Fear City

A Delightful Stroll thru NYC's previous Dystopia

Image 1. The cover of the notorious pamphlet.

Subversion by New York's Finest

New York City was a mess in the 1970s and 1980s. Generous, I know, but let's not bury Mayors like Abe Beam, Ed Koch, and David Dinkins. Any way you slice it, NYC was far from the glory days of previous decades. The pictures of conflict and decay were quite telling, but a pamphlet known as Fear City is one of the most compelling artifacts from that period. The stark and direct pamphlet serves as an interesting case study to show the chaos that the Mayor's office tried to stop outside its walls was penetrating inside its walls. The police, the guarantors of safety and security in the city, conducted an active influence campaign to undermine the Mayor.    

The Roots of the Pamphlet

The lack of fiscal accountability might have been the first domino that started New York City's decay. Liberal excesses and optimism saddled the city with $10 billion in debt. The situation was desperate, and even the Ford Administration refused to help. This led to the famous New York Daily News headline: Ford to City: Drop Dead.  

Concurrent with the fiscal situation was a city that appeared to be dying:

Image 2. Daily New York carnage in the 1970s.

"Trash littered the streets. Landlords abandoned buildings because they couldn't pay property taxes…there was a pervasive sense that the social order was breaking down. Most subway trains were filthy, covered in graffiti inside and out. Often only one – and sometimes no – carriage door would open when they pulled into a station, and in summer, they were "cooled" only by the methodical sweep of a begrimed metal fan."

Image 3. That's not exactly what he said, but it's a great headline

Without external assistance, the city had to tighten their belts. This came as cuts in the police, fire, and sanitation departments by then-Mayor Abe Beam. The police force was not going to take this. There was no visible strike or nonviolent demonstration representative of the previous decade's Civil Rights movement. Instead, they took a page from Lenin and produced something Saul Alinsky would have been proud of.

Some cannier and subversive minds within the NYPD produced a pamphlet whose front page read Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York. Taking it further, they distributed it in an area that would cause embarrassment and lost revenue for the city: significant ports of entry. NYC was still a major tourist destination despite the violent crime, arson, and dysfunctional civil services.   

In the summer of 1975, tourists and other New York visitors were handed the macabre at the airport by actual off-duty police officers. The pamphlet attributed ownership of the material to the Council on Public Safety. The nine rules in the pamphlet encouraged tourists to stay only in Manhattan, avoid public transit, stay inside past 6:00 PM, don't walk, and others. Above the nine rules was the cautionary Good Luck maxim from none other than the Grim Reaper in all 1 million of the pamphlets.  

The Council on Public Safety and the plainclothes disseminators did not fool Abe Beame. He understood the police union and its members were directly challenging his leadership. This new "low in responsibility" prompted Beam to direct city lawyers to crush the insurgency in the courts. The robust union contracts, rules, and inertia that progressive politicians had pushed over the previous decades now served as a vulnerability as the rights of the police were upheld.          

The Effect

"Crime cannot be tolerated. Criminals thrive on the indulgence of society's understanding."

Ra's al Ghul, Batman Begins.

If the effect was to draw attention to the plight of NYC and create a representative artifact for the time, then Fear City worked. The pamphlet further cemented the idea "the idea that anything could happen, anywhere, at any time." While distribution lasted two days, it was impactful. New York City workers went as far as to visit Europe to counter the negative narrative and ensure tourism.    

Curiously, the union leaders "persuading their members to throw $2.5 billion in pension funds behind the city's bonds" revitalized the city. But it did little to help the city. The 1980s saw a deepening of despair and crime and the introduction of two new epidemics: Crime persisted in the 1980s, as did crack and HIV/AIDS. Wall Street's resurgence and a drop in unemployment helped to provide a cheerful veneer for the city, but crime was still climbing or maintaining.

Image 3. New York Crime Rates over time.    

It wasn't until 1994 that crime in New York City finally went down, possibly due to the aggressive "broken windows strategy" implemented by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton. Broken Windows hypothesized that the city's environment itself had to be transformed. Visible signs of minor crime and dysfunction encourage further crime and disorder, including rioting, murder, rape, and theft. If you give criminals an inch, they will take a mile. Stomping out minor infractions was imperative. Broken Windows advocated targeting petty crimes (e.g., vandalism, loitering, jaywalking, etc.) to yield an orderly city. Police aggressively prosecuted minor violations. No longer could you skip the turnstile. While the effects of Broken Windows are still debated, there was at least a parallel correlation between the policies and an improved city.

New York City rebounded throughout the 1990s and reached its zenith mid-2010s. However, at a point, New Yorkers seemed to get a point of exhaustion. By trading one fear for another, New Yorkers accepted an increased sense of constant surveillance and apprehension of immediate prosecution for minor infractions. By 2013, New Yorkers became skeptical of this policing, typified by the stop-and-frisk policy. The election of Bill de Blasio was a return to the attitude of City Hall from the 1960s. Trade-offs of perceived racial inequities from programs like stop and frisk and nationwide deaths at the hands of police led to a reversal of much of the policies of the previous ten years. With the Black Swan event of COVID-19, the indulgence of violent protestors, and decreased police activity, the city has returned to its 1970s tumult.         

New York City Today

"Bill de Blassio has done more to destroy New York City than Mohammad Atta."

Michael Malice, writer 

"On the way here, I saw a fan who was so happy to see me he collapsed in front of me with a needle in his arm."

Aaron Berg, comedian

Fear City is back. Today, residents are concerned that New York "is heading back to the dark days with crime and disorder on the rise even as $ 1 billion is slashed from the NYPD." People are expressing their dissatisfaction with their feet. Many New Yorkers and New Jersey residents who commuted into New York left the area to safer pastures in Tennessee, Texas, the Carolinas, and other states where crime is contained.

New York continues on its downward trajectory. It will be some time before New York can return to its former glory. There is a natural asymmetry between building and destruction. The former takes infinitely more time than the latter. Eric Adams appears to have no strategy to save the city; thus, Fear City has returned.