has fallen not to the most skilled or organized but to those who care.”
Jonathan Rubinstein’s “Survival in the Night,” also from 1993, sees New York’s lawlessness stealing off the street and into your apartment. It’s the end of the day, and Rubinstein is naked, in bed, reading and “listening to a blues program on WKCR,” when the unthinkable happens:
Rubinstein, an ex-cop, keeps a gun in his filing cabinet, but has no way to reach it. The burglar ties him up and begins searching the apartment. The two men make conversation. (“You like to fish?” the burglar asks, seeing some fishing rods in a corner; “I wish I was fishing now,” Rubinstein replies.) His son is out, he tells the man, and he’d really like it if this were over by the time he comes back. Eventually, the burglar leaves, with eighty dollars and a radio—only to return, surprising Rubinstein, who has rubbed his wrists bloody trying to get out of the restraints. “What’s wrong with your elevator?” he asks. “Listen, pal,” Rubinstein replies, “you just have to walk down like the rest of us.”
After the burglar leaves, Rubinstein starts to lose his cool. He rides along with the cops, and points out the man on the street so that they can arrest him. Over the next few weeks, he works with the police and the D.A.’s office to maximize the man’s sentence. All the while, his anger is rising; “the Event,” Rubinstein writes, “had taken control of my life.” He talks about it so much, and so vehemently, that he begins to alienate his friends. Then, subtly, his feelings start to change. He wonders at the desperation, almost certainly fuelled by drug addiction, that could have driven the man to invade his fifth-floor apartment. (The burglar must have climbed the fire escape, Rubinstein surmises, then swung on a “rotten iron shutter” into the open space of the alleyway, landing on a tiny ledge near an unlocked window.) The gun, it turns out, was incapable of firing, a bluff. And Rubinstein finds himself thinking back to the surprising gentleness of their exchanges. “If the gun in the filing cabinet had been in my hand I would have killed him,” Rubinstein writes. “I say this now, even as I recall his acts of civility towards me when I was entirely in his power.” Some years later, Rubinstein is volunteering at a needle-exchange program. He realizes that he’s looking for his burglar among the addicts, curious to know what’s become of him.
Much of The New Yorker’s crime reporting from the nineties is haunted by the troubling question that’s implicit in these stories: how much of the city’s crime problem can be solved through better policing, and how much must be solved, instead, through social reform? Crimes are offenses against society, but, when they become pervasive enough, they can gain a new meaning, and become criticisms of it. In “Quality and Equality,” a 1994 Comment, James Kunen expressed support for Mayor Giuliani’s new “broken windows” approach to policing—which had the police focussing on minor offenses, like vandalism—while also questioning its social cost. He points out that the N.Y.P.D.’s recently-published manifesto, “Reclaiming Public Spaces,” lists “dirt, graffiti, homeless people, noise” as factors that lower New Yorkers’ quality of life. The police, he wrote, “should not be in the business of doing everything”:
These concerns were warranted, but, looking back, it also seems as though it was hard to imagine just how far the crime rate could fall. In “The C.E.O. Cop,” his 1995 Profile of Giuliani’s Police Commissioner, William Bratton, James Lardner is taken aback by Bratton’s bold “guarantee” that crime rates will fall precipitously. But Bratton is convinced that, with better management and morale, the N.Y.P.D. can actually go on the offensive against crime. Bratton, Lardner writes, asked his commanders how much of a drop in crime they could envision. He fired the ones who named a figure like five per cent, and replaced them with ones who spoke about ten, fifteen, or twenty per cent declines. He bought officers new equipment, and gave precinct commanders more power.
Bratton implemented, as is often reported, a “broken windows” strategy. But he was also aided by his Deputy Police Commissioner, Jack Maple, who put in place a new, statistics-driven approach to policing. “The Crime Buster,” David Remnick’s 1997 Profile of Maple, refers to him as “the cop who cleaned up New York.” Maple, who started out as a Transit patrolman, was a genius—inventive and impulsive, he was so addicted to policing that he arrested people in his free time. He ran decoy squads in the subway: “cops,” Remnick writes, “posing, generically, as ‘the Jewish lawyer,’ ‘the blind man,’ ‘the casual couple,’” which were phenomenally successful in flushing out the muggers who worked in gangs called “wolf packs.” And he took the first steps toward using statistics to give police an edge:
Eventually, Maple was taken out of Transit, and tasked with implementing his system city-wide. He called his new approach CompStat. In “The Wire,” the CompStat meetings are decadent and cynical, but in the nineties, in New York, combined with a newly energized, well-managed, fully-funded police force, they made a difference. And the changes at the N.Y.P.D. collided with other trends, like the consolidation of the crack market and the easing of a demographic bump which had made for a lot of young New Yorkers, to push crime lower. The resulting decline was so dramatic that, in 1996’s “The Tipping Point,” Malcolm Gladwell proposed an additional explanation for the change. “There’s a puzzling gap between the scale of the demographic and policing changes,” he wrote, “and the scale of the decrease in crime”; one way to make sense of the change was to think of social problems as “behav[ing] like infectious agents.” Push the crime rate low enough, and the internal dynamics of the urban system take over, pushing it ever lower.
Looking back on the nineties, of course, you can’t help but notice one problem that the N.Y.P.D. isn’t trying to solve: terrorism. By 2005, when William Finnegan wrote “The Terrorism Beat,” the department, under a new Police Commissioner, Ray Kelly, had began retooling, staffing a thousand officers on counterterrorism between 2001 and 2005. It began posting officers abroad, in places like London and Israel, and recruiting native foreign-language speakers from its own ranks and from the city at large. (In terms of languages, Finnegan writes, the N.Y.P.D.’s resources rival the federal government’s.) Today’s challenges are scary in different ways. They are less local, and less visible. The nineties offer up a reassuring crime story; we don’t yet know how this new story will end.
Illustration by Mark Zingarelli.
