That is where the schools and streets have gone wrong since the 1960's. That helped to make the crime exposition possible!
Backing the NYPD—by Accident by Heather Mac Donald - City Journal
A New York Times story reveals, without quite meaning to, how much the poor value policing.
21 August 2012
A recent column by New York Times reporter Ginia Bellafante inadvertently tells the truth about the public-safety desires of the poor—and thereby undermines the Times’s relentless crusade against the New York Police Department. The main thrust of Bellafante’s article is an attack on New York City for “inadequately . . . rank[ing] the needs of the poor” in its budget priorities. Her evidence is the allegedly slow pace with which the New York City Housing Authority has installed security cameras in its housing projects and the “mere” $51 million that it has allocated for doing so. That sum, Bellafante contends, compares poorly with the cameras now “commonplace to see . . . affixed to office buildings and expensive co-ops” (those cameras are privately funded, but who’s counting), with the “hundreds of millions of dollars for the development of lush tourist-luring green spaces like Brooklyn Bridge Park and Governors Island” which the city is planning, and with a proposed $20 million to assist with Carnegie Hall’s renovation.
Bellafante’s claim that the city stiffs the poor is sheer delusion. New York’s poverty infrastructure has no national parallel. No other American city provides housing on demand to every childless adult and single-mother-headed household claiming homelessness, for example, to a tune historically of about $1 billion a year. Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the South Bronx teem with city-funded nonprofit agencies that send out armies of social workers and case managers in the name of poverty reduction. Mental health services, youth services, AIDS housing and AIDS counselors, family-preservation services—all roll forth from the city’s coffers. The city’s massive hospitals corporation is geared almost exclusively to low-income residents; its public-housing system is the nation’s largest. Special-education students in the public schools are surrounded by expensive paraprofessionals and aides. The mayor’s Center for Economic Opportunity and Young Men’s Initiative pour millions more into the poverty-industrial complex. Whether these billions accomplish anything is a different question, of course.
There is one city program for the poor, however, that has measurably improved the quality of life in distressed neighborhoods: policing. Violent crime is the most regressive of all taxes, since it falls heaviest on poor minorities, as University of California at Berkeley law professor Franklin Zimring observes in The City That Became Safe. New York’s data-driven, proactive style of policing is government’s most progressive social program, for its benefits accrue disproportionately to those same minorities.
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