This question of crime was tricky. There were in fact eight American cities with higher homicide rates, and twelve with higher overall crime rates. Crime had long been taken for granted in the less affluent parts of the city, and had become in the midseventies, as both unemployment and the costs of maintaining property rose and what had once been functioning neighborhoods were abandoned and burned and left to whomever claimed them, endemic. “In some poor neighborhoods, crime became almost a way of life,” Jim Sleeper, an editor at Newsday and the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York, noted in his discussion of the social disintegration that occurred during this period:
… a subculture of violence with complex bonds of utility and affection within families and the larger, “law-abiding” community. Struggling merchants might “fence” stolen goods, for example, thus providing quick cover and additional incentive for burglaries and robberies; the drug economy became more vigorous, reshaping criminal lifestyles and tormenting the loyalties of families and friends. A walk down even a reasonably busy street in a poor, minority neighborhood at high noon could become an unnerving journey into a landscape eerie and grim.
What seemed markedly different a decade later, what made crime a “story,” was that the more privileged, and especially the more privileged white, citizens of New York had begun to feel unnerved at high noon in even their own neighborhoods. Although New York City Police Department statistics suggested that white New Yorkers were not actually in increased mortal danger (the increase in homicides between 1977 and 1989, from 1,557 to 1,903, was entirely among what the NYPD classified as Hispanic, Asian, and black victims; the number of white murder victims had steadily declined, from 361 in 1977 to 227 in 1984 and 190 in 1989), the apprehension of such danger, exacerbated by street snatches and muggings and the quite useful sense that the youth in the hooded sweatshirt with his hands jammed in his pockets might well be a predator, had become general. These more privileged New Yorkers now felt unnerved not only on the street, where the necessity for evasive strategies had become an exhausting constant, but in even the most insulated and protected apartment buildings. As the residents of such buildings, the owners of twelve- and sixteen- and twenty-four-room apartments, watched the potted ficus trees disappear from outside their doors and the graffiti appear on their limestone walls and the smashed safety glass from car windows get swept off their sidewalks, it had become increasingly easy to imagine the outcome of a confrontation between, say, the relief night doorman and six dropouts from Julia Richman High School on East 67th Street.
And yet those New Yorkers who had spoken to the Times in April of 1990 about their loss of flexibility about their panic, their desolation, their anger, and their sense of impending doom, had not been talking about drugs, or crime, or any of the city’s more publicized and to some extent inflated ills. These were people who did not for the most part have twelve- and sixteen-room apartments and doormen and the luxury of projected fears. These people were talking instead about an immediate fear, about money, about the vertiginous plunge in the value of their houses and apartments and condominiums, about the possibility or probability of foreclosure and loss; about, implicitly, their fears of being left, like so many they saw every day, below the line, out in the cold, on the street.
This was a climate in which many of the questions that had seized the city’s attention in 1987 and 1988, for example that of whether Mortimer Zuckerman should be “allowed” to build two fifty-nine-story office towers on the site of what is now the Coliseum, seemed in retrospect wistful, the baroque concerns of better times. “There’s no way anyone would make a sane judgment to go into the ground now,” a vice president at Cushman and Wakefield told the New York Observer about the delay in the Coliseum project, which had in fact lost its projected major tenant, Salomon Brothers, shortly after Black Monday, 1987. “It would be suicide. You’re better off sitting in a tub of water and opening your wrists.” Such fears were, for a number of reasons, less easy to incorporate into the narrative than the fear of crime.
The imposition of a sentimental, or false, narrative on the disparate and often random experience that constitutes the life of a city or a country means, necessarily, that much of what happens in that city or country will be rendered merely illustrative, a series of set pieces, or performance opportunities. Mayor Dinkins could, in such a symbolic substitute for civic life, “break the boycott” (the Flatbush boycott organized to mobilize resentment of Korean merchants in black neighborhoods) by purchasing a few dollars’ worth of produce from a Korean grocer on Church Avenue. Governor Cuomo could “declare war on crime” by calling for five thousand additional police; Mayor Dinkins could “up the ante” by calling for sixty-five hundred. “White slut comes into the park looking for the African man,” a black woman could say, her voice loud but still conversational, in the corridor outside the courtroom where, during the summer of 1990, the first three defendants in the Central Park attack, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Raymond Santana, were tried on charges of attempted murder, assault, sodomy, and rape. “Boyfriend beats shit out of her, they blame it on our boys,” the woman could continue, and then, referring to a young man with whom the victim had at one time split the cost of an apartment: “How about the roommate, anybody test his semen? No. He’s white. They don’t do it to each other.”
Glances could then flicker among those reporters and producers and courtroom sketch artists and photographers and cameramen and techs and summer interns who assembled daily at 111 Centre Street. Cellular phones could be picked up, a show of indifference. Small talk could be exchanged with the marshals, a show of solidarity. The woman could then raise her voice: “White folk, all of them are devils, even those that haven’t been born yet, they are devils. Little demons. I don’t understand these devils, I guess they think this is their court.” The reporters could gaze beyond her, faces blank, no eye contact, a more correct form of hostility and also more lethal. The woman could hold her ground but avert her eyes, letting her gaze fall on another black, in this instance a black Daily News columnist, Bob Herbert. “You,” she could say. “You are a disgrace. Go ahead. Line up there. Line up with the white folk. Look at them, lining up for their first-class seats while my people are downstairs behind barricades… kept behind barricades like cattle… not even allowed in the room to see their sons lynched … is that an African I see in that line? Or is that a Negro. Oh, oh, sorry, shush, white folk didn’t know, he was passing….”
In a city in which grave and disrupting problems had become general — problems of not having, problems of not making it, problems that demonstrably existed, among the mad and the ill and the underequipped and the overwhelmed, with decreasing reference to color — the case of the Central Park jogger provided more than just a safe, or structured, setting in which various and sometimes only marginally related rages could be vented. “This trial,” the Daily News announced on its editorial page one morning in July 1990, midway through the trial of the first three defendants, “is about more than the rape and the brutalization of a single woman. It is about the rape and the brutalization of a city. The jogger is a symbol of all that’s wrong here. And all that’s right, because she is nothing less than an inspiration.”