October 2, 2006
IS NYC CRIME ACTUALLY DOWN?
Personal anecdotal experiences taken as such, one has to wonder if crime in NYC is actually still down. From my observations, it seems like the city is getting a little raggedy at the seams. I was walking along 22nd St. at a late hour this weekend after the Oyster Festival, a totally botched attempt to meet friends for a b-day party, and catching up with some friends, when I ran into a large group of people, who could generously be described as a mob on Broadway at the southern end of the Flatiron Building on Broadway.
It was all a bit chaotic, but what I saw was a larger-scale version of what I witnessed last week on a subway platform [see SCARY, 9/18/06]. A young hispanic man was being chased across 22nd St. by a mob of dozens (about 100) African-American men shouting angrily.
I stopped a couple walking quickly down 22nd away from the melee.
"What the hell is going on?"
The woman answered "I don't know, but that guy is in big trouble and we're getting out of here."
The crowd was looking pretty volatile, so I tucked into a phone booth and called my friend K., suggesting that she may want to call our acquaintance B. who's a cop in the 17th Precinct, figuring that a direct call might be quicker than routing it through a dispatcher and I knew he was on duty. It's not his precinct, so she was reluctant to call him. Then I heard another passerby on the phone with 911 and figured everything that was going to be done was going to get done.
In retrospect, it's not a good idea to walk through a volatile mob. Fortunately, I possess an innate level of innocuousness and ability to avoid eye contact. Also, I chose a path straight down the middle of the street, ignoring the traffic light and walking through two lanes of cars that were blocking the entire intersection by dozens of milling angry young men. When I got to an inadvisable impasse that I didn't feel like crowding through, I just stepped on the bumper, hood, roof, and then trunk of of a taxi before sliding off the car and heading down the steps to the subway station. I was either remarkably unremarkable or people just assumed I was too fucking insane to deal with.
Mayor Bloomberg and the city continue to crow about dropping crime numbers, but this is the second time in about as many weeks that I've eye-witnessed a "Warriors"-type incident of out-of-control violence. In addition, the reason that I knew the cop B. was on duty is that he headed into K.'s bar earlier in the evening to search for a suspect in what appeared to be an assault. Things appear to be getting a little unhinged.
Tagged:Posted by Lexiphane at October 2, 2006 12:07 PM
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