After working at home for the day, since our office is being moved and our computers are down, I went down to Times Square to meet N. She wanted to go see 10 Things I Hate About You, a teenage version of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. I sort of like to see these teen movies, just so I can keep pace with the pulse of today's youth. Don't want to be an old fogey before my time. I need to know what all this Letters to Cleo business is all about. "What-EVER..."
Times Square, as you all know, has been cleaned up. It's good, I suppose, that it's all clenaed up, but without further ado, here are...
I suppose there are some good things too. It is "cleaner" but it seems like it's been cleaned of its character. What bothers me is that people somehow judge all of New York on that one area. Last year, a bussiness acquaintance remarked how "Mayor Giuliani has made it possible for me to come to New York and not get mugged."
This guy was from Oregon. He'd only been to New York a few times before. So I had to batter him.
"Have you been mugged in New York before?"
"No."
"Do you know anyone who was mugged in New York?"
"No."
The Mayor had pulled off a public relations coup. People visit New York, but sometimes only stay within a few square blocks. Stay at the Paramount, go to the theatre, and then take a safe double-decker tour of Manhattan.
But rapes are up. The initial stopping of Amadou Diallo was to see if he fit the profile of a rapist whose struck 51 times in The Bronx. The police, not in uniform, scared the heck out of this unarmed street vendor from Guinea, and shot at him 41 times, striking him 19 times.
Meanwhile, while waiting for N, happy tourists take photos with seemingly friendly police. What they don't see, or don't want to see, is that these same cops are not required to live in New York City. They are only required to have two years of college or only military experience. They have inadequate training when it comes to either weaponry or sensitivity to non-whites. They used racial profiling to stop 45,000 citizens last year and only 9500 of them were arrested. Black and hispanics mainly. The police are here to "serve and protect" but it's a sick fraternity that inflicted bodily harm on Abner Louima, sodomizing him with a toilet plunger. It's very frightening, that da Mayor and Police Commissioner Safir cannot find a way to do good policework without trampling our civil liberties.
So the mayor has succeeded in ridding Times Square of "undesirables" and tawdriness--by spreading it all over the city indiscriminately, and made Times Square "safe for families." But those families are not New Yorkers. Their safe suburbanites spreading word about hos wonderful New York is, based solely on their Times Square experience.
New York is safer overall. A lot of that actually started with the efforts of the previous mayor, but Mayor Giuliani won't tell you that. Crime in the country has dropped overall for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that there has been a drop in the demographic that perpetrates a lot of crime: Men in their teens and early twenties. So it's a great time to be a police commish.
So come to New York, please do, but don't just stay in a ten-block area and think you've seen the whole story. Go over to Ninth Avenue for an affordable meal. Walk around Brooklyn Heights. Go to a restaurant that's not part of a chain. See the whole picture.
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