Mayor Bill de Blasio canceled a graffiti eradication program that cleaned up private buildings, deliberately sending the city into its worst days of crime and misery.
Nothing sent a stronger signal in the late 1980s that New York was determined to defend itself against lawlessness than the transit system’s campaign against subway graffiti. That campaign was based on the surveillance of broken windows, a theory that recognizes that physical disorder and low-level illegality, such as graffiti, the tourniquet jump and garbage, telegraphy that social control has broken. That low-level illegality invites more disregard for behavioral standards, including serious crime.
The subway authority declared victory over graffiti vandals in 1989, even as privately funded business improvement districts increased graffiti cleanup in retail corridors in all five boroughs. Inspired by the broken windows theory, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who served Mayor David Dinkins, removed the squeegee men who threatened helpless drivers lining up for city bridges and tunnels. And with Rudolph Giuliani’s mayoralty in 1994, maintaining law and order entered the city’s governing philosophy.
This was followed by the largest drop in crime in any major city in the country, nearly 80 percent in three decades. The recently restored storefronts and avenues, free of aggressive beggars, invited an avalanche of tourists and new residents.
De Blasio paid attention to the theory of broken windows during his first term in the City Hall. But an appreciation of public order does not naturally come to a “progressive”. Now he has rewritten.
Attitudes towards graffiti are one of the biggest divisions between the conservative and progressive mentality. For a conservative, graffiti is blatantly abhorrent, a devastating plague of the spirit in the public realm, and a theft of property by people who have accomplished next to nothing and to come their mediocrity by destroying what others have built through hard work and deferred gratification. .
It is a 24-hour reminder that, perhaps in the recent past, non-socialized youth broke the law where they now are and may be in the neighborhood to re-commit crimes.
For a progressive, by contrast, graffiti is a “political statement,” as The New York Times recently put it, a valiant attack on stunning bourgeois values. Represents the urban arena and resistance to corporate hegemony. The owner of the property whose building has been inadvertently appropriated is not an entity, the tagger is the vibrant anti-capitalist soul of the city.
The official reason for the termination of the graffiti removal program, which allowed building owners and residents to report the graffiti to 311 and receive assistance from the city to remove it, was the financial shortage of the New York coronavirus.
That justification is not convincing. The administration found the resources in June to pay city workers to paint massive Black Lives Matter logos on the road in front of the Trump Tower and on Harlem and Brooklyn Avenues, in the process that puts the government imprimatur on a political point of view; Blasio’s own, in the taxpayer’s currency, joined the BLM painting on Fifth Avenue to make sure President Trump understood the taunt against him.
And when two women scattered black paint on those BLM logos to protest hatred against the police, the Blasio administration found more resources to arrest them and charge them with criminal mischief, vandalism of graffiti, no less, and to repaint the BLM slogans.
Meanwhile, the city tolerates many other acts of chaos, with Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance even refusing to prosecute those arrested on charges of illegal assembly and disorderly conduct (to “minimize unnecessary interactions with the justice system. criminal “AND” reduce racial disparities “).
The graffiti eradication program costs $ 3 million annually, not even a rounding error in the city’s $ 88 billion budget. The city spends multiple of that on overtly anti-white training at the Department of Education and tireless nonprofit organizations dedicated to political advocacy. Cutting the graffiti program was not a fiscal necessity, it was a policy choice.
The decision to bow to vandals will accelerate the city’s slide back to being ungovernable, a slide terribly exemplified by ongoing violence against police officers. The completion of the graffiti cleanup shows that the understanding of what made the city governable was never universally shared.
Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor at City Journal, from which this column was adapted.
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