If black lives matter, New York’s former mayor has nothing to apologize for.
A remake of “Death Wish,” the popular 1974 film starring Charles Bronson, was released last year. In the original, Bronson plays a successful architect in New York who becomes a vigilante after street thugs break into his home, murder his wife, and put his daughter in a coma. The remake, starring Bruce Willis, flopped. Maybe moviegoers today just couldn’t relate to the depiction of a big city gripped by violent crime while politicians tell police to look the other way. That wasn’t a problem for audiences 45 years ago.
In the 1960s and early ’70s, nearly all major cities experienced a significant rise in serious crime. From 1966-73, New York’s murder rate rose 137%, an increase second only to Detroit among large cities. Marshall Berman, a political scientist at City College of New York, once recalled the late 1960s as the “years when violence, and violent death, became everyday facts of city life.” Ordinary people “suddenly found themselves entangled—as victims, witnesses or survivors—in ferocious crimes. There was nowhere you could get away from it.”
In his 2001 history of New York, “The Ungovernable City,” Vincent Cannato reminds us that the city’s mayor during the crime wave, liberal Republican John Lindsay, had a reputation for being soft on criminals and hard on cops, and was skeptical that strong law enforcement would deter bad behavior. “One reason for the increase in crime and other disorders was a change in the nature of policing in New York,” Mr. Cannato writes. “A policeman’s goal was no longer to enforce order on the streets or prevent crime; it was to stay out of trouble and avoid the appearance of corruption.” Politicians steered cops away from proactive policing and showing a strong street presence. Neighborhoods were patrolled by car rather than on foot.
Minority communities bore the brunt of the crime wave and vocally criticized what they considered inadequate law enforcement. In 1967, the Harlem-based Amsterdam News editorialized that the city “can’t get rid of crime by ignoring or compromising with it” and called for “restoring the legitimate, unbiased use of firearms by our police.” The local chapter of the NAACP said, “It is not police brutality that makes people afraid to walk the streets at night” and demanded an end to “the reign of criminal terror in Harlem.” In a 1968 report, Mr. Cannato writes, the civil-rights organization asked for “greater police protection in Harlem, harsher criminal penalties for murderers and drug dealers, and ‘vigorous’ enforcement of the city’s anti-vagrancy laws.”
It would be decades before these calls for better policing were answered. In the 1970s and ’80s, violent crime in the Big Apple continued to worsen. By the early 1990s, New York was experiencing more than 2,000 murders a year, and the overwhelming majority of perpetrators and victims were black and brown men. The situation would not change significantly for the better until after Rudy Giuliani became mayor in 1994.
Mr. Giuliani, who had campaigned on restoring law and order, recruited a police commissioner who took even petty crime seriously. The new mayor hired more police officers, put them on the streets, and allowed them to stop, question and sometimes frisk pedestrians engaged in suspicious behavior. What followed was an unprecedented reduction in crime. “By 2000, the rates of most offenses in New York City had dropped so precipitously that New York no longer looked like a typical big city,” writes Franklin Zimring in “The Great American Crime Decline.” Between 1993 and 2001, the year Mr. Giuliani left office, murders in New York fell by more than 66%.
Mr. Giuliani was succeeded by Michael Bloomberg, who continued to employ his predecessor’s polices. The city sustained steep reductions in violent crime. But these days Mr. Bloomberg is weighing a run for president and apparently believes he can’t win the Democratic nomination without pandering to black voters. Last weekend, he spoke at a black church in Brooklyn and apologized for stop and frisk. “I can’t change history,” he said. “However, today, I want you to know that I realize back then I was wrong, and I’m sorry."
But why should Mr. Bloomberg apologize? If anyone should be remorseful, it’s all those city leaders in the 1970s and ’80s who allowed crime to reach levels that made “Death Wish” look like a documentary. If anything close to the crime rates of the early 1990s had persisted for another quarter-century, tens of thousands more black men might be dead or incarcerated. Does Mr. Bloomberg really want to return to a time when criminals were treated like victims, police were treated like criminals, and the quality of life for law-abiding blacks in poor neighborhoods was an afterthought?
Mr. Bloomberg’s about-face is earning him ridicule from progressives and eye rolls from moderates. One thing it won’t earn him is very many black votes.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal