TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082090/0820108.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.2 KB | 154 lines

                ═                                                              NATION, Page 44

The Littlest Victims


An epidemic of random violence tests New York City's new mayor

By JOELLE ATTINGER/NEW YORK -- With reporting by Stephen Pomper
and Janice C. Simpson/New York


    At a little after 4 p.m. on a humid summer day,
nine-month-old Rayvon Jamison was maneuvering his
blue-and-white walker toward the refrigerator in his
grandmother's kitchen. Suddenly, seven 9-mm bullets ripped
through the tin-plated front door, one piercing his tiny body.
Rayvon's chilling shrieks of pain shot through the dingy pale
brick apartment building in the Highbridge section of the
Bronx. His mother Esther scooped up the bleeding child and ran
down five flights of stairs and into the street screaming,
"They shot my baby! They shot my baby!" Within the hour Rayvon
was dead, the innocent victim of a pointless quarrel involving
a neighbor's caricature on a T-shirt.

    A little piece of New York City died with him. Rayvon was
the fourth child to be killed by a stray gunshot in less than
nine days and the second to perish within the safety of his own
home. By the time he was buried last week, yet another child
had been fatally shot and three more wounded. The slain
children are called mushrooms in street lingo -- as vulnerable
as plants underfoot. Their deaths have pushed New Yorkers,
already reeling from a daunting inventory of urban ills, to a
new depth of despair. "The job of taking back our streets
requires an all-out assault on every front," said Mayor David
Dinkins. "We must restore confidence and security."

    More than the epidemic of homelessness, more than inadequate
schools, filthy streets, high taxes and the outrageous cost of
living, violent crime is gnawing at the soul of the city that
thinks of itself as the embodiment of American energy and
creativity. The random nature of such crime spares no one. As
the case against three of the alleged participants in the
brutal rape and assault of a young female jogger in Central
Park last year drew to a close, a 33-year-old advertising
executive was shot to death while returning a phone call on a
quiet Greenwich Village street.

    Lee Brown, the police commissioner brought from Houston by
Dinkins to lead the 26,000-officer force, acknowledges the
anxiety. "The top priority has to be public safety," says
Brown. "That's the basic function of government." But with
violent deaths mounting so quickly that the homicide record of
1,905 set last year appears likely to be broken, the ability
of Brown and Dinkins to restore security to the city's streets
is in doubt.

    Both Brown and the mayor have admitted as much, citing harsh
budgetary constraints, the absence of tough federal gun-control
laws and the slew of social ills that are at the core of urban
warfare. "People know that I'm not responsible for the crime
rate," says Dinkins. "They know that crime is directly
attributable to drug addiction." The mayor may well be right.
But Dinkins' statements strike many New Yorkers as a dismaying
confession that government has no remedy for the mayhem that
has made toddlers unsafe in their own homes.

    The rash of child killings has renewed questions about
whether the calm and dignified Dinkins is tough enough to cope
with his city's myriad woes. A reactive politician, New York's
first black mayor has long preferred the back room to the front
line, opting time and again for private negotiations over
public displays of leadership. His soothing style suited a city
bruised by the abrasive and divisive style of his predecessor,
three-term mayor Edward I. Koch. But it has served him poorly
in reassuring New York's 8 million people that he is in charge.
"Dinkins doesn't match up against the problems of this city,"
says Mitchell Moss, director of the Urban Research Center at
New York University. "He presides rather than leads."

    In fact, it took the 63-year-old mayor nearly two weeks to
address concerns about the current crime wave, and even then
his response was paltry. With minimal fanfare, Dinkins
announced on Aug. 3 a 60-day amnesty for all those who turned
in illegal firearms, an idea that failed miserably when it was
first tried 10 years ago. By week's end only 12 weapons had
been received, a minuscule fraction of the arsenal of 16,214
illicit guns that police seized last year. Stung by the
derision that greeted his amnesty plan, Dinkins then proposed
squeezing $24 million out of the city's $28 billion budget to
hire 1,058 new policemen. "Now we are striking back," he said.
It was a painful about-face for Dinkins. As a candidate last
year, he pledged to be the "toughest mayor on crime ever." But
the city's $1.8 billion budget shortfall forced him to renege
on his promise to hire more police officers as soon as he
assumed office in January. As recently as Aug. 1, Dinkins had
publicly chastised city council members for jumping the gun by
proposing additional budget cuts in order to hire more police.


    Even after the new officers hit the streets next spring, the
city's police force will be 14% smaller than it was in 1975.
Since then violent crime has increased more than 25%. Most
experts agree that the most significant cause of the surge is
an epidemic of crack cocaine that has infected all five of the
city's boroughs. "The drug scene has no conscience," says city
council member Priscilla Wooten, whose Brooklyn neighborhood
is one of the city's deadliest. "It used to be that you spared
children. That's no longer the case." Residents of such areas
are convinced that simply adding more police, while welcome,
will not be enough to stop the violence. Says Gloria Corley,
48, a community activist and native East New Yorker: "Cops can't
come into homes, can't heal family problems and can't stop
drugs from being there."

    No longer willing or able to wait for government to help
them regain control of their streets, neighborhood groups are
assuming the responsibility themselves. At least 375
crime-watch groups have formed the Alliance for a Drug Free
City, and according to director Sally Dunford, the
organization's ranks are swelling daily. "People say this is my
city and I'm going to do something about it," she says. David
McKenzie is one of them. When crack moved into his Bronx
neighborhood five years ago, the youth counselor openly
confronted dealers, organized his neighbors into a community
patrol and raised more than $50,000 to launch a local youth
center that provides job counseling and recreational
opportunities for some 70 neighborhood children.

    But for Marie Laroche, such laudable efforts are too little,
too late. Her five-month-old son Pierre was sound asleep in bed
in the Laroches' Manhattan apartment last week when a .38-cal.
bullet, fired in an adjoining apartment, pierced his bedroom
wall and lodged itself beneath the skin on his forehead.
Miraculously, the child survived. If she could, Laroche would
turn her back on the American Dream and return to her native
Haiti. "Violence is something I expected coming here," says the
27-year-old mother of three, "but now my dream is to get out
of here."