Crime Is Down, But Far From Out.

Those of you who had reason to pass through New York City in the dark, going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket days of the late 1970s and early `80s: Remember the signs city residents used to post in their cars when they parked on the street? They read "No Radio." And sure enough, if you peered in at the dashboard you'd see a gaping hole instead of buttons and dials.

This represented a very frank declaration--good liberals pre-emptively telling thieves, "I surrender." New Yorkers were basically conceding the streets to the pirates, and were advertising that their radios (and all other items of even minor value) had already been stripped out of their private vehicles--either by earlier robbers, or by fully intimidated owners who'd decided to ride in silence rather than risk having their windows bashed in by one of the criminals then vacuuming the streets of anything they could lay their utterly unrestrained hands on.

The implication was that crime is normal, just something you plan for and rationally work around, like rainshowers. The uglier, hidden invitation of the "No Radio" sign was for the thugs to find someone else--someone a little less jadedly savvy--for their next payday. Maybe a tourist from Kansas. ("Try next car" as the vintage cartoon below jokes blackly.) What a thoughtful compromise with the criminal class!

Accommodation of criminality of this sort was rampant in Manhattan and many other liberal precincts across America from the 1960s onward. The subways were owned by the graffiti gangsters. Dope peddlers were treated as somewhere between harmless funlovers and chic moral revolutionaries. Stick-up artists and smash-and-grabbers were said not to know better blame racism/stingy government checks/inadequate day care/whatever. Intellectuals like Norman Mailer excused even murder as a courageous political statement of downtrodden folk.

Of course, during that same era there were plenty of other American neighborhoods where the signs in vehicle windows read "This Truck Protected by Smith and Wesson" instead of"No Radio." But among elites, there was a definite trend toward capitulation and tolerance of criminality in post-1960s America.

The end result is captured well in this little vignette by William Bratton, who oversaw the police clean-up of New York starting in 1990. He describes his entry into Gotham from the airport as he arrived for his job interview:

 
   It looked like something out of a futuristic movie ... graffiti on every 
   highway wall ... burned-out cars, litter everywhere. Welcome to New York. 
   Then when you reach the first stop light you see the official greeter for 
   the city, [a panhandler in] dirty clothes with a [windshield] squeegee. ... 
   Then there were the subways. ... I can remember going through the first 
   turnstile array and watching people leap over turnstiles, crawl under them, 
   anything but pay the fare. Every platform had a cardboard city on either 
   end of it where the homeless had taken up residence. This was a city that 
   had really lost control of itself.