6.15.00
William Tucker on Wilding

6.07.00
C. Boyden Gray on Microsoft

6.06.00
Donal Rumsfeld Says

6.01.00
Spencer Eig Says

6.01.00
James Carville On Bob Casey

5.31.00
Murray Sabrin On NJ's Senate Race

5.25.00
John Zogby On Hillary & Lazio

5.24.00
Lucianne Goldberg on Linda Tripp

5.23.00
Matt Glavin on Clinton's Disbarment

6/15/00 5:55 p.m.
William Tucker Says...
“The fact is we are always on the edge of uncivilization.”

By Kathryn Jean Lopez, NR associate editor------------lopezk@nationalreview.com

illiam Tucker is a frequent commentator on New York City politics and author of the author of The Excluded Americans: Homelessness and Housing Policies.

Lopez: What do you make of the Central Park incident on Sunday and the coverage of it?

Tucker: The main thing it illustrates is the fear of so many people, and their inability to face the reality of the situation. The one thing about liberals is that they always refuse to look reality in the face. They refuse to recognize that you've got a population of barely civilized people out there, basically young men, minority young men. Nobody has said a word about whether these were blacks or Hispanics who did this on Sunday. It's kind of ironic to me because they seem to be mostly black, and this was the Puerto Rican Day parade. So, in effect, Puerto Ricans are getting a bad rap because a bunch of black kids came in and disrupted the whole thing.

The fact is we are always on the edge of uncivilization. You don't have to look very far to realize that this kind of thing can happen anywhere, at any time. I live in a neighborhood where I can confront these kinds of gangs of kids anytime I want to. We're four doors away from a technical high school, which draws mostly black kids from everywhere in New York. And everyone in the neighborhood lives in fear of them. I've seen them threatening storekeepers over a candy bar or something. There's a constant possibility of violence. These kids basically live lives that are steeped in physicality. What always happens is when something like this just bursts out, its much easier to get mad at the people who are peripherally involved. It's like gun control — let's get rid of the guns and then we won't have people who are using them. Here it's the cops: "Why didn't the cops do something?"

Two days before it happened, the Daily News ran an account of the 1935 Harlem riots. These were the famous riots when some Chinese laundry hung up a sign "Me Colored Too." I had never realized how those happened. The riots were kicked off because there was a white department store, Kress's department store. A Spanish kid was stopped for shoplifting in the store. Some woman saw him being taken in the back for questioning and ran out and spread the rumor that he was being beaten. So, as it happened, there was a funeral home right around the corner that usually parked its hearses outside the funeral home. But they didn't have a place to park so they parked outside of Kress's that morning. When crowds started assembling after the rumor spread, through the neighborhood, that a kid was being beaten, they saw the hearse. So the story quickly became that a kid had been beaten to death in the basement of this department store. In fact, the kid had been questioned for about five minutes and then had been sent home. Once a rumor gets started like that, who's going to stop it? So you have the famous Harlem riots of 1935 which lasted for several days and destroyed most of Harlem.

Who's to say that couldn't have happened at the parade on Sunday? You had a million, mostly Puerto Rican people down on Fifth Avenue and the Central Park area who mostly live uptown. Just imagine if a band of forty cops had tried to corral this gang of kids. First of all, nobody would have done a thing, they would have all been innocent. And you would have had a riot. You would have had the Puerto Rican Day Riots of 2000, easily.

Lopez: What should be said about the police? Is there a Catch-22 they're stuck with?

Tucker: Sure. They're damned if they don't; at the very same moment Bruce Springsteen was at Madison Square Garden singing his anthem about police brutality.. So what do you expect? The scapegoating of the police is just avoiding the problem.

Lopez: Does the scapegoating of the police create problems like this?

Tucker: Well, you've got your choice. This is the great "Broken Windows" theory, that controlling public behavior is the key to controlling crime. They've done it. The changes in New York are beyond belief. My son is going to play football at Stuyvestant next week. So we went in for an orientation last week and they showed us some film clips about the Stuyvestant football team. One of them was about ten, twelve years old. And the team had to practice in a park on the East Side. And the camera had followed them over for practice. There was drug-dealing everywhere. The film showed cash going back and forth. And then the football players said often the bus gets stoned as we show up and leave. And all of a sudden that all came flooding back. That behavior was commonplace ten years ago.

I remember a couple of columnists reporting it, just at the end of the Dinkins era. There were gang wars after school. There was this whole underground world of gang confrontation. Once, somewhere in midtown, a subway station filled up with kids after school and all of a sudden, Wham! Things blew up. For half an hour, people just fought hand-to hand on the subway platform. There were undercover cops there--totally outnumbered, fighting to survive. This kind of thing had just spread everywhere. For about ten years the cops had taken the attitude, "we're just out here to earn our paychecks." And so they basically looked the other way on these things.

Then, ten years ago, they started controlling public behavior. It made a difference. It made the difference that people like James Q. Wilson always predicted it would. But it has run up to a point of diminishing returns. It all started with the Diallo thing. That happened in February 1999-more than a year ago. But it has just reverberated. Here we are, 18 months later, and Springsteen is singing a song. It's going to be one of those never- say-die issues.

I think Giuliani could have done a little better job by co-opting this whole thing. By saying that Diallo was a martyr. By saying that this kind of thing will never happen again. By naming a park after him, and turning him into a hero. Then he would be a civic hero, not an anti-cop hero. Giuliani had a little bit of the bunker mentality obviously, but just read the papers. A week ago Giuliani was a kinder, gentler fellow, was more considerate of the rights of suspects and minorities. Now, a week later, where the hell was he? He didn't burst into tears when he heard these stories. He actually tried to downplay them a little. It's just bizarre how you can say totally contradictory things within a week of each other and nobody is embarrassed about it.

You've got a choice. The Daily News finally ran a decent article this morning where they went out and actually interviewed some cops. And the cops said sure, the attitude at the Puerto Rican parade is we're not going to police. We're not going to hassle people over marijuana. We're not going to bust people for being disorderly-just like the St. Patrick's Day parade used to be. Finally somebody was killed at the St. Patrick's Day parade, so last year they decided they were going to crack down on it. But if you try that with the Puerto Rican Day parade or the Jamaican Day parade, you're racial-profiling. It's sickening the way people won't realize the racial aspects.

You have this woman writing on the Times op-ed page who lives right in my neighborhood. She said that she was jogging in the park and was harassed. No mention that the kids were black. You don't even have to ask. "But no, this is sexism. Hate crimes against women." It's just simple unbridled sexuality. Feminists never understand that these are not hate crimes. Guys like to paw women, they're not expressing contempt. You've got the possibility for that kind of behavior anywhere, anytime.

Lopez: With Springsteen songs and the like, do you see the city reversing?

Tucker: I think crime is back. It's a very fragile coalition that can contain it.

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