Another Reason to Love New York City and the NYPD

They now arrest school children for doodling on their desks.

There was a time, back in the `80s and `90s, when New York City had close to 2,000 homicides a year. In the `70s, when the city had severe money problems, it was often a nasty, filthy and dangerous place to be. There were portions of the Bronx and Brooklyn that looked as though the Luftwaffe had just finished bombing raids. The city put glass in the windows of abandoned buildings that faced the Penn Central (now Metro North) tracks in the South Bronx and put decals that looked like curtains and shades on the insides of the windows, so they would look less decrepit. There were police precincts that were nicknamed "Fort Apache" and "the Planet of the Apes". If you were driving in Manhattan and stopped at a stoplight, some bum would come out with a filthy squeegee and "clean" your windshield for a quarter (and throw a rock through it if you stiffed him). Times Square was one of the great porno centers and you could probably buy any illicit item you could carry away.

But then Giuliani cleaned up and Disneyfied Times Square. The squeegee men were run off. Crime went down (for reasons more to do with demographics and the collapse of the crack bubble) and the violent crime rate dropped to near historic lows.

So that is why the NYPD has time to go around arresting school kids for drawing on their desks.

(H/T)