Afraid of Crime Now? Join The Kids

Times Square. In its colorful and danger-filled heyday of the 1970s and ’80s, porn shops, drug pushers, prostitutes and pistol-toting stickup men were the price of admission. But the venue has been a tourist-friendly commercial strip for some 15 years. In early April, for few minutes, that changed.

On Easter night, a series of brawls and violent confrontations broke out in Times Square and nearby Herald Square among roaming bands of youths, reportedly resulting in the shooting of three women and one man, whose ages ranged from 18 to 21. A 20-year-old Bronx man was arrested in two of the shootings. The New York Police Department alleges that a rowdy group, including some who are gang-affiliated, caused the mayhem after flocking to the area for the annual New York International Auto Show at the Jacob Javits Convention Center. More than 50 youths were arrested or given summonses for disorderly conduct. Although some who were picked up later claimed that they were wrongly apprehended at the scene, what isn’t in dispute is that while the injuries among the wounded weren’t life-threatening, the incident—which garnered newspaper and television coverage worldwide—stoked old fears. The mayor called it “wilding.”

Some of the old anxiety had already been creeping back. The citywide murder rate rose nearly 23 percent in the first 11 weeks of the year compared with 2009. Despite multiple economic challenges facing the city, the mayor in his executive budget reversed proposed cuts that would have reduced the NYPD head count. Ostensibly, the move was a reaction to the failed May 1 terrorist bombing. But the proposal to cut cops had people anxious well before Faisal Shahzad left his SUV parked in Times Square.

For many New Yorkers, however, crime isn’t news. While peace has prevailed in much of the city for most of the past 15 years, there are plenty of neighborhoods where the presence of guns, as well as their deadly consequences, are routine. And it’s a reality that no single demographic in New York City knows quite as intimately as its youth.

In 2008 more than a quarter of the city’s gun-violence victims were age 16 and younger. Some experts fear that the onset of summer—with more teens out and about, fewer jobs available and budget-busted services—will contribute to a rise in youth-related gun violence. Those observers point to cases like the fatal shooting in May of two teenage bystanders in the Bronx—Marvin Wiggins, Junior, 15, and Quanisha Wright, 16. Two Bronx men in their 20s have since been arrested in the case. “The story is not that something—for all practical purposes—‘unprecedented’ happened in Times Square,” says David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “We still have poor communities of color where mothers are afraid, kids are getting shot, kids are getting killed, and every young man knows somebody who has been killed. That’s the story.” It’s not all about numbers. Individual shootings have an impact that a digit (there were 1,800 shooting victims in the city in 2007, the last year the city provided that figure) doesn’t convey.

In July 2008, Brooklyn native Dwayne Hyde—then a 25-year-old employee with the Steve Madden shoe company at the Kings Plaza shopping mall—hopped on his motorcycle and rode alongside several friends to attend a nighttime barbecue in Flatbush. “We were heading out to a different barbecue in Queens because a friend of mine wanted to use our bikes in a music video,” he recalls. “That’s where I really wanted to go.” But Hyde agreed to briefly stop o with his friends at the barbecue being held on the intersection on East 59th Street and Glenwood Avenue. “I saw a lot of people that I knew, so I was just greeting everybody,” he says. “The whole time I was there, I was just keeping my eyes open. Anytime I’m in a large crowd, I’m always aware that something could happen.” Nearly five minutes later, something did. As he sat on his motorcycle and waited for other friends to join him for the ride to Queens, Hyde answered a cell phone call and watched a green Oldsmobile roll by. Within moments, he heard what he initially thought had been fireworks. “I heard, ‘pop, pop, pop’ through my right ear. And as soon as I turned, I got hit by the bullet.”