How Come Murder Has Returned To New York?
Hey! What
happened? New York City was supposed to be a very safe place. But yesterday the Mayor and his Chief of
Police announced
that homicides in the city during January and February had jumped by almost 30
percent over the same months in 2017, and if this murder activity continues at
the current pace, the Big Apple will once again be known as a city where the
streets aren’t so safe.
What caught my eye about this situation, however, was
the geography of where those murders took place. Most of them were in neighborhoods that have
always been centers of poverty an violence, places like Upper Manhattan, Bed-Stuy
(Do or Die) and Brownsville in Brooklyn and Jamaica in Queens. But one other
neighborhood jumped out at me, which was a neighborhood known as Parkchester
which is in the northeast corner of The Bronx.
I attended high school in Manhattan from 1958 to 1962,
and I was a student at one of those specialized schools – High School of Music
and Art – which drew kids from throughout the city. Several of my friends lived
in Parkchester and I often visited them in their homes. I thought that
Parkchester was a public housing project (it certainly looked like one) but in
fact it was a private apartment development built in 1939-40 by Metropolitan
Life. It was also racially segregated when it first opened its doors, which I
guess is the reason why I never recall seeing a person of color when I walked
to the apartment of one of my high school chums.
According to the 2010 census, Parkchester’s population is now
at least 75% Hispanic and Black. And given the spike in murders, I suspect that
the demographics of the community have steadily gone downhill. What this means is that possibly the
geography of what we refer to as ‘underserved’ urban neighborhoods is changing
in New York or in some areas getting worse.
What’s DeBlasio’s plans for keeping violence under
control? The 43rd precinct in
Parkchester will get some more men, there will be a greater presence of the
CeaseFire street monitors to intervene in gang disputes and here’s the one I really
like, increased efforts to get guns out of the hands of domestic
abusers. – that’s a direct quote.
Maybe these efforts
will make a difference, maybe they won’t. But if the Parkchester complex is beginning
to attract the kinds of folks who put a dent into someone’s head with a baseball bat or a hole
in their head with a gun, we may be looking at a more general problem, namely,
the degree to which violent crime seems to go up as socio-economic conditions
in a neighborhood go down.
Next week I’m going to review a new book, An American Summer by Alex Kotlowitz,
which is a series of first-person narratives from residents of Chicago’s most violent
neighborhoods, in which these folks talk in graphic and chilling terms about
the violence they see all around them which is often violence caused by guns.
This book is a clear departure from most of the social science that explores
urban violence because it doesn’t attempt to present a solution to the problem,
it simply gives the reader feeling of what
life inn these brutal streets is all about.
Over the last several years, there have been any number
of projects mounted by organizations trying to reduce gun violence in which the
survivors of shootings tell what happened to a family member who was a victim.
You can listen to a collection of these stories collected by
our friends at The Trace here.
The news out of Parkchester, however, is a reminder that you just can’t reduce something as complicated as violence, particularly gun violence, to the usual data on income, housing, economic opportunity, all the issues which are always thrown up to explain why some people feel the need to grab a gun and let it rip. We really have no idea why the streets around Parkchester have become unsafe, and I’m not sure we even know how to figure it out.
