In 1990, there were 2,245 murders in New York City, or more than six per day. People entering the city by car from the city’s bridges and tunnels were often greeted by “squeegee men” who would aggressively try to clean their windows and demand money, sometimes scratching the cars of those who failed to pay. It was common to see cars parked on the street with signs on their dashboards advertising “no radio” in a desperate effort to deter break-ins. Those arriving in the city by bus were dumped into the area surrounding the Port Authority Bus Terminal and into Times Square, where they would pass a row of X-rated movie shops and peep shows. Large parts of the city were considered off-limits to tourists.
Those images, which dominated New York City for decades following the disastrous urban planning policies of the 1960s, have been largely unknown to anybody under 30 years old — aside from scenes from movies such as Martin Scorsese’s 1976 classic Taxi Driver. Due to lots of hard work and effective policing that started with the mayoralty of Rudy Giuliani, the city has experienced a long period of urban renewal.
Murders steadily declined, reaching fewer than 300 per year in 2017 and 2018, with all major crimes having dropped a staggering 82% since the 1990 peak. Neighborhoods that had once been no-go zones for many New Yorkers were transformed, and the city’s cultural life flourished. The changes were so radical that people actually had the luxury of debating the drawbacks of “gentrifying” previously crime-ridden areas. What happened in New York City was echoed in major cities throughout the nation.
Sadly, in 2020, urban America is in danger of reversing decades of hard-fought gains.
First, the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged New York City and crippled the economies of large cities that were forced to lock down to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Bars, restaurants, and theaters have spent months largely or completely shut. Many have been forced to close. Landlords have been missing out on rent payments, and stores have been shut down.
Then, after George Floyd suffocated under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, the nation’s cities broke out into large-scale demonstrations that in many cases turned into violent riots and began to deviate more and more from the original stated purpose of wanting reforms to policing.
In the past few months, we’ve seen small businesses torched, stores looted, and statues (even of abolitionists) toppled and defaced. Liberal mayors, reluctant to put themselves at odds with the anti-cop protest movement, have largely allowed lawlessness to take hold. In perhaps the most extreme example, the city of Seattle for weeks indulged radicals who created an “autonomous zone” without police. Unsurprisingly, this led to shootings.
There is now evidence that lawlessness is having a broader effect on the safety of cities. For the first six months of 2020, homicides in New York City soared 21%, with shootings up 46%, and that’s despite the long periods during which people were sheltering in place due to the virus. On the Sunday of the July Fourth weekend alone, 10 people were killed, and 30 were shot. Over the same weekend in Chicago, which has one-third the population, 79 were shot, and 15 were killed. Spikes have also been seen in other major U.S. cities, including Los Angeles and Miami.
One of the principles that was used to reverse the decline in New York City in the 1990s was the idea of “broken windows” policing, by which law enforcement began to crack down on smaller crimes such as aggressive panhandling or the menace of “squeegee men.” The theory was that when cities allow smaller quality-of-life crimes to go unpunished, it creates a climate of lawlessness that then goes on to manifest itself in more violent crimes. That would be a good description of what’s been playing out in cities across the country over the past few months.
Cities have traditionally been economic, cultural, intellectual, and academic centers. People are willing to put up with the crowds, costs, and relatively cramped living quarters because when functional, cities offer opportunities that cannot be found elsewhere. But when people cannot take advantage of what cities have to offer, whether because of the disruptions caused by the coronavirus or rising crime, people have less reason to live there, and the urban centers can get hollowed out, creating a vicious cycle from which, history shows, it might take 30 years to break out.
While there are reasonable police reforms that can be discussed to avoid tragedies such as the one that befell George Floyd, America’s mayors cannot passively allow great cities to get destroyed by a descent into lawlessness.
