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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

That's a feature, not a bug. NYC has always been free, free-wheeling, and very pragmatic. Think for yourself, don't worry about what everyone thinks about you, get things done, work it out pragmatically with the people around you. Look at how traffic flows - no laws describe it, lanes are often ignored, etc., but it works. Saying 'you are violating traffic laws' would be misunderstanding the system fundamentally. NYC has always worked very well, the greatest city in the world for generations (despite recent media campaigns that seem to have forgotten it), but it's also not for everybody.

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Ah, but I remeber the 1970s and 1980s when the bankrupt hellhole was considered (by outsiders) one of the worst places on Earth and a place you would only go if you had a suicide wish. You would expect to get mugged or shot, bad graffiti covered every surface, and junkies filled every cold-water walk-up that hadn't yet burned down.

The "broken window" approach to law enforcement started a reversing trend. Seems like that approach has been dropped again, and the old New York is coming back.

> The "broken window" approach to law enforcement started a reversing trend.

Yeah, may be, but the bulk of the cost was borne by minorities, poor and otherwise vulnerable people [1]. "Broken windows" only works for everyone in a fair way when police is held accountable for their actions and systemic injustice gets combatted in parallel - otherwise it will only serve to entrench the interests of the White, rich population.

[1] https://www.usccr.gov/files/pubs/2018/03-22-NYSAC.pdf

This really has nothing to do with broken windows or probably even approaches to crime at all. Crime went down for thirty years basically everywhere. Now it is going up basically everywhere. Hard to point at a specific policy when it’s so universal across locales

Overall morale is declining. Call it the Trump Effect. Having a leader who behaves like he did normalizes this behavior and immoral behavior becomes more commonplace since people feel its legitimized.

I'm far from being a liberal but that guy objectively didn't show manners, so why should the man on the street..

My theory, for which I have no evidence beyond subjective observations, is that Trump jumped on a burgeoning trend (that behavior was trendy before Trump's election, and similar patterns predate him in other countries) and pushed the country over the edge. Many people I know who despise Trump seem to follow his lead in their behavior.

If we write really extreme hyperbole, it's witty (not really anymore) but doesn't actually support the argument. Millions still lived there; it remained the national capital of finance, publishing, business, arts, etc.; the nation's leading city and one of the world's; a magnet for tourism.

> The "broken window" approach to law enforcement started a reversing trend.

It's a popular claim but AFAIK here's no evidence of that and it's one of those claims that was repeated without anyone looking at the most basic data: Crime dropped nationwide, both in places that used 'broken window' policing and without it. It's like today, where gun crime has increased relatively evenly everywhere, red states and blue, urban and rural areas, but certain political media campaigns have successfully associated it with a certain political group and cities (and by implication, a certain minority). Also, 'broken windows' often amounted to 'harass and drive away people that wealthy white people don't like'.

>The "broken window" approach to law enforcement started a reversing trend. Seems like that approach has been dropped again, and the old New York is coming back.

The "make low effort comments about leaded gas and crime crowd" would take issue with that statement.

Seems like everyone wants to take credit for the crime decrease in the 90s.

Meh, compared to something like Tokyo NYC is a shitshow.

Crime is getting pretty bad these days. (https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p00041/nypd-citywide-cri...) It's not as bad as the worst period in New York's history, but that's not an excuse.

How is that related to double parking?

New York City might well be the safest city in the country:

https://twitter.com/mnolangray/status/1520134999164395521

Obviously there's much that could be done to make the city safer, and it does seem there was an uptick in certain types of crime during the pandemic (though not localized to NYC in any way). I'm just wary of people's intuitions about things like crime, which have historically been divorced from reality.

> I'm just wary of people's intuitions about things like crime, which have historically been divorced from reality.

Also, there's a media campaign by conservatives to say that 'liberal cities are dangerous' (and to dog whistle race issues). Somehow, Miami and Texas cities never come up.

The image on this Tweet was from 2019, which likely uses data from even earlier years. The data I showed you, from the NY city itself, illustrates a sharp rise in crime today.

More like everyone in the city thinks they're the main character.

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