In the late 1970s and on into the 1980s, midtown Manhattan, primarily around Times Square, was a fetid sump of hustlers, prostitutes, pimps, porn shops and peep shows, panhandlers, three-card Monte card sharks, squeegee kids, graffiti artists, scammers, drunks, addicts, illegal street vendors hawking fake or stolen merchandise, dirt, trash, broken glass. And punks. And gangs.
Downtown New York, in a phrase, had become nearly uninhabitable. If you stopped in at Eddie Condon’s jazz club on West 54th Street, just off 7th Avenue, or Jimmy Ryan’s next door and stayed until 3 AM, or maybe longer some mornings, a legendary doorman named Gilbert Pinkus – who always appeared out of nowhere, it seemed, in front of both clubs – would stop you on your way out and say “I’ll have a cab for you in a moment, Sir.” If you suggested well, no, the hotel is only four blocks away, Pinkus would persist: “It’s not safe, Sir, and the cab will be here right away.”
It always was, and even with a meagre four block fare, the cabbies had no problem because they’d just circle back to West 54th, and wait for Pinkus to corral some more club patrons. Then maybe there’d be a long trip down to south Manhattan, or on a really good morning, over to Jersey.
You dared not walk anywhere. But beginnning in 1993, newly-elected Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the Police Commissioner at the time, Bill Bratton, took Manhattan by the scruff of its grimy neck, and cleaned it up. They started with the “Broken Glass” approach, which held that if smashed windows all over New York were replaced almost immediately, and then if necessary repaired again and again, the opening message to the lowlifes would be you”re not going to go around messing with this town any more. Then they went after the graffiti artists, and the squeegee kids, the panhandlers, the vendors, and all the rest of them. They moved the porn business out of midtown to a warehouse district at the far end of the Bronx.
And then, with a considerable measure of financial support from the U.S. government, Giuliani and Bratton got serious about policing. By the close of the 1990s, there were 7,000 additional cops on the streets of New York, while at the same time Bratton rewrote the manual for police strategies, tactics, and above all, the code of conduct. It was, in the view of University of California sociologist Frank Zimring, “the most focused form of policing in history,” and it put a cop on just about every corner in the city.
The result was a reduction of 57% in overall New York crime, a 65% decline in murders, and for five straight years, an FBI ranking as the safest large city in the United States.
It still is, which brings us to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, in 2009. You can’t walk half a block downtown without being hassled by a stoned or drunk panhandler. There’s a 24-hour stroll flanking the East Village, there’s open drug dealing all over the downtown core and along 17th Avenue, the squeegee kids are on the corners, and the recently-closed Cecil Hotel was so menacing even the cops themselves said undercover work in the bar was very dangerous. Calgary has more than its ration of graffiti, and you’re likely to step on foul, used syringes in just about any downtown park or back alley. But beyond all else, there are two gangs with guns, and not the slightest hesitation about using them.
A 24-year-old Brazilian exchange student named Jose Neto can tell you all about the guns. He was blinded last September by a goon’s stray bullet which caught him on the side of the head when all he was doing was walking through the downtown with his girlfriend. Keni S’ua would be another man who could talk about guns, but he can’t because he was killed on New Year’s Day outside a strip mall on Macleod Trail. S’ua was an innocent witness to what’s carefully described as “a gang-related killing” inside a restaurant, where all he was doing was having lunch. But because he saw what happened, the shooters “gang related” murdered him, too, as he stepped out the door.
Without putting too fine a point on it, Police Chief Rick Hanson is in some respects the Bill Bratton of Calgary, and Dave Bronconnier the Rudy Giuliani. In the 13 months since he became chief, Hanson has pointedly insisted something has to be done about the justice system, which bails known gangsters back to the streets a couple of hours after the cops run them in. He needs 400 additional officers for a city whose police-to-population ratio is the worst in the country. He’s raised the alarm for months about armoured vehicles, and drugs, and guns.
Bronconnier is onside, and has been pushing the Alberta government to wake up and smell the stench of gang crime. But Premier Ed Stelmach, fully clothed in his robes of governance “for all Albertans,” has responded with blurred and indecisive musings about his “safe communities strategy,” which is probably all right for Red Deer or Stettler, but ignores the incontrovertible evidence that downtown Calgary is manifestly unpleasant, and certainly not safe. Not any more.
And besides, says Stelmach, the criminal justice system is a federal government responsibility. The obvious questions would therefore be why hasn’t he been pounding on the Justice Department doors in Ottawa? And in particular, why hasn’t he been going after the Senate, whose Liberal majority has devoted its entire recent life to blocking a Conservative government crime bill?
Stelmach doesn’t get it, is why. The Premier glides from city to city, town to town, country fair to country rodeo in a chauffeured limousine or government aircraft, occupies the gilded cage (with apologies to Judy LaMarsh) otherwise known as the Alberta Legislature, and never sets foot in downtown Calgary, or Edmonton for that matter, without a brigade of handlers and security men to keep the dregs at a distance.
No such cocoon for the rest of us, Mr. Premier. We’re fed up to the teeth with what’s happening to downtown Calgary, but notwithstanding your Three Blind Mice approach to gang warfare thus far, you will presumably permit a suggestion.
Acquaint yourself, Sir, with the outstanding recent example of North American urban policing, sitting right before your eyes.
It’s called New York City. You can look it up.
