#Progressives’ dreams will send New York right back to ’70s blight

In 1974, a great movie called “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” featured the hijacking of a subway car. The crooks demand a million-dollar ransom from New York City. “Goddamit,” yells the mayor, “this city doesn’t have a million dollars!”

No one-liner was ever so prophetic. The following year, in mid-October 1975, New York City owed its creditors a payment of $453 million — and had exactly $34 million on hand the day before the bill came due.

Yes, this nation’s largest city had the equivalent of two quarters and some lint in its collective pocket when the bill collector came to call.

What I’m saying is we’ve seen this movie before. And we could be heading for a remake.

Before the riots and looting of the past week, New Yorkers were facing existential questions about their continued residence in the city going forward. Primarily this: How can we stay here when the compensating pleasures of a life lived in crowds might be putting us and our families in danger?

The economic crash caused by the coronavirus response also raised the prospect of an increasing tax burden in this very highly taxed city to deal with the inevitable budgetary shortfalls that will come in its wake — which will inevitably mean paying more for fewer services.

Now, however, there’s a third existential question: How can we stay here when we’ve seen mass lawlessness go unpunished and the authorities in charge entirely ineffectual (at best) when it comes to keeping the streets safe?

The dream vision of the newest generation of activist urban politicians — living in a world in which job-creating businesses like Amazon are treated like pariahs and the systems by which law is enforced are viewed as enforcers of inequality and injustice — is getting closer to reality.

And people who were already thinking of fleeing for their health are thinking even harder about hitting the road to protect their personal safety and long-term security.

Nationwide, nightmarish images of apparent police misconduct are fueling a radical movement against policing itself — the idea being that cops in the United States should be defined not by the protection they provide but by the exceptional monsters that arise occasionally in their midst.

No matter. Julia Salazar, a self-described socialist state senator representing Brooklyn, is thrilled by the prospect of slashing police budgets.

“To see legislators who aren’t even necessarily on the left supporting at least a significant decrease in New York Police Department funding is really very encouraging,” she told The Guardian.

It’s encouraging if you know nothing about history.

In the 1960s and 1970s, police officers in New York City lost the confidence of the public. To some degree, this was well-deserved, as investigations uncovered deep corruption and official policies (so-called “911 policing”) changed priorities from preventing crime to showing up on the scene after the crimes had been committed.

Just when cops were needed most, they were at their most ineffectual. And that may be the long-term consequence of the current sustained effort to delegitimize their profession.

It was surely not lost on anyone with eyes that adding an ideological and racial element to an act of raw economic criminality like looting immediately places the authorities in this city and elsewhere on the spiritual and actual defensive. And so a new tool has been added to the felon’s kit.

Add all of this together and you get a recipe for depopulation. In 1970, New York City had a population of 7.8 million. In 1980, New York City had a population of 7 million.

The fiscal crisis of 1975 was due in large part to those missing taxpayers, almost all of them middle class and almost all of them refugees to the suburbs.

The crime wave that began in 1964 haunted the lives of everyone in the city. And as the government’s bank account began to deplete itself, so did the city’s resources. Garbage pickup slowed. Street cleaning slowed. Grassy parkland became the exception rather than the rule.

It took 20 years, the end of the three-decade crime wave and the astonishing growth of the financial-services sector beginning in 1983 for the city’s numbers to return to those of 1970 — and grow beyond that in the next 20 to 8.5 million.

The flight to safety may be upon us again. And we’ll see how Julia Salazar, who’s 29 years old, likes living in and trying to govern a city with broken finances, a broken police department and the menace and despair that rose from the pavement like the intolerable, shimmering heat of a New York City summer.

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