Yet as dark as Gotham could be in those gritty days memorialized in film classics like Taxi Driver, there was always a ray of light: namely, a healthy respect for the police. Any disturbance would stop as soon as an officer stepped into the train, for example. Many of these cops were Vietnam veterans, and you could see the command and experience in their eyes. I remember noticing one officer’s medal above his NYPD shield: “sharpshooter”, it read.

It’s the crucial element missing today, as disorder grips the Big Apple once more. Law-breakers don’t respect law enforcement — and for good reason: they know that, thanks to misguided criminal-justice “reform”, they can re-offend over and over with utter impunity.

I didn’t aspire to be a police officer when I joined the force in 1989. My career choice was born of necessity. I had to provide for my young family, so college had to wait. But there was also the calling to serve communities racked by poverty, lack of opportunity, and lousy infrastructure — a state of affairs embodied by abandoned and burnt-down tenement blocks; buildings spray-painted “X” by the Fire Department were unsafe for first responders to enter.

These buildings became havens for drug dealers and shooting galleries for addicts. As rookie police officers, we were tasked with cleaning up areas like that. To combat the visible signs of a decaying city with high crime rates, we were deployed to the busiest precincts, called “shitholes” by the cops. These were the worst of the worst. We were assigned to crack patrols to tackle the emerging epidemic head-on.

Numerous overtime details were created to address crime spikes, one of which was “Operation Takeback,” to which I was assigned. It included tackling minor violations — vandalism, urination, aggressive panhandling, and the like — that could foster an atmosphere of lawlessness. Little did we know then that this was the so-called broken-windows theory of policing in practice.

As a result, New York City experienced a renaissance beginning in the mid-1990s and early aughts. Formerly depressed communities thrived. Times Square, once dotted with peep shows and porn shops, was transfigured into a family-friendly destination. The hipster culture emerged in Williamsburg, marking a significant cultural moment — a “vibe shift,” to use today’s lingo.

These and other changes were driven by a police culture of strict enforcement. These officers were no-nonsense and motivated. They took pride in their jobs and had the support of the mayor, the NYPD brass, the media, and the people they served. Then it all went downhill again.

Although crime rates overall are still low compared to the bad old days, many indicators are flashing red. Since 2019, there has been a 31% increase in major crimes. The murder rate is almost 20% higher than it was five years ago; robbery is up by a quarter; and felony assault by nearly half. As former Queens district attorney Jim Quinn summed it up recently, “there were almost 29,000 more crime victims in 2024 than there were in 2019.”

Behind each of these statistics are real lives permanently scarred or snuffed out altogether by crime. Some of these cases — such as the woman burned to death on a Brooklyn train, or the man shoved onto subway tracks at Manhattan’s 18^th Street — receive national and even international media attention. But many other victims and their families suffer and mourn in silence.

So what happened?

Partly, it’s because the NYPD became a victim of its own success. We failed to adapt proven formulas to changing conditions. Front-line officers were encouraged to conduct “stop-and-frisk” procedures, and higher-ups demanded it during CompStat meetings (at which leaders review neighborhood crime data). “How many touches do your officers have?” was a frequent question from chiefs who were likely excellent academic test-takers but had limited street experience.

The pressure at times translated into needlessly gruff, insensitive treatment. Several high-profile use-of-force incidents drew sharp criticism from communities of color. Fast-forward to the rise of Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd “reckoning”, and law enforcers in New York and across the country faced unprecedented pressure. With Covid in the mix, it felt like an all-out war on police and law and order.

In the year 2020, under Mayor de Blasio, these trends reached a terrifying crescendo. That was when the state legislature in Albany launched its disastrous experiment with bail “reform,” eliminating cash bail and removing judges’ discretion in detaining criminal suspects. As if that weren’t enough to hinder law enforcers, the activist chorus to #Defund police grew louder.

De Blasio and his police executives didn’t know how to handle it. Even at the height of the Floyd reckoning, overwhelming majorities of African-Americans indicated they wanted the same or even higher levels of policing in their neighborhoods. But instead of taking a holistic view of what the public wanted and balancing competing demands, the de Blasio administration folded to the loudest activists. Hizzoner permitted rioting, property destruction, and assaults on police officers. Mass police retirements occurred nationwide and in Gotham. Police morale sank — and remains low: applicants to the NYPD sank to 8,000 this year, down from 18,000 in 2017.

Mayor Eric Adams, the former NYPD captain who took over from De Blasio in 2022, inherited his predecessor’s crises — and failed to overcome them. Adams appeared to appoint friends rather than qualified executives. Four police commissioners have served under him, formerly unheard of. And on the streets, a climate of criminality continued to fester.

The criminal element felt empowered by the revolving door of the criminal-justice system. Nearly 20% of offenders break the law again, according to data released this week by the New York Department of Corrections. Offenders are often released on the same day they are arrested, and many go on to do more harm even as earlier cases against them are still pending. Yet district attorneys like Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg remain committed to so-called restorative justice and diversion programs that keep criminals on the streets.

All this sends the wrong message to offenders. Criminals have come to believe that crime pays, and there are no consequences; law-abiding New Yorkers live in fear, especially in the confined spaces of the subway system.

Political leaders assert that the public perception of crime, especially in the subway system, is not aligned with actual crime statistics. Things aren’t that bad, they insist, and it’s only sensational media coverage that makes us feel unsafe. It’s true that overall crime rates have decreased — marginally, compared to the worst of the pandemic years. But compared to the renaissance of the 1990s and aughts, things are unquestionably and dramatically worse.

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As NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch recently noted, despite the marginal decline in crime numbers, the department must work to enhance the sense of safety. To tackle crime in the city, especially in the subway system, we need a stronger uniformed presence, particularly at the turnstiles. By preventing ne’er-do-wells from entering the subway in the first place, we can likely win half the battle. And we need officers on the trains. We need undercover cops, both underground and aboveground. Although tough anti-crime units have recently been controversial, they remain a valuable tool for policing.

Today’s cops act as therapists, social workers, racial reconcilers, and peace officers — all rolled into one — as other institutions of social care have eroded. But police officers aren’t a panacea for all social woes. Tackling the root causes of criminal behavior requires ensuring that individuals in crisis have access to mental health and social services. This approach can help reduce recent violent incidents linked to homelessness and mental health issues. Agencies responsible for assisting this segment of the population should also be held as accountable as the police department is. Otherwise, we might well fall back into the state of affairs when I was a boy.

The bad old days are better kept confined to old movies.

As DEFUND BPD graffiti took over a prominent billboard on North Avenue, Scott was one of the few candidates who seemed in sync with the activist moment. He questioned the authorities’ over-reliance on police presence as they attempted to curb the violence plaguing the city. What Baltimore needed, he argued, was an expanded social safety net. But the darling of the activist Left would soon find himself at odds with his earliest supporters, as the reality of running a city with a spiking homicide rate became clear.

These tensions between activists and politicians were happening all across the country. Activists had been campaigning to end police violence for years when the death of George Floyd caught the world’s attention: finally, and abruptly, the words “defund the police” and “prison abolition” were appearing on the front page of the New York Times. Local politicians started running on issues such as bail reform. A handful of cities, from Philadelphia to Chicago to Seattle, all announced they were reallocating funds from bloated police budgets to other city services. Approximately $870 million was slashed from police departments nationwide. The idea was that with fewer police there would be more money to spend on the other services people want, which are typically underfunded. This in turn would boost the sense of community and stability — which should create a higher quality of life and theoretically bring down crime rates.

And then the homicide rate started to climb in cities across America. Many other crime statistics remained flat, but opponents to police reforms now had a frame for the backlash. Enthusiasm for slashing police budgets has faded — as has the idea that other services, such as housing, health, and drug rehabilitation programs, should be prioritised.

The debate is now absurdly binary: either you care about police violence, or you care about the homicide rate. Both these issues disproportionately affect the same demographics: economically vulnerable people living in under-serviced neighbourhoods are more likely to experience violence at the hands of both police and non-police. But anyone hoping to be an accepted member of either the Left or the Right must exaggerate one issue and erase the other.

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Baltimore, a city plagued by poverty and violence, is a microcosm of what the defund debate has become. Brandon Scott’s main rival in the hotly contested 2020 mayoral race was former mayor Sheila Dixon. She started in the lead, despite the fact that she’d had to resign after being accused of stealing and using gift cards that had been donated to the city for distribution to needy families. One reason for her popularity, despite her alleged crimes, was her previous ability to bring the homicide rate to its lowest level in decades. Her success was mostly credited to “focused deterrence”, a strategy that includes police presence in high-risk communities and police intervention in the lives of high-risk individuals. Despite being effective and popular, this approach was mostly abandoned in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death, after anti-police sentiment had swept the city (the six officers involved were charged and their trials resulted in a mix of a mistrial, acquittals, and dropped charges; all officers returned to duty).

Still, it was Scott, who was city council president, who won out in the end. For years, he has approached gun violence as a public health crisis — one that requires sustained engagement from services beyond law enforcement. He has discussed the reallocation of resources to give other forms of intervention priority; activists interpreted this as support for the idea of defunding the police. And yet when he released his first city budget for approval, and the police budget remained around the same level as his predecessor’s, he was roundly condemned by critics on social media.

In response, Scott gave an interview in the Baltimore Sun, in which he criticised the “defund the police” slogan and its activists for focusing on the means rather than the ends. “We have to do a better job of explaining to folks what we’re talking about.” The goal should be a city in which every citizen is given the opportunity to flourish, and defunding the police doesn’t in itself achieve this. Moving numbers around on a budget is not policy; it is a symbolic gesture. And it’s a gesture that will only satisfy a small number of activists; a large percentage of residents would prefer the same or more police presence in their neighbourhoods. The majority support police reform over abolition.

Scott still believes in reallocating resources and ending the dependence the city has on police, but, he said in an interview with The Trace, “I need time.” He continued, “I have been consistent that reimagining public safety and the budget would not be overnight work.” But time is not something many activists have been willing to grant him. He has been in office for a year and a half, and has already become a target for those on the far-Left, who often point to this one budgetary marker as a sign of his failings rather than fairly assessing his policies. Scott’s first municipal budget increased funding for police to cover rising healthcare and pension costs. During the Taxpayers’ Night — an open forum for citizens to give feedback about how the city’s funds are being spent — multiple activists waited in line to express their anger and frustration with him. Many said they regretted voting for the young mayor.

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When I moved from Baltimore to Philadelphia last year, I found a similar dynamic, with complicated realities obscured by the binaries, opportunism and bitter rivalries of local politics. Since the summer when 66,000 people marched in support of Black Lives Matter here, Philadelphia has been moving up the list of metropolises with the highest homicide rates in America. In 2019, it was fourteenth; now, it is twelfth. Last year, there were more murders here than in New York and Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, police shootings here have not made national headlines. Earlier this month police officer Edsual Mendoza was charged with murder. He shot 12-year-old Thomas Siderio in March. Between 2013 and 2021, 39 people, 26 of them black, were killed by the police.

Still, only a very small percentage of Philly’s population actually wants a decrease of police presence — including in neighbourhoods where police have killed or brutalised residents. They want services, such as affordable housing and free health clinics and public transportation and better schools, but they also say public safety is a top priority, and see police presence as a part of solving that problem.

Only 44% of Philadelphia residents feel “safe” in their neighbourhoods at night, and the largest percentage of residents who do are white. There is some truth to the criticism that the liberals who support defunding the police often don’t live in the neighbourhoods most afflicted by gun violence and homicides. And it doesn’t help that the most prominent professional activists in this arena, whether part of Black Lives Matter or the Women’s March, make headlines for lucrative book deals and expensive real estate purchases. The people on social media who most frequently and loudly talk about defunding the police often have extensive media bylines in their bios.

The city’s District Attorney, Larry Krasner, is adjacent to this demographic: a white civil rights attorney whose  education from University of Chicago and Stanford has been brought up in a few of the conversations against him I’ve overheard. Krasner was elected in 2017, following widespread protests in Philadelphia against police violence — and the arrest of the previous DA Seth Williams on federal corruption charges. Krasner ran on a platform of ambitious reform, and he has delivered: his office has declined to prosecute low level prostitution or marijuana possession, and it is also implementing the controversial bail reform measures. Requiring cash for bail has for a long time left the poorest people in jail for weeks, months, and, in at least one high profile case, years, awaiting trial for nonviolent crimes. Krasner and other reformist DAs like him have pledged to put an end to this possibility, letting low-level offenders go home to wait for trial.

Krasner’s platform and unapologetic manner have brought him national attention, including an eight-part documentary series on PBS that gives an inside look at the work in his office and the controversies that have sprung from his tactics. Bail reform is an easy target for the Right: if someone with an extensive record commits a heinous act, a conservative will inevitably go on television to demand to know why that person was “on the streets” in the first place and not in prison. Locally, Krasner has been blamed for the increasing homicide rate, by both politicians and members of the police.

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But like Scott in Baltimore, the most serious criticism that Krasner faces comes from his own side, the Left. In the mind of his most prominent critic, Michael Nutter, Krasner is a white saviour, thinking he knows best how to order the world while underserving the black people in neighbourhoods hardest hit by violence. The former mayor, who is black, said in an interview with the Washington Post: “It all goes back to supremacy, paternalism. ‘I’m woke. I’m paying attention. I spend a lot of time with Black people. Some of my best friends…’ All that bullshit.”

Nutter has referred in speeches to young black men as an “endangered species”, threatened by imprisonment, poverty, and violent death. He has long been an advocate for public safety, both before and after his eight years as mayor, and his term saw a significant decline in the Philadelphia homicide rate. Although there is no consensus about why or how that drop happened, but Nutter’s work, like Sheila Dixon’s in Baltimore, has often included a close relationship with the police, including controversial measures such as stop and frisk. As soon as Nutter left office, the white progressive Jim Kenney was elected as mayor and Krasner was elected DA, and those tactics were discontinued. And the homicide rate once again started to rise.

The most recent city budget presented by mayor Kenney significantly increased the funding for “anti-violence” programs, including neighbourhood organisations, after-school and summer programs, and workforce development programs — the same types of programs Defund the Police advocates have argued should take priority over policing. Philadelphia has also been slowly implementing other police-related reforms, such as a citizen oversight committee and the deployment of mental health professionals alongside police for certain emergency calls. Krasner enjoys widespread support from black voters, and his reforms have been largely popular in the city, despite the fact that a small handful of crimes have involved people who had been released on charges awaiting trial. But the effects of his work are not yet visible. The homicide rate for 2022 is already above what had been recorded by the same time last year.

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The reality is that when crime rates go down, it’s hard to pinpoint a specific reason. Everything from neighbourhood development to the removal of lead paint from homes to robust police forces were credited with Philadelphia’s drop in violent crime in the Eighties. Similarly, when the homicide rate increased during the pandemic, many contradictory reasons were given. Gun sales had gone up — but was this cause, effect, or unrelated? Unemployment had gone up, but when it declined again it had no effect on the rate of violent crime. Were the police effectively on “strike”, refusing to engage in the prevention or intervention of dangerous situations because they were concerned about being blamed for bad results? Something similar had happened in Baltimore after the uprising that followed Freddie Gray’s death. But maybe other problems contributed too, such as rising rents or the difficulty of accessing health services during the pandemic.

The lack of clarity has allowed anyone, with any agenda, to speculate publicly about why homicide rates are climbing. For the head of the police union, it’s because the police force is underfunded and under-appreciated by the community. For conservatives, it’s because of broken families and lack of personal responsibility or because authorities are soft on criminals. For liberals, it’s the lack of gun control laws or poverty.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle, just as effective policy lies somewhere between anti-police activism and an unquestioningly pro-police stance. Crime rates aren’t predictable or easy to change, as local leaders across America are discovering. To pretend otherwise is to fail its victims.