‘Mayor Bill de Blasio has cancelled a graffiti-eradication program targeted at cleaning private buildings.’
Heather Mac Donald writing for City Journal, July 23:
Mayor Bill de Blasio has cancelled a graffiti-eradication program targeted at cleaning private buildings. He is thus deliberately sending New York City back to its worst days of crime and squalor. . . .
Ironically, the city is a lot safer for graffiti vandals today than it was in the 1980s, in part thanks to policies that got rid of the disorder that graffiti represents. Back in the eighties, a tagger in the wrong neighborhood could be killed, a veteran vandal told the New York Times. Today’s taggers can deface property without getting shot—but they, accommodated by the mayor, are working to undermine the climate of order that undergirds their security.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal, and the author of the bestselling War on Cops and The Diversity Delusion. This piece was adapted from City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal