Some commentators can't understand why the American public isn't more upset about the flogging that Michael Fay faces in Singapore. Can it be that the barbarity of the punishment isn't clear? Well, no. After more than a month of increasingly graphic journalistic descriptions of Singaporean caning, a large percentage of Americans still show strong support for the sentence to be carried out.
Newsweek's polls showed 38 percent for caning, 52 percent against. In Fay's hometown of Dayton, Ohio, a newspaper poll showed 2-to-1 support for the punishment. A five-day nonscientific poll by one computer service drew 60,000 responses, with 75 percent in favor of the caning, 20 percent opposed. And because computer services are expensive, that poll is heavily weighted toward upscale, allegedly enlightened opinion.
It is possible that much of the public is just so angry about crime that it wants somebody bloodied. Or, more likely, the public may be using these polls as referendums on public disorder. Given a narrow choice between seeming permissive and seeming stern, many are choosing the latter. Fay's 10-day vandalism spree wasn't a major crime. But as columnist Charles Krauthammer said, the anti-Fay poll results might be "a natural reaction to the laissez faire, everything-goes regime of the past 30 years -- vagrancy, panhandling, vandalism, public displays of all sorts -- that has given our cities a palpable sense of danger and decay."
Krauthammer thinks a backlash is coming, possibly with calls for an authoritarian solution. But that's alarmist. An orderly retreat from the extreme libertarianism that produced social chaos in many cities is already well underway. Some cities on the West Coast, for example, have new ordinances to cope with public disorder, often explicitly passed so that the disasters that happened to the older Eastern cities wouldn't repeat themselves in the West.
Keep walking. Seattle, for instance, has a new "sit down" ordinance that prohibits sitting or lying down on sidewalks in downtown and commercial zones between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. Unlike the old vagrancy laws, the ordinance was drawn narrowly to focus on behavior, and it was upheld last month by a federal judge. The ordinance was aimed at people who were camping out on sidewalks, sometimes with their pets and belongings. As merchants complained and shoppers began to think twice about going downtown, the city recognized what was at stake and acted.
Some of the older cities are finally acting, too. Having learned the lesson that public disorder often leads to rising crime, they now know that the reverse is also true: Eliminating disorder can lead to a falling crime rate. New York's Transit Authority wiped the subway system clean of graffiti and kept it clean, and banned panhandling and made it stick in court.
Transit police consciously zeroed in on signs of disorder, targeting smokers and fare beaters. The campaign convinced the public that the subways were at last under control, and the subway crime rate fell by 36 percent between 1990 and 1993. "By maintaining order," said a spokesman, "we've created a climate where less crime occurs."
Now the same approach is being tried above ground, starting with the squeegeemen -- the often menacing windshield washers who approach drivers at bridges and tunnels. A study showed that there were about 70 squeegeemen in Manhattan; a majority with criminal records, most with drug or alcohol problems. The city found an old statute forbidding any approach to drivers for the purpose of washing windshields. Police informed the men that they were breaking the law and told them to stop. After summonses were issued (all of them ignored), the men who persisted were arrested and spent a day in jail. Now, says Deputy Chief Michael Julian, "There are no squeegee guys in Manhattan."
The city has just launched a new antitruancy campaign. Police are patrolling seven areas, including Times Square and Coney Island. Youngsters who can't explain why they aren't in school are taken to a designated school, and their principal and parents are notified. As writer Heather Mac Donald said, "In many neighborhoods, truants rule the streets, imprisoning the elderly in their own homes and terrorizing merchants." Getting thousands of truants off the streets is a tall order, but Mayor Rudy Giuliani is determined to show his commitment to order and reasonable social expectations -- like showing up in school if you belong there.
Criminologist George Kelling, who consulted with the city on the antisqueegee campaign, thinks the whole country is beginning to get the message on urban disorder. "I don't want to be a naive optimist," he says, "but I think a new consensus is forming." He thinks people understand now that things have gone too far and it is time to pull back. He says, "That's why the liberal bastions of the West Coast that thought they would be immune to what happened in the East have changed."
That consensus is on the nature of the problem and the disastrous costs of the anything-goes ethic. The tricky part is shoring up the social order without trampling on individual liberties. As Kelling says, the campaign to restore public order must be a noble one.
