When Animals Attack

Grim news greeted New Yorkers in the aftermath of last weekend's Puerto Rican Day Parade. Three men were stabbed near the end of the parade route and several women were sexually assaulted and robbed in Central Park by a gang of parade goers, according to published reports. Fox News Channel televised a video-tape showing young men clad in the Puerto Rican flag bandanas assaulting and molesting several women. To make matters worse, at least one of the women claimed that New York City Police ignored her when she reported the attacks.

The Puerto Rican Day parade has long been an embarrassment to New Yorkers. Most folks who can manage it tend flee the city altogether – spending the weekend in their Hamptons or Jersey Shore beach shares. Those stuck in city, simply make every effort to avoid the parade route and any subway line connecting to it. (A sure sign that neither Hillary Clinton nor Rick Lazio are real New Yorkers is that both politicos showed up for the parade.) Even when they avoid the parade itself, few New Yorkers escape its costs. Returning from my own weekend escape, I was confronted with streets and sidewalks piled waist high with trash.

For years the horrors of the Puerto Rican Day parade have been an open but unspoken secret in New York. Nearly everyone knew why almost everyone else was stealing away and staying away on this particular June weekend but seldom was the politically-incorrect sentiment spoken aloud. There was good reason for the reticence. When the television show Seinfeld portrayed its lead characters encountering the havoc of the parade, the Puerto Rican branch of the Ethnic Grievance Syndicate charged everyone involved with racism and exacted a pledge that the episode would never again be shown. A few years ago the editor of the New York Post had been fired for crossing the PR-EGS. In New York, you don't mess with the Syndicate.

One of the consequences of this conspiracy of silence is that some New Yorkers didn't receive the invisible memorandum to make themselves scarce. The details of the attacks are still hazy. This much is known. Just off the southern edge of Central Park, a mob consisting of dozens of young men attacked more than two dozen 20 women, dousing them with water, stripping them of their clothing and molesting them. A young woman who was attacked while skating in the park has said in several television interviews that after fighting off her assailants, she sought out the assistance of police but was ignored by several officers.

For the moment at least, Sunday's attacks have given New Yorkers license to speak the truth about the Puerto Rican Day Parade. Even the New York Times noted that New Yorkers were "rightfully outraged" at the attacks, even if they weaseled out of connecting the attacks with the parade itself by saying that the attacks happened "just after the Puerto Rican National Day Parade." (That's what the Times calls it – the Puerto Rican National Day Parade – raising the question of what business the nation of Puerto Rico has parading through the streets of a U.S. city, or what business our Republic has maintaining a Carribean colony.) The New York Observer had it better when its lead editorial commented: "It is hard to imagine any other major city allowing itself to be subject to the havoc caused each year by the Puerto Rican Day Parade." I heard similar sentiments at the midtown club Au Bar Monday night and at Greenwich Village's Grey Dog Cafe Tuesday night. New York is openly aghast at the parade.

Clearly, New York's club libertines and cafe liberals, as well as the knee-jerk liberal editors of the New York Times have been helped along toward this bold confrontation with truth by the fact that the most prominent victim is the articulate blonde rollerblader who claims she was ignored by the police. In the happy-clappy liberal dream of multiculturalism, residents of Manhattan's Upper West Side are just as safe skating past the parade honoring the anniversary of Israel as they are the Puerto Rican Day Parade. They expect a multicultural community to be sort of like u2018international day' at their grade school – everyone cooperating nicely and lots of interesting food. As residents of Lebanon, Kosovo, and Northern Ireland know, real multiculturalism is a bit rougher around the edges. Sunday was a reality wake-up call for these liberal dreamers.

Puerto Rican New Yorkers are justifiably incensed by the attacks. In the first place, some of the women attacked were Puerto Ricans. In addition, the attack has unfairly damaged the reputation of New York's Puerto Rican community. Puerto Ricans are great New Yorkers who don't deserve to have their reputations besmirched by the villiany at the parade. (As a son of old Ireland, I know all to well how unfair it is for an entire community to suffer from the parade day loutishness of a few thugs.) Few Puerto Rican political leaders, however, have prominently condemned the attackers. Worse yet, even before the attack the parade organizers had decided to honor Pedro Albizu Campos, a Puerto Rican nationalist terrorist who had a hand in the shooting spree in the U.S. Capitol that badly wounded congressmen. This year's parade and the attacks that followed were nothing less than an assault on the dignity of New York's Puerto Rican community.

The charges against the police have served to deflect attention from the assailants. The New York Times has urged New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to "punish any [police] who violated the public trust by ignoring pleas for help." Coming from a newspaper that has been on a nonstop campaign against the Giuliani Administration's rigorous police tactics, this call rings hollow. Even worse, it resounds with a racist double-standard. Apparently, the Times would have the police give up zero-tolerance policing and thus ignore the pleas for help from black and hispanic crime victims in the city's poorer neighborhoods, while stepping up enforcement for Central Park's roller-blading set.

What exactly were the police supposed to do? It doesn't take a social psychologist to predict what would have ensued had a small group of police officers attempted to forcibly interfere with mob. Aggressive police action would have immediately polarized parade goers. Police action against the Puerto Rican flag-brandishing attackers would have appeared as unwarranted and dangerous to other paraders unaware of the earlier attack. Conflict with the police would look like legitimate social action to the crowd. This had all the makings of a riot. Even if a full-scale riot failed to erupt, the police would certainly have run the risk of once again being ridiculed as racist thugs. "We were told not to do anything … They don't want photos of altercations with minorities," an officer told the New York Post. We might not like the fact that our police can be intimidated out of enforcing the law by charges of racism but in a society where such charges result in public humiliation, job loss, and even imprisonment, we should not be surprised.

For many New Yorkers, Sunday's attack is a reminder of an ugly past thought left-behind in the 1980s. In the era of Mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins, many New Yorkers fell victim to an especially disturbing form of criminal assaults, in which individual victims were overcome by large mobs of young men who robbed and beat their victims. In the colorful language of New York's tabloids, these mobs were "wolf-packs" and their attacks were called "wilding." On the street level, these gang robberies were simply called "bashing" or "mobberies" (combining mob and robberies). The city government seemed unable or uninterested in stopping the attacks.

The 1989 gang-rape of a Central Park jogger shocked New York out of its complacency. The city cried out for action against the attackers, and eventually most of that particular wolf-pack were arrested. (DNA, however, tests suggest that at least on attacker is still at large.) More than any other, this horrific incident was responsible for New Yorkers turn toward more vigorous law-enforcement and, eventually, the election of Giuliani. It seems a nasty joke that we should once again find ourselves confronted with the wolf-pack in Central Park.

The reaction against the crime – encouraging policies of the Koch and Dinkins administratiosn was severe. Giuliani saturated crime-ridden neighborhoods with officers instructed to exercise "zero-tolerance" for even minor infractions, carefully tracked crime patterns, and put pressure on officers to make more arrests. Drinking a beer in public, jumping a subway turnstile, urinating in an alley, panhandling on the sidewalk-once regarded nearly as civil rights by certain New York residents, and almost never inviting police attention-suddenly became offenses that could lead to arrest.

Underlying these tactics was the "broken windows" theory of crime reduction. The term "broken windows" was coined by political scientist James Q. Wilson and criminologist George Kelling in an article for The Atlantic Monthly in 1982, the theory holds that when someone breaks a window in a building and it is left unrepaired, others will be emboldened to break more windows. Eventually, the broken windows create a sense of disorder that attracts more serious criminals, who flourish in conditions of public apathy and neglect. Fix the windows, the theory goes, and you will reduce the crime encouraged by social chaos. The Giuliani administration turned this theory loose on the streets.

Crime rates in New York dropped dramatically. People felt safer. Getting mugged was no longer the quintessential New York experience. Some old-school liberals griped about the aggressive policing, but most New Yorkers were ready to tolerate aggressive policing in exchange for losing the aggressive criminals with whom they had lived throughout the eighties.

The Giuliani administration's tactics were bound to run afoul of the Ethnic Grievance Syndicate eventually. Residents of poor and minority neighborhoods are disproportionately victimized by crimes, and so any serious crime-reduction program will concentrate on these areas. This concentration lead to cries of racism almost immediately. After a few highly publicized cases of police killings and police brutality against black New Yorkers, public opinion turned against the Giuliani administration, the police, and the broken windows approach. The backlash against the police was followed by a rise in New York's homicide rate, and a decline in weapons arrests. Last weekend, for example, six people were killed in New York. In the wake of the Puerto Rican Parade attacks, New Yorkers must wonder whether their recent rejection of Giuliani style policing was a good idea.

Former Police Commissioner William Bratton recently said, "The government, not the mob, must control the street." But a better alternative to either criminal chaos or police saturation would be to allow New Yorkers to defend their own lives and properties. For years, New York has had some of the strictest gun- control laws in the nation. Under these laws it is impossible for most New Yorkers to legally own a handgun. Not that this has stopped criminals from getting their hands on firearms. I knew how to get my hands on a pistol when I attended a New York City public junior high school in the middle of the nineteen eighties. Today, as a graduate from an Ivy League law school with no criminal record, I am prevented from carrying a firearm, or even keeping one in my home.

Even as a youngster I knew that a free-market solution to crime was available. "Bashing" – which usually involved gangs of teenagers attacking adults-wouldn't stand a chance in a community where the adults carried guns. The greatest encouragement to the wolf-packs was the certain knowledge the wolves enjoyed that their victims would be unarmed lambs. Just the possibility of lethal retaliation by the victims would have ended the mob violence. Not the government, not the mob, but an armed citizenry is the real key to bringing freedom to our streets.

Allowing New Yorkers to exercise their right to self-defense should be the most important political issue in this city. Unfortunately, its not even part of New York's public discussion. Richard Brookhiser recently raised the gun issue in the New York Observer but with little result. It looks like we're stuck with the Hobson's choice of wilding wolf-packs or streets saturated with blue-coated centurions (as Brookhiser colorfully called New York's Finest). And next summer, when the Puerto Rican parade pushes through Fifth Avenue, I'll once again be out of town.

June 17, 2000

John Carney is a third-year law student at the University of Pennsylvania.