Читать книгу Confessions of a New York Taxi Driver - Eugene Salomon - Страница 16

I was cruising along on West 75^th Street on a pleasant evening in October, 1984 when I spotted a young man emerging from a brownstone, waving his hands frantically in the air, and calling out for me to stop.

‘Please wait here a minute,’ he pleaded as he came running up to the side of my cab, ‘I’ve got to help my friend get down the stairs.’ And then he ran back up the steps to the brownstone and opened the door there.

When I saw his friend my jaw dropped. He was also a young guy, medium in build, but he was completely covered in blood, his white t-shirt a red rag. As the two of them carefully navigated the steps and approached my cab, I could see that his face had been severely beaten, with his mouth, nose, and maybe even his eyes bleeding. He was indeed a horrifying sight.

‘Please get us to Roosevelt Hospital as fast as you can,’ the first one begged as the two of them slumped into the back seat. I tore out of there like the ambulance driver I had become and headed for the hospital, a sixteen-block journey. Of course, I wanted to know what had happened, and it was the explanation of the event, even more than the blood, which made a lasting impression on me.

What had happened was this: the guy had been walking on the sidewalk on the park side of Central Park West just as the sun was setting. There is a four-foot-high stone wall there that runs the length of Central Park, separating it from the sidewalk. As the soon-to-be-victim walked along, he passed another, somewhat larger, man who was leaning against a parked car. Suddenly this larger man grabbed him from behind and shoved him up against the stone wall. Behind the wall – actually inside the park – was another man who grasped the guy and pulled him up over the wall, into the park. The first thug then scaled the wall himself and proceeded, with his partner, to beat their prey to a pulp, as well as robbing him of his money and watch.

This incident became, in my mind, a metaphor for the condition New York City was in during those years. It was as if the young man in my cab had been swallowed by a monster – the city itself.

But by the time the nineties came around, the crime situation in New York started to show a noticeable improvement. Not only were the crime statistics down, the city actually began to look safer. Local politicians stood in line trying to take credit for the improvement, ignoring the fact that it was part of a national trend. But as someone who has been down in the trenches for a long, long time and as someone who might be considered to be sort of a professional observer, I formed my own opinion. Not to take anything away from police work that is sensible and on-target, nevertheless I attribute the drop in crime to three broader social factors.

1. AIDS – the devastation of the AIDS epidemic in New York City in the eighties and nineties should not be forgotten. I remember once having a passenger in my cab in 1989 who told me that he personally knew thirty-six people who had died of AIDS. The two principal groups affected were gays and intravenous drug users (‘junkies’). Well, guess what? The guy who broke the window of your car so he could steal the baby seat and whatever was in the glove compartment was a junkie. It may not be politically correct to say so, but if an epidemic is wiping out the junkies, the crime rate sure as hell is going to go down.

2. The cell phone – that’s right, the cell phone. By the time the millennium passed, nearly everyone in New York City owned one. Today, if a person sees a crime being committed, he can immediately alert the police. I once had a passenger tell me that her nephew had been held up by a young thug who pulled a knife on him while he was walking down a street in Manhattan. As the mugger jogged off, the nephew followed him from a distance while calling the police on his cell. The cops showed up instantly and the thief, seeing them, tried to escape by running into a subway station where he made the mistake of attempting to sprint across the tracks to the other side. He managed to avoid the third rail but did not manage to avoid an oncoming train which struck and killed him. Not that the guy deserved to die, of course, but the truth is his demise did bring the crime rate down.

3. Now here’s the big one, and it is surprising to me that I’ve never heard this mentioned as a reason for the drop in the crime rate nationally: race relations are improving. It seems to be human nature to become annoyed or outraged when things are going wrong, but to take no particular notice of it when things are going right. I believe the efforts of many, many well-intentioned people going back to the 1950s are bearing fruit – race relations are improving.

A kid growing up in the inner city today is not as likely to feel that, since he’s not allowed to be a part of the mainstream of society, it’s okay to commit crimes against it. He’s more likely to feel that he has a part in the game, too. Due to a gradual leveling of the playing field in economic and educational opportunities, the boundary lines between the ghetto and the rest of the city are disappearing. It’s no longer unusual for me to take a white guy to his apartment house in Harlem or to drop a black, urban professional off at his building in the Financial District.

But you’re not going to see any politician get up and say, ‘Well, the reason the crime rate is down isn’t really because of anything I am doing – it’s being caused by trends in the society that I have no control over.’ To the contrary.

In the late nineties Mayor Giuliani, riding on a crest of popularity as a crime-stopper in his first administration, decided to take it a step further in his second and final four years in office. Seizing upon a dubious philosophy that if you can stop the little crimes you will also somehow be nipping the big crimes in the bud, he set an army of police officers out to seek and destroy sin at even its smallest incarnation.