This incident became, in my mind, a metaphor for the condition New York City was in during those years. It was as if the young man in my cab had been swallowed by a monster – the city itself.
But by the time the nineties came around, the crime situation in New York started to show a noticeable improvement. Not only were the crime statistics down, the city actually began to look safer. Local politicians stood in line trying to take credit for the improvement, ignoring the fact that it was part of a national trend. But as someone who has been down in the trenches for a long, long time and as someone who might be considered to be sort of a professional observer, I formed my own opinion. Not to take anything away from police work that is sensible and on-target, nevertheless I attribute the drop in crime to three broader social factors.
1. AIDS – the devastation of the AIDS epidemic in New York City in the eighties and nineties should not be forgotten. I remember once having a passenger in my cab in 1989 who told me that he personally knew thirty-six people who had died of AIDS. The two principal groups affected were gays and intravenous drug users (‘junkies’). Well, guess what? The guy who broke the window of your car so he could steal the baby seat and whatever was in the glove compartment was a junkie. It may not be politically correct to say so, but if an epidemic is wiping out the junkies, the crime rate sure as hell is going to go down.
2. The cell phone – that’s right, the cell phone. By the time the millennium passed, nearly everyone in New York City owned one. Today, if a person sees a crime being committed, he can immediately alert the police. I once had a passenger tell me that her nephew had been held up by a young thug who pulled a knife on him while he was walking down a street in Manhattan. As the mugger jogged off, the nephew followed him from a distance while calling the police on his cell. The cops showed up instantly and the thief, seeing them, tried to escape by running into a subway station where he made the mistake of attempting to sprint across the tracks to the other side. He managed to avoid the third rail but did not manage to avoid an oncoming train which struck and killed him. Not that the guy deserved to die, of course, but the truth is his demise did bring the crime rate down.
3. Now here’s the big one, and it is surprising to me that I’ve never heard this mentioned as a reason for the drop in the crime rate nationally: race relations are improving. It seems to be human nature to become annoyed or outraged when things are going wrong, but to take no particular notice of it when things are going right. I believe the efforts of many, many well-intentioned people going back to the 1950s are bearing fruit – race relations are improving.
A kid growing up in the inner city today is not as likely to feel that, since he’s not allowed to be a part of the mainstream of society, it’s okay to commit crimes against it. He’s more likely to feel that he has a part in the game, too. Due to a gradual leveling of the playing field in economic and educational opportunities, the boundary lines between the ghetto and the rest of the city are disappearing. It’s no longer unusual for me to take a white guy to his apartment house in Harlem or to drop a black, urban professional off at his building in the Financial District.
But you’re not going to see any politician get up and say, ‘Well, the reason the crime rate is down isn’t really because of anything I am doing – it’s being caused by trends in the society that I have no control over.’ To the contrary.
In the late nineties Mayor Giuliani, riding on a crest of popularity as a crime-stopper in his first administration, decided to take it a step further in his second and final four years in office. Seizing upon a dubious philosophy that if you can stop the little crimes you will also somehow be nipping the big crimes in the bud, he set an army of police officers out to seek and destroy sin at even its smallest incarnation.
Hounded
A woman of perhaps seventy years entered my cab one evening in September, 1998 whose destination was her apartment building on 96th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. In her arms she held a cute little Cocker Spaniel whose name, I learned, was Terrence. It took only a few words of admiration from me about her pet to set her off on a tirade. This woman was a firecracker ready to explode.
She told me she had started the day, as she always did, by taking her dog for an early-morning walk in Central Park. Not too far from where she enters the park, she said, there’s a wide-open field where she lets Terrence off the leash for a few minutes to get some exercise before they head back to the apartment house. That day had been no different – she had let little Terrence off the leash.
But this is technically against the law and the violation was spotted by a cop in a patrol car who swooped down on her, she said, like a hawk zeroing in on a mouse. The cop informed her of the infraction and told her he would have to write her a summons for a hundred dollars.
Identification, please.
She didn’t have any.
At this point the policeman could have taken her off to the police station if he’d wanted to, but, she said bitterly, instead he opted to do her a ‘favor’ by hauling her and Terrence in the cruiser to her own building. After they rode up in the elevator to the 6th floor, she showed him the necessary papers, he wrote her out the ticket, and he departed, leaving behind one pissed-off septuagenarian.
One has to wonder what ‘bigger crimes’ are prevented by cracking down on old ladies who let their dogs off the leash. But one does not have to wonder why, after a few years of this, Mayor Giuliani’s popularity plummeted like a stone and he began to be known as ‘Mayor Crueliani’ in my taxicab.
Upon reflection, I found that I had acquired a new metaphor. This incident symbolized for me what New York City had become – not quite a police state (thank you, the Constitution of the United States), but a too-heavily-policed state. The trauma of being victimized by a thug had been replaced to some degree by the trauma of being victimized by agents of the municipality itself.
But that is not to say that the city has become a place where crime is at such a minimum that you no longer need to have ‘street smarts’. You do. And the most important street smart in a city of strangers is simply good manners.
The wrong guy
I had someone in my cab on a Saturday night in March, 1999 whom you know. Or at least know of. You have never seen his face, but you have wondered what he looked like. And you have spoken of him from time to time.
Let me explain. Has something like this ever happened to you? You are walking along on a crowded city sidewalk and you’re in a pretty good mood, just minding your own business, when someone walking in the opposite direction bumps into you so hard that it knocks you off balance for a moment. You look at the person who did this and expect to hear some kind of an apology, but instead you hear this: ‘Watch where you’re going, asshole.’
Or this? You are waiting in line at the Quikcheck and someone a foot taller than you blatantly cuts right in front of you with his beer just as you were about to step up to the cashier. You think of saying something to the guy but he looks like a thug, so you just keep your mouth shut and stand there with your half-gallon of milk.
In both cases your urge to react in a forceful way is suppressed by the consideration of what the consequences might be if you did. You might be injured. Hell, you might be killed. You might be arrested and charged with assault. You might have a lawsuit on your hands. So you just stand there and take it. But you soothe your anger by thinking this thought: ‘Someday that guy is gonna meet the wrong guy.’
But the wrong guy is not you, so the moment of retribution has not arrived. Nevertheless, you know he’s out there somewhere and it’s just a matter of time before he evens the score with this subhuman who was just so rude to you.
It was the ‘wrong guy’ who got into my cab that night in March, 1999. I had taken a fare out to Jackson Heights in Queens at midnight and was heading back toward Manhattan on Northern Boulevard when I was hailed by a man who came suddenly running