The shame of the cities - crime in New York City

National Review, Oct 1, 1990

THE DEATH of Brian Watkins, the 22-year-old Utah tourist who was stabbed while attempting to rescue his parents from a gang of subway thieves, has focused the attention of New Yorkers on the issue never far from their minds: crime. Politically, the first victim of the media fallout has been Mayor David Dinkins, who is urged to abandon his habitually serene demeanor and show a little fury. There is something absurd about such advice-as if rug-chewing will make the streets safe. Yet there is also justice in the anti-Dinkins backlash, for he owed his election to a conviction among liberal-minded whites that only the elevation of a black man to the mayoralty could appease the city's seething pathologies. Those who sow delusions reap frustrations.

The same class of voters tended to believe that, while the greatest immediate threat to social peace was underclass rage, the underlying threat was white racism. In fact, the scourge of city-dwellers is a class of anomic hoodlums, most of them belonging to minority groups, who visit their violence mostly on other minority members and, to a lesser extent, on whites such as Brian Watkins or Sean Healy, a prosecutor in the Bronx who got caught in the crossfire of a local drug battle while buying doughnuts across the street from the courthouse. Willie Horton is not a myth; the specter of white violence is.

In the long run, the insights of analysts such as Charles Murray and George Gilder-that creating a class of welfare dependents creates a subclass of rootless marauders-will guide us to policies that will reduce the crime rate. In the short run, we have to arrest more criminals. New York liberals, characteristically, are reluctant to contemplate that step. First Deputy Mayor Norman Steisel warned against drastic increases in the police force, which would force the city to "gut" social services. Ride the subway, Steisel. The most basic promise of the social contract is protection against violent death, and in New York, it has worn away. If the housing budget suffers, so be it.