IT'S NOT SCARY

Don’t believe this garbage.

I moved to NYC in 1990. It was quite a different city then. In 1991, my boyfriend at the time and I found a huge loft apartment with a loft bed on West 13^th Street in the Village for $1025/month, and then two years later, after we broke up, I found a large, real two-bedroom, with a living room and a kitchen, to share with a roommate in the East Village on 6^th and A for $1300. Yeah: believe it or not, back then Manhattan was a place where normal people could live with just a small amount of help from their parents. Because, okay, no, I wasn’t paying my own rent until I graduated from NYU in 1995 and moved to Brooklyn (dropping my share of the rent from $700 to $500), but my middle-class parents could afford to pay my rent and I could afford to pay for everything else.

That isn’t the only way in which the city was different, though. It was, actually, a little dangerous. Not dangerous like the 70s or 80s, when my friends and I would go into “the city” to go vintage shopping, which to us New Jersey suburban girls only ever meant getting off the PATH at 9^th Street, walking east along 8^th Street to Broadway, the down Broadway to Canal, then turning around and going back. But in the 90s, you learned be careful — of the “dealing blocks” in the East Village, of not having your wallet anywhere that was too accessible (the outer pocket of any bag, a coat pocket or backpack on the back of a chair), of discarded needles on the sidewalk, of rats in the streets and the subways (okay, that hasn’t changed). Overall, you kept your eyes open to what was going on around you and thought about where you were walking and what you were doing before you walked or did to make sure it wasn’t stupid — skills that I’ve never regretted having, since they have taken me safely on travels ever since, to some beautiful and fun places that actually were a lot more unsafe than here but that I’m so glad I went to, and would love to visit again. I’ve had very few bad things happen to me either traveling or living in New York, aside from having a backpack stolen off the back of my chair in a tourist dive in 1995 or so (placement of said backpack that I’ve never repeated since: stupid), and that one fluky time in the 2010s when some kid punched me for no reason as I tried to pass him on the Ocean Parkway bike path and knocked me off my bike (and I was unhurt, but chances are his hand was not, since he only connected with my helmet).

And that last incident sticks in my mind, not because of the trauma of it happening, which faded very quickly, but because of the absolute shit response of the NYPD that I experienced at the time. I called 911 because I was freaked out, waited and waited, then finally flagged down a police car that had circled around me a couple of times. The two officers claimed that they had not been responding to my call, but they listened to my account and then promptly did nothing. I would never ever call the NYPD for something like that now. For one thing, anyone punching a stranger on a bike for no reason is clearly having mental health issues, and it’s become quite clear how the NYPD and the courts regularly send people, especially those with mental health issues and POC, to get hurt, raped, and killed at Rikers pre-trail, especially since Gov. Hochul rolled back bail reform and gave judges the “discretion” of assigning cash bail for things like shoplifting, knowing full well that many of our shitty judges would go back to their old, shitty ways. But also, that incident illustrated to me how cops not only don’t prevent crime, they generally prefer doing easy things to actually trying to solve crimes, like arresting so many people for jumping turnstiles under Mayor Adams — supported full-throatedly by the NYPD and the NY Post, which are practically the same institution these days — that it clogs up the court system. They claim that the same people who commit petty crimes commit real ones, even though the NYPD’s own, historically biased data only claim 45% of people arrested for fare beating were “sought for other crimes” — and we don’t know how much of those are misdemeanors, but we do know that that means 55% of those people were arrested for farebeating, instead of just issued a summons (and that includes the guy they were chasing when the NYPD shot him and three other people, including one copy and one bystander they shot in the head). Cops want to go after the easy crimes that happen right in front of them, so that they don’t have to get out of their cars and can meet quotas that they won’t call quotas because that would be illegal, but which is one way that they prove that they are needed in vast numbers that the city can’t afford.

The other way? Scaring people about crime. Unfortunately, the NYPD and our current should-be-felon-but-won’t-be-since-he’s-sold-the-city-out-to-our-actual-felon-president mayor and the NY Post aren’t the only ones who have a stake in making people think that crime is bad and New York is dangerous. Apparently, the New York Times Editorial Board got in on the act a couple of days ago in its utterly dishonest “we aren’t doing endorsements, we’re just saying don’t vote for Zohran Mamdani who is currently looking like the only person who can beat Andrew Cuomo so we are essentially supporting Andrew Cuomo” endorsement, or whatever the fuck that was. “Unfortunately, Mr. Mamdani is running on an agenda uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges,” they write, and that he “shows little concern about the disorder of the past decade.” What’s that mean exactly? They get to it when they eventually write, “Subway trips can have a chaotic or even menacing quality.” Yup: BE SCARED CRIME BAD. It’s like they’re just copying and pasting from these Cuomo-supporting superpac mailings I’ve been receiving every goddamn day, paid for mostly by 16 billionaires and a few little millionaires, including Trump supporter Bill Ackman, the biggest (also Trump-supporting) real estate moguls in NYC, and DoorDash, which has long fought minimum wage and workplace protections and calls for the company to pay into state unemployment for their employees.

These mailings also smear Zohran Mamdani as anti-semitic, which I won’t get into because Marisa Kabas does it so well here. TLDR: it’s lying, racist and opportunistic, another way of exploiting people’s fear to drive them toward Cuomo, who has demonstrated time and again how little he cares about the people of NYC — or people in general, as the Daily News puts it in this brilliant headline. It makes me especially mad since I’m Jewish, and I’m sick and tired of having shit done in my name using antisemitism as a cudgel and an excuse — for dehumanization and genocide, for illegal disappearances, abuse, imprisonment and deportation, for the destruction of Columbia University and attacks on other universities nationwide.

Here’s the thing: I’m not afraid. Sure, crime is a scary thing, but everyone with half a brain and who reads fact-based news backed up by actual data knows that it’s been going down since 2021, when the pandemic caused it to spike. Is the subway scary? As Hamilton Nolan points out in his great piece: Nope. Most New Yorkers take the subway at all hours, and our ability to do that to get anywhere in the five boroughs without a car is one of the greatest things about our city. Yes, you are likely to see unhoused people, maybe with mental health issues, on the subway and on the platform. Why? Because we keep doing the same old things we’ve been doing that don’t work: paying for more cops instead of social workers, putting money into jails instead of improving the shelter system and supportive housing, giving developers massive breaks to build “affordable” housing and then letting them slide when they don’t. Why? Yeah, because these “solutions” serve cops and rich people, particularly those real estate billionaires. Sure, anti-semitism is scary and it actually is up worldwide, but its exploitation to stoke fear by authoritarians and right wingers, many of whom are themselves anti-semitic white supremacists or evangelicals whose worldview is built around Jews returning to Israel and converting to Christianity en route to the apocalypse, who, as Wonkette so eloquently if disturbingly puts it, “love Israel and Jews like pedophiles love children.”

I’m tired of the media making the rest of the country, my mom, and even some of my friends who live here, who should be critical thinkers, worry that this city has gotten scary. IT HASN’T. Basically, I’ve lived in NYC since it was considered scary, and even then, it wasn’t that scary. In fact, the main thing that I remember about New York in the 90s? It was affordable. Not full of Starbucks and Chipotles — whose products, mind you, I don’t dislike, I just dislike that they and other chains are the among the only businesses that can afford to operate in most of Manhattan now. Walk down 8^th Street, or any other street which is half empty storefronts these days, and tell me what the biggest problem is now in New York City. Yeah, it’s not crime. It’s unaffordable real estate. And who created that problem? The people bankrolling Andrew Cuomo — and, frankly, a huge chunk of the politicians in New York State. If anyone is ruining my city, it’s them.

(And this is why you should fill all five slots for mayor with people who are not Andrew Cuomo.)

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