New York Times
Judy Rosenbaum says she hears about it everywhere these days, but she has a hard time understanding the fuss.
Crime is making a comeback, her co-workers say. The newspapers write about it. The television news is filled with it. Two weeks ago, she even got up close to it: a brick and bat fight erupted among construction workers near her Upper East Side home and a stabbing occurred not far from her office in the Flatiron district, where she works as a picture editor at a greeting card company.
“Everyone says it is going to be less safe because Giuliani is not here,” Ms. Rosenbaum said last week in Greenwich Village, where the shooting last month of a Russian-born engineer has served as a reminder of an earlier, more violent era.
“But I don’t feel any different,” she said, on her way to dinner with a friend well after dark. “In New York, it is so hard to tell what is real and what is not. Perception is so much of it.”
New York has a new mayor who is cutting budgets and talking a lot about tough times. The anxiety from Sept. 11 continues to stalk the city. Joblessness is at a four-year high. Some prostitutes are back at Times Square. The Police Department is losing officers — almost 3,700 in the last 10 months. Can the bad old days of mayhem, with roving crack gangs and more than 2,200 murders a year, be far behind?
Ms. Rosenbaum thinks they will remain a distant memory. In scores of interviews across the city in recent days, residents like Ms. Rosenbaum said that they were aware of the foreboding but that they were confident in the city’s ability to keep crime down. From the Melrose section of the South Bronx, a stretch of tough streets lined with brick apartment buildings, to Whitestone, Queens, a verdant community of single-family homes where some residents leave their doors unlocked, people reported no slippage in their sense of well-being.
And, perhaps more significant, most of them were not expecting one.
“I feel safe where I live and I feel safe where I work,” said Kenny Aybar, 22, who tends the counter at his father’s dry-cleaning business in Jamaica, Queens, and who lives with his wife in Ozone Park. “When I was growing up in Jamaica, it was really bad. But it hasn’t been like that for five or six years. Now I don’t think about it.”
Mr. Aybar pointed out the window at an approaching patrol car on 163rd Street, where a half-dozen men were drinking beer against a chain-link fence. “Things still happen, but they have it under control,” he said.
The latest crime statistics seem to confirm the general optimism. Overall crime in New York City declined by 7 percent during the first four months of this year, compared with a year earlier, sustaining a trend that started more than a decade ago when Raymond W. Kelly, the current police commissioner, first held that job, under Mayor David N. Dinkins.
Nationally, the same long-term trend remains strong in some other cities, like Baltimore, where major crime was down 20 percent in the first four months of this year. Other cities, though, have seen a reversal; in Los Angeles, major crime was up 6 percent compared with a year ago and violent crimes were up more than 16 percent.
In New York City, murders were at their lowest level since 1960, down nearly 17 percent from the same time last year. Every other major category of crime was also down, with the exception of rapes, which were up 6 percent, and shootings, which were up 22 percent.
The police are hard pressed to explain the rape statistics, except to say the increase was driven by rapes in which the victim knew the attacker; rapes by strangers were down 8 percent. And the spike in shootings, while striking, appears less so when compared with previous years: the number of shootings this year was down more than 9 percent compared with 2000 and nearly 71 percent compared with 1993.
“The city is safer than it’s ever been,” Mr. Kelly said in an interview. “And you have to hold the police accountable by some measure, and that measure is reported crime.”
But Mr. Kelly, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and other city officials acknowledge with exasperation that the statistics do not necessarily influence what some people talk about and what the news media report. Even people who said they saw no worsening in crime reported that friends and co-workers were looking for signs of renewed trouble.
Julian Boyd, a Web developer, has heard the chatter in Greenwich Village. “I’m a little worried since Bloomberg’s cutting back city agencies, including the police,” Mr. Boyd, 28, said. “I think because of the articles about the increase in crime, specifically in the Village, and the fact that Giuliani’s not there, I might be looking out for the increase in crime, but I haven’t seen it.”
And there is probably good reason. The statistics show that overall crime in the Sixth Precinct, which covers Greenwich Village, was down nearly 10 percent compared with the same period last year. There was only one shooting this year compared with two in the first four months of last year.
At Francis Lewis Park at the foot of the Whitestone Bridge in Queens, the crime data are considered equally heartening. On a sunny afternoon, people spoke of an almost idyllic life, watching the wild parakeets flutter and the boats pass. Pressed to identify a complaint, one stroller, Ed Castle, pointed to the overflowing garbage cans and the knee-high dandelions — things that were absent only last year, he said.
Is this the kind of disorder that will lead to more crime? Mr. Castle did not think so, but he left the door open.
“We are optimistic about Bloomberg,” said Mr. Castle, a retired maintenance worker who has lived in Whitestone for 40 years. “But I know it could change in a minute.”
Mr. Kelly characterizes talk like that as the “Yes, but . . . syndrome” — yes my life is good, but maybe it will change tomorrow. And it drives him mad.
“People are waiting to write the story, `The sky is going to fall,’ not that it’s falling,” he said. “It’s like, `Oh, yeah, but it will go back.’ You know, somehow, it’s almost gleeful in some people’s minds because there is some invested interest in some places in saying that.”
There are many possible explanations for the “yes, but . . . syndrome.”
People are generally more distrustful of the future since Sept. 11. People are seeing fewer officers on the street because of a shrinking of the police force, cuts in overtime and even some terrorism-related assignments. Subway riders say they see more panhandlers, prostitutes and homeless people, though the police dispute it.
Some in the Bloomberg administration even talk of “land mines” laid by loyalists to former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani — an unproven notion that the Giuliani faithful sought to guarantee his crime-fighting legacy by tarnishing that of his successor. Writing last week in The New York Post, one of Mr. Giuliani’s former deputies, Anthony P. Coles, scolded Mr. Bloomberg and and the Police Department for reacting to events. “They should be ahead of the curve,” he wrote.
Mr. Kelly may also be inadvertently feeding the syndrome with high-profile measures, like the recent sweep for prostitutes in Times Square.
“Because we want to jump on anything that looks like it has the potential of being a reversal, we increase people’s attention and focus energies on it,” said Michael J. Farrell, the deputy police commissioner for strategic initiatives. “From the outside, that may look like, `Oh my God, they are really concerned about this. It’s a real problem.’ Or, `The trend has turned.’ That’s not the case.”
With the broken-windows theory of crime in mind — that a seemingly small nuisance like a broken window, if left unfixed, leads to bigger crimes — police officials said they were carefully monitoring calls to the city’s quality of life hot line (1-888-677-LIFE). Mr. Farrell said that 97 percent of complaints were related to noise, blocked driveways and animals — an indication that the most pressing sources of public discontent are not related to safety.
On Pennsylvania Avenue, one of the main drags of perennially crime-ridden East New York, Brooklyn, an elderly homeowner named Santa Mojica complained last week that her quality of life had declined. She did not speak about robbers and killers, but of the rude people who wait for the bus at the stop the city recently moved in front of her house.
“People throw coffee cups, bags, cigarettes, everything,” said Ms. Mojica, 75, as she walked home from the subway station at 10 p.m. “My husband has to sweep the sidewalk three times a day.”
Just three blocks south, the owner of an all-night Exxon gas station and deli told the tale of a different quality-of-life problem — one that police administrators acknowledge is worrisome. The owner, Ibrahim Eksi, a 38-year-old veteran of the Turkish army, said he was caught in a crime zone that had grown more chaotic since Sept. 11, as late-night visits from police officers declined sharply and police response times slowed.
Mr. Eksi bought the station, at Granville Payne and Pitkin Avenues, in 1998, so he missed the city’s most violent days. But Mr. Eksi said that in his four years on the corner, drug sales and other crimes, like shoplifting, had been relentless.
“There’s less police officers,” he said. “If you call them, they come after they finish what they’re doing, two hours later. Before, every half-hour the cops come in for a cup of coffee. Now some nights you don’t see them at all.”
In the interview, Mr. Kelly did not dispute that some residents and business owners are seeing fewer police officers. In that regard, he said he was particularly proud that the department had managed to “push crime down” with fewer officers and resources. With 37,400 officers, the police force is at its smallest size in five years. The department has also been forced to cut certain overtime spending.
Nonetheless, Mr. Kelly said the main lesson of the Giuliani years was not lost on him — that resources count. He said he hoped to have 39,100 officers by July 1, when a new class of officers is expected to be hired.
“I think we can continue to drive down crime if we have the resources to do it,” Mr. Kelly said.
Not surprisingly, some criminals say they are watching.
On Sutter Avenue in East New York, a man who said his name was Jaye Garcia was on his way to Prestige Cuisine to buy dinner the other night. He said he was 23, had grown up in the Roosevelt projects, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, had used drugs with his father and had been a drug dealer. Mr. Garcia said he had robbed drug dealers and had almost been killed. He said he had been arrested, but never convicted.
Mr. Garcia said he disliked Mr. Giuliani, but respected him.
“I think he made a good impact on the city,” he said, a silver cross dangling on a chain around his neck and his teeth plated in gold and silver. “He did his job and he just wanted to get rid of people like me and I respect him for that.”
The word on the street is that it is still “too hot” for criminals, he said. Yet Mr. Garcia has noticed the more sporadic and irregular patrols — and he is paying close attention to Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Kelly.
“Crime is always going to be a roller coaster,” he said. “There’s no such thing as a real Spider-Man.”