Prometheus 6

I'm sorry.

America’s Mayor Goes to America
By MATT BAI

Rudy Giuliani has staked his campaign on the idea that he will keep America safe from terror the same way he kept New York City safe from crime — with ruthless efficiency. Is there a method to his relentlessness?

I immediately jumped to Giuliani's decision to put the Office of Emergency Management where it could be destroyed in the next emergency. Even though he was warned not to. And lied about being warned in subsequent interviews.

This was supposed to be about his claiming responsibility for the drop in crime in thr 1990s. About his efficient ruthlessness.

Even though the drop in crime started before his 1994 change in policing strategy.

[T]he 35 percent increase in police staffing that added 13,000 new employees to the NYPD, which Zimring considers another driving force in the crime decline, began under Giuliani’s predecessor, David Dinkins, and then was continued by Giuliani. Crime declined each month during the last three years of the Dinkins’ administration, too.

The decline in crime predated Rudy? You don't believe that? Well, check this article from the Justice Department's National Institute of Justice Journal (don't worry, it's October 1998, from well before the Bushistas bastardized it).

The Improbable Transformation of Inner-City Neighborhoods: Crime, Violence, Drugs, and Youths in the 1990s
by Richard Curtis*

*Richard Curtis is Associate Professor of Anthropology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

At the peak of the crack epidemic in many American cities--when people seemed ready to write off inner cities as hopelessly lost--a remarkable transformation began to take place. In a global economy where the gap between the haves and have-nots continued to increase at an alarming rate, inner-city neighborhoods defied nearly all expectations and, with minimal outside intervention, mounted an improbable comeback.[1] The most visible and trumpeted manifestation of this rebirth was a plummeting crime rate that, in the latter half of the 1990s, fell to lows not seen in more than 30 years.[2]

This paper, based on 10 years (1987-1997) of ethnographic fieldwork spanning nine different research projects,[3] focuses on two Brooklyn, New York, neighborhoods (Bushwick and Williamsburg) and examines local-level processes that contributed to their remarkable transformation in the 1990s. Neighborhoods and communities are important to examine because they are, in addition to family contexts, where people learn to be human. They form the crucible where orientations, outlooks, behaviors, and lifestyles are forged.[4] To understand neighborhood variation, behavior must be situated in a community setting that renders it intelligible.

By examining the lives of different groups of young people--a household sample, gang members, and drug dealers--this research demonstrates that the urge to invest explanatory power in structural (e.g., demographic, economic) or institutional (e.g., police, courts) factors with regard to the turnaround witnessed in inner-city neighborhoods, especially plummeting crime rates, is tempered by a close examination of the lives of people who live there, the very people who have agency and must ultimately decide whether or not to use a drug, pick a fight, or commit a crime.

In the early 1990s, much evidence seemed to suggest that the dominant models of urban decay and worsening youth violence were correct. Many youths had grown up in dysfunctional, multiproblem families, without positive role models, and left unchecked by the informal controls that had defined and protected previous generations. The lack of order and structure worsened as youths turned into adolescents and neighborhood violence seemed to be spiraling out of control. Where there was typically a diffusion of responsibility for social control--shifting away from parents and onto societal institutions, especially schools-- these societal checks had been largely missing, and young adults had to forge their own solutions to problems. But by the mid-1990s, far from becoming "superpredators" as an outcome of this exposure, many youths began to withdraw from social life, afraid of lingering in public spaces for fear of violence. The impact of drug misuse by parents and/or older siblings on family life was also deeply felt by many young residents, often narrowing the parameters of their own drug use, and they made a conscious attempt to avoid similar fates.

Not all youths were scared into avoiding public spaces and hiding behind closed doors, and as an unintended consequence of the war on drugs, gang life of a type never encountered before arose among a population of convicted drug distributors and users. Following massive police initiatives in the early 1990s in which hundreds of neighborhood youths were jailed, sizable chapters of the Latin Kings and ¥etas formed and asserted their control over some blocks, especially those where there had been large street-level drug markets and unchecked violence. Predominantly of Puerto Rican descent, these gang members reported that they had experienced a genuine rebirth, and in attempting to reconstitute their lives, their new goal was to "uplift the Latino community."

The corporate-style drug businesses that had dominated the neighborhoods also responded to policing initiatives. Many disbanded during this period, while the remainder downsized and moved off the street. The new cadre of distributors who were soon challenging them were not simply smaller, more discreet versions of the drug supermarket vendors, they were qualitatively different. Because transactions were dependent on familiarity and trust between participants, undercover police were less able to make drug buys and were forced into tedious surveillance of suspected street-level drug markets. The reconfiguration of drug markets in the mid-1990s appreciably reduced the level of neighborhood violence. As distribution retired indoors, turf battles were eliminated, and because organizers of drug businesses hired a few trusted friends rather than easily replaceable workers, there was less conflict between them. Distributors were robbed by users less frequently because they were more protected selling indoors to known customers.

The residents of inner-city neighborhoods did not share equally in the fruits of the economic revitalization of the 1990s that created new (although less secure and rewarding) jobs and low unemployment and led to an optimism not seen since the post-World War II economy of the 1950s. In spite of their marginalized status and bleak prospects, many inner-city residents not only forestalled their expected slide into economic ruin and social disintegration, they confounded the schools of economic, cultural, and genetic determinism and showed a new vitality, graphically illustrated by precipitous drops in crime and violence. In altering their own lives, they shattered the myth that they were powerless against a "criminogenic" environment that was said to mass-produce superpredators and threw into question the canon that violence must beget violence.
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Notes

1. Johnson, K., "Washington Steps Back, and Cities Recover," New York Times, November 16, 1997, 7.

2. Butterfield, F., "Numbers of Victims of Crime Fell Again in '96, Study Says: Lowest Level Since Reports Began in 1973," New York Times, November 16, 1997; and Krauss, C., "New York Crime Rate Plummets to Levels Not Seen in 30 Years," New York Times, December 20, 1996, A1.

3. The nine projects are: "Community AIDS Prevention Outreach Demonstration" (National Institute on Drug Abuse [NIDA] #DA06723), "The Community Effects of Street-Level Narcotics Enforcement: A Study of the New York City Police Department's Tactical Narcotics Teams" (National Institute of Justice), "The Ecology of Crime and Drug Use in American Cities: Social Structure and Neighborhood Dynamics" (Social Science Research Council), "Social Factors and HIV Risk" (NIDA #DA06723), "HIV Risk Among Youth" (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases #A134723), "Latin Kings and Gang Violence" (Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation), "The Natural History of Crack Distribution" (NIDA #DA05126-05), "Drug Use and HIV Risk Among Youth" (NIDA #DA10411), and "Heroin in the 21st Century" (NIDA #DA10105-02).

4. Arensberg, C., and S.T. Kimball, Culture and Community, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1965; and Sullivan, M., Getting Paid: Youth Crime and Work in the Inner City, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.