Curbing Crime

Twelve years ago, when the crime rate in the city was at its highest, both incidents would have merited a mere column or two in the national press. In 1995, they were given both precedence and prominence. Paradoxically, it was not so much the chilling nature of these crimes as the relative infrequency of such incidents in recent times that propelled them to the headlines.

For the past five years, crime has been steadily on the decline, not only in New York but all over the US. According to the nationwide report for 1995 released by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) last week, the overall crime rate has dropped to its lowest level since 1989. Preliminary New York City Police Department (NYPD) statistics registered a drop of nearly 30 per cent in the murder rate in the city during the first nine months of 1995.

President Bill Clinton would like some of the credit for this. He points to the Crime Act, which will put an additional 100,000 police officials on the streets, his administration’s efforts to ban the sale of weapons and its support for the Brady Bill, which intends to introduce a waiting period for the purchase of handguns. Experts, however, give credit to the police top brass—especially New York City Police Commissioner William J. Bratton—who, they say, have adopted a more aggressive approach to their work. The NYPD has skillfully worked its way around prevailing laws by making more frequent arrests: for instance, of suspected drug-dealers. The charges now include loitering, consuming alcohol in public and other relatively frivolous lawbreaking activities which in the past were tolerated to a greater extent.

The NYPD’s efforts came in tandem with another interesting anti-crime experiment. An unlikely alliance has been forged between police officers, residents, academicians, corporate executives and housing experts in many parts of the city to fight crime.

On a muggy summer afternoon early this year, a man wearing a leather eyepatch and blond-tinted dreadlocks entered a peeling, decrepit housing block in East New York. He stepped over empty crack vials, plastic syringes and paper bags that once contained food. Graffiti-smeared walls, damp with neglect and humidity and the pervasive stench of urine greeted him as he walked up to an apartment on the first floor. The woman who lived there opened the door a fraction, peered at him suspiciously and let him in with the utmost reluctance. Ten months later, when the man walked into the same building for the umpteenth time, the vials, syringes and putrid debris had disappeared, the hallway smelled of disinfectant and there were only faint traces of seepage and scribblings on the walls. Upstairs in the apartment, a much warmer welcome awaited him.

The man is 35-year-old Lyndrew Nesmith, a so-called tenant organiser, who is paid $24,000 annually by the East New York Urban Youth Corps and the Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation—two of New York’s 109 non-profit organisations—to persistently visit state-owned residential buildings frequented and mutilated by drug-dealers. He motivates tenants to unite and drive out the addicts and spearheads an alliance of police officers and housing workers. Besides urging tenants to collaborate with the organisations and the police, he identifies and advises street dealers to move on, pointing out that the residents are organising themselves.

But as with most other things in this country of unlimited freedom, Police Commissioner Bratton’s intensified efforts have also come in for sharp criticism. While the crime rate declined over the first six months of 1995, the Civilian Complaint Review Board—an independent body set up for the purpose of monitoring misbehaviour by the NYPD—received 4,516 complaints of police misconduct during the same period.