Okay, first your thoughts: the poll is only for out-of-towners who don’t visit New York City, please. My 2¢ follows.
Thirty, thirty-five years ago, New York City was a scary place: crime had jumped to third-world standards (you had a 1.1% chance of being a victim of a violent crime each year). The Bug comic doesn’t begin to express the fear and lack of hope many New Yorkers felt.
(Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City is a well-written and highly readable book about the time though, as the title suggests, author Jonathan Mahler tries to do too much, using the out-of-control New York Yankees team as a metaphor for New York City. Or maybe using New York City as a metaphor for the out-of-control New York Yankees team. Or something.)
But that was then.
Eventually the City changed from a lawless jungle to someplace I’d allow my teenagers to wander without adult supervision, and that change is best illustrated by the Bernhard Goetz saga.
Goetz was on a New York City subway in December of 1984, when he was approached by four young men carrying makeshift weapons, who “asked” him for money. Subways being the fear equivalent of the proverbial “dark alley” in 1984, neither Goetz nor any of the frightened passengers around him doubted that this was a mugging. Goetz responded by pulling out a gun and shooting the four. One of them, 19-year-old Darrell Cabey, was left paralyzed. The other three weren’t seriously wounded.
The tabloids quickly dubbed Goetz the “subway vigilante” and while not everybody approved of him opening fire in a crowded subway, everybody could understand.
He was eventually convicted of one count of illegal firearms possession, and served a little over half a year in jail (New York City’s gun laws made this more-or-less mandatory).
Cabey’s lawyers filed a civil suit.
It’s fairly safe to guess that Goetz would have been been found not guilty in a civil trial in 1984; but the wheels of justice turn slowly, and the case didn’t come to court until 1996.
The City was a different place in 1996, and it was difficult to remember what it was like more than a decade earlier. Goetz had ridden in a dirty train in which most passengers wished desperately to be somewhere else. In 1996, jurors rode to the courthouse in subways which, while likely crowded, felt no more threatening than the overcrowded tram that takes them into Disney World.
(And in fact today, you’re more likely to see and interact with a major Disney character in Manhattan’s Times Square [click thumbnail, left] than on Disney’s Main Street; last week, no joke, I almost got knocked down by Mickey Mouse, who was for some reason rushing down Seventh Avenue. But I digress.)
Cabey’s attorneys painted Goetz as a “racist aggressor” and, absent any real understanding of the Number 2 Express line in December of 1984, the jury awarded Cabey $43 million.
© 2012 by Bill Bickel unless otherwise noted.
I’m late for work, so I will be brief… Yes.
I had to vote yes too. It’s probably unfair — I have seen plenty of positive representations of New York City lately — but what I remember are the TV shows, movies and horror stories from the 80′s that I grew up on. Without experiencing the city firsthand, that impression probably won’t go away.
That’s one hell of an off-model Minnie Mouse.
Maybe it’s because I live in a large city (Chicago) or maybe it’s just because crime-filled tv shows about NYC were replaced with shows like Mad About You, but I don’t think of NYC as being violent at all. I’d be far more worried in a rural environment, but that’s mostly because of animals.
I didn’t feel that way about New York in general, but I was a little hesitant about the subway and I’ve been in subways before, so I had a particular image of the New York subway. Not that I thought I would be mugged or something but that I would be pick-pocketed in a crowded car or something. But I tend to have that paranoia in most crowded places, not just New York. Anyway, I felt very safe in New York and had no qualms about walking around by myself at any time of day or night.
I don’t, personally, having grown up in New England and having visited NYC a number of times. Living in the Midwest (and previously in the South), though, I know quite a few people who do think that way. However, it’s not specifically a NYC thing; they see other large cities (Detroit, Baltimore, DC, etc.) as crime-ridden hell holes as well.
A guy in an Elmo costume may not be the best example of NYC’s strong points:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBe62Z3Htko
I visited NY in the 90′s and rode the subway without any fear. A more recent visit with my wife was a bit more anxious, maybe because her anxiety was transmitted to me, or because we brought kids.
Nah, these days it’s not the muggers you need to worry about. Not that the outside impression of the ambience has changed, you understand, but from the repeated news stories, occurring so regularly that they might be triggered by clockwork, you’re much more likely to be entrapped, harassed, injured, or killed by the police. What the heck are you New Yorkers thinking?
(And unlike the muggers, your assailant from the police is absolutely guaranteed to never face justice.)
Ok… I’m home now. To expand on my comment above –
I know New York has changed vastly from what it used to be, and I would probably feel safe riding the subway now, but I’m 50 yrs old, and there are FAR more years of “New York is a violent cesspool of humanity” ingrained into me than there is “New York has changed and is relatively safe now”. I had to say Yes, because that is still my view of NYC, even in 2012.
Law & Order and its children showed people getting murdered in New York every week (and I think SVU is still on, as is CSI:NY). It’s going to take a lot more to change the perception of the general public.
I think most people outside of New York and Chicago think every big city is dangerous.
I was told in high school that Oklahoma City (where I live) has more murders per capita than NYC. It’s probably still true (it’s been a little over ten years since I heard the statistic), so no, I don’t really have any impression of NYC as a particularly dangerous place in that sense.
However, due to the sheer density of the NYC population, there’s no doubt in my mind that there is a lot of crime there in absolute numbers. You can’t have eight million people in one city (19 if you count the whole metro area) and expect them all to be decent people. It’s just unlikely to affect any one particular individual.
So my answer is yes and no. Are muggings likely in NYC? Sure. Are you likely to get mugged? Probably not much more than anywhere else.
I would say that my opinion (Never having been closer than 1000 miles, not counting how many times NYC has been on my TV screen in my living room, of course!) is that there are PARTS of NYC that are more dangerous than, say, where I live now. There are PARTS of almost any place you can characterize that are dangerous.
In my case, and I think generally for most people, anxiety would flow from not knowing which parts are safer and which are not, and a fear of finding myself in one of the latter by accident. I had heard that some navigation systems have been created that take crime statistics into account in calculating navigation information.