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The comparison of a given city's violence with NYC's violence always sort of bums me out. A lot of film makers have come from NYC's more violent places and eras, so we have this reputation, but it hasn't been a particularly violent place in over ten years. I mean, sure, when I was in junior high I carried a knife with me everywhere, but by the time I graduated high school, the only place I ever saw any action was on the subways at night. Now, it's like friggin Disneyland out there.
Harlem, the Lower East Side, the South Bronx, East New York, and Crown Heights used to be among the worst neighborhoods in the country--Slim's ladyfriend would've been write in, say, 1991--but we hired Rudi Giuliani to clean up the streets and he did it using the same philosophy of law enforcement and social control he used to bust mafia dons: We know who the badguys are, let's not worry about justice, let's just get them off the streets. He enforced a lot of "quality of life" laws, using the police to harrass and bully the communities in question into quiescence, which I think bears some resemblance to the strategy of jailing known killers on tax beefs. I had friends at the time who were arrested for drinking beer on the stoop of their own building. This sort of thing happened mainly to brown-skinned people. In Canarsie and Bay Ridge, you could still walk around smoking a joint. Terrible deal for the black youth, but it worked*.
So, anyway, my recommendation to Detroit, Baltimore, New Orleans, New Haven, Los Angeles, and all the other American cities that are way more violent and dangerous than NYC, is to quit complaining and just throw everyone in jail. It works, dammit, and Kurt Vonnegut can go fish.
*It also helps when your local economy absorbs the first slice of the dotcom boom, with its new jobs, charity investments by 25-year-old millionaires, and sudden windfall in new property, income and lifestyle tax revenues. The law-n-order folks don't like to mention that half of the equation, especially these days. |
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