| > In his case, he was stuck at work at a public housing project for 3 days with the residents, because the city didn't ticket parking violations and the plows couldn't clear the clogged streets. This has still be case during some of the big snows of the past several years even with parking violations tickets. > Broken elevators left the elderly trapped in high-rise buildings for days. People with medical emergencies had to be carried by fireman down the stairs and down the street to an ambulance on an avenue. This still happens every once in a while. Police don't generally handle these kinds of things anyway, as the 311 service handles a lot of building code violations. > One of the reasons for the current practice in NYC is the Mayor Giuliani did a complete 180 and aggressively enforced all sorts of laws. Chaos transitioned to order. The optimal answer lies somewhere in the middle. This isn't accurate. Broken windows policing in NYC goes back to the mid-eighties and efforts to handle graffiti. Bill Bratton, the now police commissioner and comissioner during Guiliani's tenure, started using broken windows policing tactics and policies in the early 90s when he was at the NYC transit police. Also, violent crime rates were already well in decline when broken windows policing became the major tactic and policy of the NYPD. It is not at all clear that broken windows policing is responsible or a contributed to that falling rate and to characterize Giuliani as instilling order on a chaotic city is laughable, as you could view many of his policies as instilling chaos. |
The point is, there are extremes, and neither is the correct answer. I recall living in late 1980's Queens where getting a response from the police for anything short of a murder was an exercise in frustration. That wasn't the the case 10 years later.