New York sliding back to the bad old days of violence
A gun-violence crisis has shaken New York City in the first weeks of this year, turning Eric Adams, its new Mayor, into something like a wartime leader.
In the midst of a bleak autumn in New York, as a second wave of the coronavirus closed schools and an upsurge in violent crime set the city on edge, a new recruit at the police department explained why he wanted to be part of the force.
“Coming from an immigrant family, I will be the first to say that I am a member of the NYPD,” said Jason Rivera, in a letter to his commanding officer in November 2020.
Rivera grew up in Inwood, a largely Hispanic neighbourhood which did not enjoy a warm relationship with the NYPD, he said.
But the department was trying to mend fences and he believed that he could help. He thought he could make a difference “in this chaotic city”.
Rivera, 22, was shot dead a week ago on Friday in a flat in Harlem, allegedly by a disturbed middle-aged man named Lashawn McNeil, who was armed with a Glock handgun that had been modified to fire up to 56 bullets.
He is the latest victim of a gun-violence crisis that has shaken New York City in the first weeks of this year, turning Eric Adams, its new Mayor, into something like a wartime leader who appears perpetually at the scene of disaster.
“In my three weeks as Mayor I have been with an officer who was shot in the head as he slept in his own car; I have met with the mother of a 19-year-old girl who was killed as she worked the nightshift in Harlem; I have seen a toddler’s bloodstained pink jacket in the street,” Adams, 61, said.
That case involved an eleven-month-old baby struck in the face by a stray bullet.
A former police officer, he has voiced the fear held by many: that New York will slide “back to the bad old days”.
He joined the NYPD in 1984, as a crack cocaine epidemic was taking hold in New York and pushing up the crime rate. By the early 1990s the city was recording more than 2000 murders a year.
As the crack epidemic waned, the murder rate began to fall and New York entered a decades-long era of steadily falling crime which made it the safest big city in America.
Criminologists say an improving economy and the arrival of waves of law-abiding immigrants helped to effect this transformation.
Rudy Giuliani, the mayor at the time, and his police commissioner Bill Bratton are frequently cast as the founding fathers of this golden age for implementing a “broken windows” model of policing in which stamping out minor infractions is seen as a way to prevent graver crimes, and for introducing a new reliance on statistics to identify patterns and to target high-crime neighbourhoods.
The police also introduced the “stop and frisk” tactic for steadily larger numbers of people but that led to growing complaints that officers were disproportionately targeting and harassing minorities. A federal judge agreed in 2013, and the practice was scaled down – but crime continued to fall.
In 2017 there were fewer than 300 murders, the lowest since New York started keeping reliable records in the 1950s. That year the city of Baltimore, population 600,000, recorded more murders than the eight million-strong metropolis of New York.
However, murders and shootings began to rise in 2020. In November of that year a survey of data from 28 cities showed a similar picture across the country. In New York, police blamed it on gangs fighting turf wars in emptier streets, and on reforms enacted by the state legislature that eliminated cash bail for low-level crimes.
NYPD commissioner Dermot Shea complained that gang members arrested for carrying illegal guns were being released, even as the pandemic was taking a toll: nearly 50 members of the NYPD had died of Covid-19 by the autumn.
Morale was a problem too. Officers who had been hailed as heroes in the early months of the pandemic now felt they were cast as villains by protesters marching over the murder of George Floyd. Calls to “defund the police” came as violent crime soared. Insiders reported a rush for the exit.
This was when young Rivera joined the force. “I remember one day when I witnessed my brother being stopped and frisked, I asked myself, ‘why are we being pulled over if we are in a taxi?’” he wrote in his letter, setting out why he wanted to be a police officer.
But “as time went on, I saw the NYPD pushing hard on changing the relationship between the police and the community. This was when I realised that I wanted to be a part of the men in blue.”
As he joined the ranks, Adams was elected as the city’s new mayor. Like Rivera, he had suffered an unpleasant encounter with the police while growing up; while serving in the NYPD, he had been a critic of some of its tactics, including stop and frisk. As a mayoral candidate, he promised to make fighting crime his top priority.
Barely had he been sworn into office when a controversy erupted over a memo, circulated by Manhattan’s newly elected district attorney Alvin Bragg, instructing his prosecutors to adopt a more lenient approach to less serious offences and avoid seeking jail time for certain types of crimes.
Kenneth Giddon, proprietor of a Manhattan clothing store robbed twice by the same gang in December, expressed the sentiments of many when he told the New York Post: “I like the message that Adams delivered. But that message was undercut by Bragg. The memo was a punch in the gut.”
He said Bragg, 48, needed to know that “perception is reality. If New Yorkers feel unsafe, the city will struggle to come back. If criminals feel law enforcement is lax they will commit more crimes.”
Adams has unveiled a “blueprint” to tackle the rise in gun crime. Central to the plan will be the revival of a plainclothes police unit focused on tackling gun crime that was disbanded in 2020 for its involvement in a disproportionate number of police shootings.
Richard Aborn, president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York, felt cause for optimism. He said Adams “knows what the NYPD is capable of ... he knows cops and he knows what makes them tick.”
But another former cop, Eugene O’Donnell, a professor of criminology who once had Adams as a student, was not sure the Mayor would have the unvarnished approval of the rank and file. As a police officer Adams was “an administrative cop at best, and really more of a community activist on the public pay role than a fully fledged street cop knocking down doors”, he said. In the election “he got destroyed on Staten Island, in the cop heartland”. Morale among officers remained desperately low, and the lofty, “childlike” aspirations they espoused in the academy “did not last long”.
O’Donnell said a crucial test for Adams would be if he was “really going to embrace” the proactive policing tactics he was now endorsing.
“The risks in the US are that the cops are going to shoot somebody soon,” he said.
“They have been on a stand-down. Now they are going on again, at full throttle, and that’s going to come with risks. Will he say: ‘I’m the one who initiated this’ if there is an incident?”
The Times
Professional and personal fulfilment for proud Roots star
John Amos played the slave Kunta Kinte in the award-winning television miniseries Roots, which helped to combat racism in America.
UK firms warned to watch for insider Russian attacks
Criminal gangs and proxies working for Putin are on a mission to bring ‘mayhem’ to our streets, says security service.