The Worm Begins To Turn For The Big Apple?

Brooklyn Love, one of my inveterate correspondents/commenters, brings up a point I'd been meaning to make myself for a few weeks now, predicting that the long, dramatic decline in crime that has made New York City the safest big city in America is about to come to an end.

In point of fact, it's already happening: crime rates, especially for robbery and murder, are up significantly so far in 2008, the first time that's happened in 15 years. It's probably no coincidence that the police force has lost thousands of officers and is unable to attract sufficient numbers of new recruits, not least because of, as Brooklyn Love points out, the ludicrous and insulting 25k starting pay being offered, a figure which prospective police officers can easily double by moving to another city.

Opponents of zero tolerance policing may disagree with me, of course, but I regularly see signs that standards are slipping back toward those of the bad old days. No, it's nothing like the South African-style chaos which appears to be overtaking provincial cities like Oakland or San Francisco; by comparison, New York City still seems eminently safe and civilized. But increasingly I'm seeing people openly drinking on the subway - not even bothering with the traditional brown bag - a phenomenon which had all but disappeared since the Giuliani era.

A small thing in itself, granted, but the underlying message is that people no longer expect the subways to be patrolled by police, and when I stopped to think about it, I realized it had been months since I'd seen an officer on a train, whereas it used to be a regular occurrence. Yes, we're still a long way from the 1980s, when the Warriors-style graffiti that covered every subway car sent the message that nobody cares and anything goes, but it can still be the beginning of a slippery slope.

One of the biggest problems in policing New York has long been the unhappy fact that vigorous enforcement of the law almost inevitably seems to impact disproportionately on certain groups, most notably in the African-American community. That the effects of this are not entirely negative - i.e., for every Sean Bell tragedy, there are thousands of African-Americans able to walk the streets safely in what were once no-go neighborhoods - seems lost on race-obsessed cop haters like Al Sharpton or the Voice's Sean Gardiner and Nat Hentoff. But it's an unfortunate reality that in New York, as in nearly every large urban area, a large majority of the kind of street crimes that most threaten public safety and security are committed by young African-American and Latino men. For the police to focus their crime prevention efforts elsewhere in some misguided feelgood public relations exercise would be both counterintuitive and counterproductive.

One of the biggest advances of the Giuliani-Bloomberg era has been the departure from the PC tokenism and introduction of realism into police practices, which makes it all the more bewildering that Mayor Mike would retreat into wishful thinking and mealy-mouthed pol-speak when it comes to the current personnel crisis on the NYPD. The mayor is massively successful and experienced businessman; he couldn't possibly fail to be aware that you can't maintain an effective police force on the cheap, and that even if the city is in financial difficulties (which it most manifestly is not; the new budget projects a $4 billion surplus), public safety is the last place to be cutting corners.

Could it be that Bloomberg, his presidential ambitions now extinguished, is also losing interest in the day-to-day running of New York City? One hopes not, but instead of coming up with concrete proposals to beef up police numbers, the mayor has confined himself to sniping at the PBA, contending it's "their fault" for insisting on an inequitable labor contract. Not the kind of leadership I'd like to expect of Bloomberg, but maybe Brooklyn Love was right all along and the mayor has thus far been the beneficiary of little more than "luck and timing." For all of our sakes, though, I hope not.

Drive-By Sydney

It was a rare day in Sydney when I didn't stop by for a coffee at Gloria Jean's on Oxford Street. Gloria Jean's is a nationwide chain in Australia, sort of like the homegrown alternative to Starbucks (only with better and cheaper coffee and a more pleasant ambiance and color scheme), but the branch on Oxford Street, located near the ass end of the gay ghetto, was one of a kind. It stayed open late, sometimes even all night during special occasions, and the later it got, the more, er, colorful the crowd got.

Sometimes a little too colorful, especially once the club next door opened its doors for the evening. It attracted a rather macho, almost thuggish element, and the patrons would occupy the sidewalk in such a peremptory and confrontational manner that it sometimes made more sense to walk out into the street to get around them. Several points along Oxford Street have seen similar developments, to the point where many of the street's traditional gay patrons no longer like to come up there on weekend nights.

It's not just the sidewalks, either; Oxford Street itself is lined with hoons (what the English might call boy racers, what the Americans might call, I don't know, assholes with muscles cars) revving their engines and squealing their tires in a testosterone-fueled cacophony of bad vibes. The police do nothing; in fact they're seldom even seen along the strip. Australia seems to have adopted the laissez-faire policing tactics that produced so much misery in New York during the 1970s and 80s, and which are now responsible for soaring crime rates in London.

And so it was probably only a matter of time before I'd be scanning the Sydney Morning-Herald, spot a photo of my old hangout, only to see that it accompanied a story of a drive-by shooting that injured three people. As much as I miss the fabulous weather, scenery, beaches, food and atmosphere of Sydney, I can do without the steadily increasing air of menace that seemed to be settling over its streets. Indeed, I feel considerably safer here in New York, and who could have imagined things would ever come to that?

More Notes From My Old Backyard

When I think of the punk years, particularly 1977, I always think of one particular spot, just at the point where the elevated Westway diverges from Harrow Road and pursues the line of the Hammersmith and City tube tracks to Westbourne Park Station. From the end of 1976, one of the stanchions holding up the Westway was emblazoned with large graffiti which said simply, “THE CLASH.” When first sprayed the graffiti laid a psychic boundary marker for the group – This was their manor, this was how they saw London.

Jon Savage – Punk London

I've already had my say on the revolutionary mythology surrounding the Clash, created in equal parts by the band itself and by starry-eyed romanticists so eager to relive the 1960s that they were willing to glide over a whole raft of inconvenient facts. Now here comes Bernie Rhodes, the Clash's manager during much of their career, weighing in with his opinion: "They've turned Joe [Strummer] into a hippie because they wanted another John Lennon."

That nugget was massively overshadowed, however, by his opining loudly to a crowd of underground media luvvies and punk exhumers, that "If you want to sort out crime in London, sort out the niggers." Not the sort of thing you'd expect to hear in polite company these days, let alone in a room full of Strummerian acolytes, and Rhodes was quickly bundled off stage, the balance of his remarks drowned out by a Clash film clip (look here for another account).

Was Rhodes simply off his face and having a Mel Gibson moment? Possibly. Right thinkers around town were quick to denounce his remarks as racist, and you can't deny that his fit that bill. But replace the N-word with "blacks" or "Afro-Caribbeans" and you wouldn't be saying anything that many Londoners - some of them black themselves - haven't been saying for some time. It's a matter of public record that young black men commit a wildly disproportionate amount of London's crime.

Pointing that out, however, is rather different from advising that "the niggers" be "sorted out." In addition to the obvious offensiveness of the language, it makes no attempt to differentiate between the masses of black people who live ordinary, decent lives and the significant minority of black people who are responsible for a lot of crime. What makes things all the more curious is that Rhodes also managed the 2 Tone ska band, The Specials, who championed black music and had two black members. Not exactly the CV of a racist, but maybe his views have changed since then.

Whatever the reasons for Rhodes' impolitic outburst, I doubt he'll be getting a chance to explain himself; something tells me dinner and speaking engagements will be thin on the ground for a long time to come. And without suggesting that Rhodes' views in any way reflect the thinking of the Clash members themselves, it might be worth bearing in mind that this is the man who played a large role in creating and orchestrating the image they displayed to the world.

"Phil Spector Has A History Of Heinous Crimes"

So says the caption on Friday's New York Post cartoon, which shows a prosecutor brandishing a Yoko Ono record and demanding, "Did you or did you not produce this album?"