NOW it begins. The Post’s Murray Weiss is reporting a 24 percent jump in New York City shootings, despite the much-noted plunge in criminal activity after the World Trade Center attacks. This troubling news comes in the wake of a story that seems right out the recent history books – with a 5-year-old boy dead in The Bronx from drug-dealer crossfire.
Add in reports from homeless shelters of record numbers of overnight visitors – just below 30,000 – and a massive onrush of retirements in the police department’s senior ranks, and the nature of the crisis afflicting New York becomes clear.
Little boys killed by drug gunfire. The crime rate rising. An economy in recession. Homeless families on the streets. Cops looking for ways to get off the job.
OK, hands up if you want to go back to New York City, circa 1991.
Anybody?
Of course, we have such a long way to go before we are in that kind of trouble. The crime rate is rising from historic lows, which means even the kind of jump that Weiss describes leaves us in a state of urban peace nobody even imagined 10 years ago.
And unlike the recession of the early 1990s, the current crisis is at least bringing extra dollars into New York in the form of federal cleanup aid and, eventually, massive insurance payouts.
Still, what’s frightening are the intangibles.
The decayed smell that lingers over lower Manhattan, even as the 24/7 effort at Ground Zero continues well into its third month, may come to seem a symbol of a decaying city. We’re getting hints that the civil order established under Rudy Giuliani may be undergoing an unwelcome disruption just as the mayor and his police commissioner are leaving office.
They’re just hints, mind you – points of data on an enormous sheet of graph paper. But we need to think about such data points the way the NYPD learned to do when the COMPSTAT system was introduced.
Using COMPSTAT, the police department came to understand that it was possible to quell a crime wave as it was gathering, before it had a chance to coalesce.
We must look at these data points as the first indices of a breakdown in civil order. So too must incoming Mayor Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Ray Kelly.
It’s easy to say what they must prevent. It’s far more difficult to see what tools they’ll have to do so.
For civil order to remain intact, the the city’s authorities must make sure that the visible signs of that breakdown are not permitted to manifest themselves.
That means squeegee men cannot be allowed to reappear at the entrances and exits to the bridges and tunnels. It means aggressive panhandlers must be arrested and removed from the streets. It means busts for quality-of-life offenses like turnstile jumping must take place in order to roust out crooks in hiding.
But here’s the painful conundrum: How can we expect the NYPD to do all this when we also need it to provide round-the-clock security and vigilance against a new terrorist attack?
Will the cost of that vigilance – the cost of the war – come in the form of a new threat from criminals who know that cops are otherwise engaged?
For a moment after Sept. 11, it seemed as though the criminal element in New York City was experiencing a weird spasm of patriotism and citizenship by staying home and staying quiet. It was naive to expect continuing sacrifice from these hellraisers and parasites.
And it’s naive to think we can pile another major task on the backs of local law enforcement and expect the same level of brilliant service we’ve gotten in the past decade.
Woe is us.
E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com
