Back in the bad old days of 1975, the PBA and other public-sector unions battling dead-broke Mayor Abe Beame, who was threatening to lay off more than 10,000 cops, printed a flyer with a hooded skeleton.
“Welcome To Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York” told tourists: Stay off the streets after 6, never take the subways and always remain in midtown Manhattan.
They followed that with two sequels aimed at natives, which off-duty cops handed out in neighborhoods where crime was spiking: “If You Haven’t Been Mugged Yet. . .” and “Who’s Next?”
The city ended 1975 with 1,645 murders and 177,032 burglaries, two crimes that, along with rape, The New York Times flatly declared “the police are virtually powerless to prevent.” That news article went on to assert that having so many cops made crime seem worse by making it too easy for citizens to report offenses, and gave officers an incentive to churn “garbage arrests” to justify their existence.
That was fear city, back when there was a lot to fear. Now, not so much.
We ended 2014 with 332 murders and 16,734 burglaries. Rape numbers, harder to compare, have also plummeted.
It turned out cops could do something about crime, thanks largely to the CompStat system Bill Bratton introduced here back in 1994. By putting cops on the dots, Deputy Commissioner Jack Maple’s crime map epitomized the principle that black lives matter. It was, as former Newser Michael Daly put it, a system that compelled cops “to treat crime in the city’s poorer neighborhoods as seriously as (they) would crime in a rich neighborhood.”
Maple’s rule: “Treat every crime as if the victim were your mother.”
Right now, that’s not the case. We’re in the third week of a police revolt, as cops have stopped doing much of the job, with tickets, summons and arrests plummeting and response times likely rising.
The same officers infuriated at de Blasio’s open sympathy for what this paper’s editorial page memorably deemed “anti-police protesters, many of whom brand cops as killers of minorities by simple-mindedly insisting, in effect, that every police-involved death is a wrongful homicide” are helping make the case that far too much policework is really churn work.
Leaving aside the particulars of each situation, no one seriously disputes that sending cops where the crime is means that young people there are far more likely to have charged encounters with the police, each one with some chance of serious negative consequences.
And 20 years of falling crime and aggressive policing means that police violence — justified or otherwise — now appears to be a much larger share of all violence.
When the “black lives matter” slogan emerged after Ferguson, cops shot back, so to speak, that blue lives matter, too — which may have missed the point but resonated after officers Ramos and Liu were assassinated last month.
That let PBA boss Pat Lynch — who’d already been using the prospect of dead cops to bash de Blasio — and other union leaders push even harder to reclaim the department’s previous status as beyond significant reproach or reform.
It’s a striking sort of identity-politics grievance: Cops of all colors are trying to win back the stature black voters claimed by effectively electing de Blasio mayor in the Democratic primary, as though this were a zero-sum game. It’s not, but the split has held: De Blasio finished his first year in an office with an approval rating 40 points higher among black voters than white ones.
If anyone should understand the fears of black families, it’s cops, and vice versa. Even as the city keeps getting safer — including over de Blasio’s first year — the fear of sudden violence has persisted.
That’s why Eric Garner’s death, however anomalous, resonated so powerfully. And why many decent cops look at Daniel Pantaleo and fear de Blasio will hang them out to dry if a suspect has a heart attack mid-arrest.
Finally, some cops are afraid of their brothers and sisters in blue. One union leader, while denying any role in it, called the police strike “contagious.” If enough officers aren’t doing work and supervisors let that happen, it takes real guts to keep working — just like it does to stand one way when everyone else wearing the same uniform turns around to show the mayor their backs.
With union leaders denying any role, cops, like the occupiers of 2011, are presenting a leaderless front. And the same question asked then applies now: “What do they want?” (De Blasio, for his part, has said he isn’t going to apologize for the tensions but wants to move past them. And he’s taken pains not to call the cop mutiny by its name.)
It’s time for cops to get back to work, and all of us to find a better way forward, one where the city stays safe even as it gets fairer.
Or we can keep holding our breath and waiting to see who’s next to fall in fear city.
hsiegel@nydailynews.com
