Heather Mac Donald July 23, 2020
Mayor Bill de Blasio has cancelled a graffiti-eradication program targeted at cleaning private buildings. He is thus deliberately sending New York City back to its worst days of crime and squalor.
The symbolic significance of this cancellation is as large as its practical effect. Nothing sent a stronger signal in the late 1980s that New York was determined to fight back from anarchy than the transit system’s campaign against subway graffiti. That campaign was based on Broken Windows theory, the most transformative idea in urban policy over the last 40 years. Broken Windows recognizes that physical disorder and low-level lawlessness—graffiti, turnstile-jumping, and litter—telegraph that social control in a disordered environment has broken down. That low-level lawlessness invites more contempt for public norms of behavior, including felony crime...............
But an appreciation of public order does not come naturally to a self-described progressive........... Vagrancy was up in the subways, litter was metastasizing. And now, with the cancellation of the graffiti-removal program, de Blasio has reverted to type...........And when two women poured black paint on those BLM logos to protest anti-cop hatred, de Blasio found the resources to arrest and charge them with criminal mischief—for graffiti vandalism!—as well as to repaint the slogans......... To Read More....
Mayor Bill de Blasio has cancelled a graffiti-eradication program targeted at cleaning private buildings. He is thus deliberately sending New York City back to its worst days of crime and squalor.
The symbolic significance of this cancellation is as large as its practical effect. Nothing sent a stronger signal in the late 1980s that New York was determined to fight back from anarchy than the transit system’s campaign against subway graffiti. That campaign was based on Broken Windows theory, the most transformative idea in urban policy over the last 40 years. Broken Windows recognizes that physical disorder and low-level lawlessness—graffiti, turnstile-jumping, and litter—telegraph that social control in a disordered environment has broken down. That low-level lawlessness invites more contempt for public norms of behavior, including felony crime...............
But an appreciation of public order does not come naturally to a self-described progressive........... Vagrancy was up in the subways, litter was metastasizing. And now, with the cancellation of the graffiti-removal program, de Blasio has reverted to type...........And when two women poured black paint on those BLM logos to protest anti-cop hatred, de Blasio found the resources to arrest and charge them with criminal mischief—for graffiti vandalism!—as well as to repaint the slogans......... To Read More....
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