I am not an archaeologist but for decades I have searched for two lost cities. I knew they once existed. I lived in them. One was called New York. The other was Mexico City. Across the years, I have lived through a certain amount of despair, believing they could never be found again. I whispered about their vanished glories to my children. Or I would be at a party and hear a song from one of those lost cities and try to explain them to strangers. I described glistening towers and unconquerable palaces, temples of art and music, of exuberant theaters and noisy cafes, ballgames and prizefights in jammed arenas, and long safe walks on crowded summer evenings. I described cities where most of the residents were content and many were even happy. Usually my auditors were very polite and smiled in a patronizing way. Sometimes they were merely bored. They lived with the savage evidence of the present. Nothing so deadens a conversation than another man’s unshared nostalgia.

Then, astonishingly, one of the lost cities began to rise again from the dark mists. Suddenly, about five years ago, there again was New York. There again was the city in which I was born, the city where I was young and believed each day in tomorrow. The barbarians were in retreat. The mossy covering of evil and fear was being scraped from its surface. I found myself walking again in the evenings, showing the lost city to my wife, who had never known it in the days of its many wonders. I wandered again, as I did when young, through Chinatown and Harlem. I bought Willie Colon records on 135th Street in the neighborhood we once called El Barrio. I sat alone in the Cloisters. Who would ever take a taxi if the subway was safe and swift and filled with the faces of New York? One evening I sat on a low brick wall outside our Manhattan apartment house and watched people walking by. I realized that I hadn’t done that for more than 30 years. I thought: it’s over. The siege has lifted. And here again, a little more of it appearing each day, is my lost city.

The other city, poor ruined Tenochitlan, remains lost in the mist, sinking deeper each day into the bogs of the old lake.

Epoca de Oro

I first saw Mexico City in the late summer of 1956. I was 21 and wanted to be a painter. Since I had served in the U.S. Navy, I was entitled to the G.I. Bill of Rights, one of the greatest pieces of social legislation of the century. Former servicemen were entitled to low-cost mortgages and to a college education. I chose to use my benefits at Mexico City College, out on the Carretera Toluca, and it was the best year of my life. By the end of that year, I had failed out of painting into writing, and went home to begin my life.

Mexico did that to me, and for me. It did so in a city of extraordinary beauty. There were 3.5 million human beings in that city and it truly was la region mas transparente del aire. The sky was always a scrubbed blue and you could see Popocateptl and Iztaccihuatl in the clear mornings. Trolley cars still ran on Insurgentes. There were cars and taxis and peseros on the Paseo de la Reforma but not enough of them to require traffic lights. My friends and I lived in different places: on Melchor Ocampo before the highway (NAME TK) poisoned the air; in a small street called Bahia de Morlaco at the bottom of Ejercito Nacional; in another place near a flower market, the name lost to the past. My friends and I had very little money, so we walked everywhere.

We walked in the mornings and we walked at night. Above all, we walked without fear. In that lost city, the nights were full of music drifting from cantinas: Cuco Sanchez and Agustin Lara, Tona La Negra and Los Tres Caballeros. Who could resist a lament from a bed of stone? Or refuse to share in the celebration of the beautiful Maria? Or not join in protest against the tyranny of the clock? We went through the swinging doors and said buenos noches and ordered cervezas. Of course. At first, we were objects of curiosity, strange gringos indeed. But nobody ever told us to leave. In those bars, we listened to arguments about the relative merits of the boxers Raton Macias and Pajarito Moreno, and entered our own tentative votes for Toluco Lopez. We drank Carta Blanca or Bohemia and smoked Negritos and wished we could live here forever.

Sometimes, if the G.I. Bill check had just arrived, we would walk down Avenida Juarez to San Juan de Letran, passing beautiful enameled women coming out of the Regis or the Del Prado on the arms of short tough men. We’d go to see the great shows in the burlesque houses or drift to the Plaza Garibaldi and nurse beer in the Tenampa or the Guadalajara del Noche. If we had some money left, we would take taxis home, or pile into a pesero with strangers. We never felt in danger.

Neither did anyone else.This was not an illusion; the statistics show that in the mid-1950s, reported crimes per 100,000 inhabitants had dropped from 2200 in the early 1930s to about 1400 (today the average is more than 3000, with many crimes going unreported by disillusioned citizens. In the mid-1950s, we who were Mexican and we who were fortunate visitors, were living in la epoca de oro and didn’t know it. Those who were there are not slobbering old fools mourning their lost youth. Their nostalgias are genuine. I know. I was there.

This is not to say that my other lost city – Mexico -- was free of corruption; no city in the world has been free of corruption. It was just more discrete, more subtle, less pervasive than it is now. The bureaucracy had not expanded into a gigantic sludge machine, its wheels perpetually clogged by incessant demands, exhaustion, and sloth, to be moved only with the grease of the bribe. The figure of Artemio Cruz was certainly a real presence; you could see him in the booths of the Regis. But there seemed to be enough left of the ideals of the Revolution to stop short of the blatant robbery of the poor. And there was a certain restraint at work. In that lost city, no policeman waved a motorist through a stop sign in order to have a second policeman stop him at the next corner to extort a mordida. I suppose there were petty racketeers among the Mexican police of the 1950s, and some brutal thugs, just as there were among the New York police. I just never saw them. The police of those days were young, slim, proud of their uniforms and their jobs and themselves. If they had any large vanity it was to look as much as possible like Pedro Infante.

Nor could anyone claim that Mexico City in the 1950s was free of violence. Again, there has been no urban society that was ever free of violence and there is none today. Men get drunk and kill their wives. Women are pushed too far and murder their husbands. Everywhere on earth, human beings have a genius for cheating and killing. Thirty centuries of human experience have taught us that it is generally a good principle of behavior to leave another man’s wife alone or if you are a woman, to avoid married men. Such common sense is still ignored and at a certain hour of the night, erotic drama has a way of leaping into personal melodrama. In other cases, there is no romance required for the use of a pistol or a knife. When alcohol bonds with the codes of machismo, men can die in arguments over change left on the bar. In our lost Mexico, we would read such sad and foolish tales in Ovaciones, sigh, and then turn to the sports pages. Our own tabloids in New York told stories with the same familiar plots.

But in the newspapers of the lost city of Mexico, there were no stories of kidnappings, in which the police themselves were among the criminals. There were no tales of ears sliced off to make a point. No chilling episodes of masked bands entering restaurants with machine guns. No blaring headlines about gunmen turning in taxicabs to rob and murder the innocent.

The most terrible headlines of all were on TK DATE 1947. That was when Pedro Infante died. There was a mournful, grave sadness when Diego Rivera died that same year. Many years later I saw public grief on the day Colosio was murdered. But on the day Pedro Infante died, people ran in the streets without control, waving their hands in anger and grief, cursing the gods, old and new. Old women embraced their grand daughters and held them tight. Traffic slowed as men jumped from automobiles to buys newspaper with screaming headlines. Bells tolled incessantly. Men got drunk. That day, on the sidewalk outside the Cine Diana, I even saw a policeman weep.

He must be old now, that policeman, or dead. If he is alive, he must remember that day every time he hears Pedro Infante on the radio or sees him on in black-and-white on television in an old movie on a Saturday morning. Look at his smile. Listen to the song, as he wakes a woman from sleep in a second-story bedroom. Watch him do battle with villains. If that policeman weeps now, it is surely for that city of his youth and mine, when millions of human beings were still so innocent that could cry for a movie star.


The Fall of New York

New York was far ahead of Mexico City in the plunge into urban barbarism. This is not the place for a detailed examination of what happened, but the causes were all connected. Most important of all was the collapse of manufacturing. Between 1955 and the end of the 1970s, New York lost almost one million manufacturing jobs. These were the jobs that made life possible for people like my father, who came to New York from Ireland in 1923 with an eighth grade education. Around his job in a factory (supplemented by my mother’s work in a hospital, and then as a cashier in a movie house), he formed a family of seven children, of which I was the oldest. New York was not a mono-industrial city like Detroit. Most of these jobs were in small factories, employing an average of 20 men, and some women; the largest employed several hundred. They were scattered through the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, while the garment manufacturers dominated Manhattan. In the late 1950s, many of them began to flee to the American South, where unions were weak, or to places where there were no unions at all.

At the same time, the great migration of African-Americans from the fields of the South to the cities of the North was gathering momentum. Hundreds of thousands of young black men had been in the armed forces, fighting for the country into which they had been born; they were not going to accept the old ways of segregation in the Deep South. They wanted the lights of cities. They wanted educations for themselves and their children. They wanted doctors. They wanted safety from the night riders of the Ku Klux Klan. In short: they wanted what exists in cities: civilization.

Automation had also arrived on the farms of the south; where a hundred men once picked cotton, now a machine did the work, with a half dozen men to operate it. Life became a daily struggle for work and food. That meant it was time for proud men to leave. Listen to Joe Williams sing with Count Basie: Going to Chicago, sorry, but I can’t take you… and you can feel some of the emotions of that immense human migration, and find clues about the social damage it did to families. It is similar in that narrow way to the great internal migration of campesinos to Mexico City.

But there was the heart of the problem: the migration began at almost the exact moment that the jobs were vanishing. The result was a cold degrading poverty, far from home. Welfare replaced work. There were about 150,000 people on welfare in New York in 1955, and by 1992, the figure was 1,200,000. In some neighborhoods, and in too many families, children grew up without ever knowing anyone who had worked. Too many grew up without fathers, as more and more defeated or brutalized men abandoned their women and children. There should have been no surprises about what followed: drug addiction, alcoholism, violence.

In black neighborhoods, the middle class began to follow their white counterparts in flight to the suburbs. When I was young in the 1950s, I could go to Harlem and hear Count Basie at the Apollo or Ben Webster in Small’s Paradise. One evening, I saw Duke Ellington walk out of a restaurant called Frank’s, looking more aristocratic than any European duke who ever lived. If he impressed me, he bowled over the young black kids who were hanging around on 125th Street. They looked at him as if they’d had a vision of God (and perhaps they had). Maybe they too could grow up be as good a man and as great an artist as Mr. Ellington was. Maybe I could try the same thing. He had that kind of effect on the young.

But by the late 1980s, Frank’s was closed and Ellington was gone and so were all the other musicians, artists, and writers, doctors and lawyers who had made Harlem the black capitol of the United States. The streets were full of human debris. Drug addicts stared with opaque eyes. Abandoned automobiles rusted in the sun. Beggars sat against walls and held up signs saying they were dying of AIDS. On block after block, you could see the burned-out hulks of tenement buildings, torched for insurance money by panicky landlords. Only one figure was left to impress the young with his money, his expensive cars, his glossy women: the drug dealer.

By 1990, there was a sense that New York was gone too. Crack cocaine, the invention of some evil genius, had arrived among us, replacing heroin as the drug of choice among the young, and fueled an explosion of violence. That year we had more than 2200 murders (compared to 340 in 1955) in a city of 7.3 million inhabitants (down from almost eight million in the mid-1950s). All other crimes followed the big one in their enormity: robberies, burglaries, rapes, felonious assaults. Chaos seemed general. Teenaged gang kids gathered into menacing wolfpacks and terrorized people on the subways, ripping jewelry from the necks of women, grabbing briefcases from businessmen, beating and sometimes slashing people who protested. The old Mafia, which once imposed a kind of order on the drug trade, lost its grip. This was laissez faire savage capitalism at its most obvious. Armed with an immense supply of .9 mm. semi-automatic weapons, drug-dealing teenagers sprayed crowds with bullets, fighting for control of a single street corner. Such events became so common that at least six people would have to die to get into the newspaper. Old New Yorkers longed for the days when the newspapers told stories of how Robert killed Wanda for sleeping with Tony.

Cynicism took over. Ordinary black and Latino citizens believed that the New York Police Department was paralyzed, made up of too many white officers from the suburbs who were themselves convinced that the city was a jungle. In many ways, they were right. Half the police force lived in the suburbs, some for economic reasons, most to get away from blacks. You would hear certain refrains over and over again: There’s no sense arresting these people, they’ll be back on the street tomorrow. Or Why should I risk my neck to help these animals? For some cops, racism merged with fear and indifference to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. They kept their heads down, ignored as much crime as possible, and hoped to finish their twenty years of service, get pensions, and move to Florida.

For other cops, ghetto crime and the expanding crack trade were a way to get rich. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of police officers became uniformed criminals. Instead of arresting big-time drug dealers, they took bribes to look the other way. Low-level drug dealers were targets of opportunity. The cops arrested them, stole their drugs, pocketed their money, and set them free. Some corrupt cops used the stolen drugs for their own pleasure; most sold them back to other drug dealers. In the streets, police in secure cruisers moved past corners where drugs were being peddled openly. They did nothing. Ordinary honest citizens knew this, told reporters about it, and said: What am I gonna do? Call a cop?

Drugs also fueled another New York phenomenon: the roaming armies of the homeless. They were sleeping in doorways, on rooftops, in cardboard boxes. They were clustered in subway tunnels and under bridges. Most of them were men (the government found immediate – if dilapidated -- housing for women with children) and they panhandled in an angry way: What do you mean you don’t have a dollar? I said I want a dollar! At intersections, they descended upon cars, sprayed the windows, rubbed greasy cloths across the glass, and demanded money. If the driver refused, they would strike at the windows or use can openers to scratch the bodies of the cars. In the early days of their arrival, many well-intentioned people on the left created romantic scenarios about them. They were victims of various cosmic forces, of Reaganism, of greed, of The System. But as social workers began to find out more about them, it became clear that there was very little truth in the early analyses. About twenty percent were people with severe mental problems, released from institutions during a time when reformers insisted that mental patients should live in real communities, not behind the walls of institutions. All they had to do was take their medicine. Those shopping bag ladies, those wide-eyed crazy people careening through the streets were the released patients who didn’t take their medicine. The rest of the homeless were alcoholics and drug addicts. They didn’t want to go to the city-run homeless shelters. They didn’t want to go somewhere for rehabilitation. They wanted whiskey. They wanted wine. They wanted heroin. They wanted crack. They became a collective symbol of the accelerating collapse of a once-great city.

And then slowly at first, imperceptibly, a day at a time, it began to change. There were too many New Yorkers – black, white, Latino – who refused to allow the city to turn into a John Carpenter movie. If the cops seemed unable or unwilling to do their jobs, these citizens began to organize their own security (the Black Muslims were particularly effective in some public housing projects). They met with police and politicians and demanded action. They pestered the newspapers. These were combinations of citizens: working people of all races, the mothers of murdered children, businessmen who were seeing the central marketplace of the city being abandoned. They businessmen could cite the case of the great department store, Gimbel’s, as an example: it went bankrupt and closed in 19TK for two reasons: wolfpacks of 12-year-old boys were roaming Herald Square, where the store stood across the street from Macy’s. They waited in daylight hours, feigning innocence, then pounced on the shopping women, the older the better, battered them with five or six pairs of fists, and ran off with the newly-purchased good. They were as efficient as a school of piranha fish. For the same reasons, driven by the same fears, shoppers were afraid to use the subways. More and more women began shopping through catalogs, or waited for their sons to take them on a weekend to some suburban mall. It was a vicious circle: fewer customers required fewer clerks, and shops that went out of business required no workers at all.

So the lords of New York were important to the great change that was coming. Most of them were personally secure; they lived in well-defended buildings; they took limousines to work and the chauffeurs usually carried licensed guns. In New York, kidnapping never became a problem (and has not been a problem in the rest of the United States since the early 1930s, when it became a Federal crime, punishable by death). The few kidnappings that did take place were pulled off by blundering amateurs who were caught very quickly. A few business people had idealistic motives for getting involved; they loved New York and wanted it to live. Others had a singular, more selfish motive: crime is bad for business. It is bad for shops and stores. It is bad for tourism, and therefore bad for restaurants, and Broadway theaters, and hotels. They began pressuring politicians, who depended upon them for campaign contributions. And plans began to be drawn. Goals were set. Bryant Park would be rehabilitated by the private sector, taken back from the drug addicts and petty criminals. So would Grand Central Station and 42d Street. Businessmen helped raise the money for rehabilitation, taxed themselves to pay for private security, forced the collaboration of politicians who thought nothing could be done. These plans took months, even years, to show results. But they worked. Human intelligence was employed to deal with problems made by human beings. Nothing can be left to government alone. But there are some tasks that only the government can handle. One was crime.

New York Gets Up

The most important of all problems for New York, as it is now for Mexico City, was crime. The first great breakthrough came in the subway system. In April 1990, Mayor Ed Koch had the good sense to hire a police profesional named William Bratton to become the new boss of the 4000 members of the New York Transit Police. Bratton was a veteran of the Boston Police Department, a man of high intelligence and ego to match. Bratton in turn had the good sense to listen to a brash young transit police lieutenant named Jack Maple, a sartorial dandy who wore custom-made suits, bowties, and a Homburg. Maple had been a transit cop – other cops called them “tunnel rats” – for a decade and was only serious about one thing: getting rid of crime.

Together they worked out a solution to subway that was startling in its simplicity and elegance. They reasoned that if a criminal – or a wolfpack – went into the subway system to commit crimes, they were unlikely to pay the (then $1.15) fare. That is, they would leap over the turnstiles, or open an emergency door and sprint for the train. In some stations, almost nobody paid the fare (the estimate was about 170,000 a day throughout the system); they simply walked or leaped defiantly into the system. Under Bratton, the worst stations were flooded with plainclothes policemen. They caught hundreds of men in the first few days, but did not settle for giving them a simple summons (called a desk appearance ticket). They knew most would never show up to pay a fine. They handcuffed them. They searched them. They arrested them and then ran their names through the computer system.

They were astonished at what they found. While working on a petty crime –farebeating - they confiscated guns, knives, and drugs. They discovered false identity papers. More important, they swiftly learned that almost one out of every seven of those arrested for farebeating had outstanding warrants for their arrests. That is, they had been released on bail in other, more serious criminal cases, but had never appeared in court to face trial and judgement. Those without criminal records did pay the fines, but lost much time in the process. The wanted criminals went to jail. Police morale suddenly improved because the cops felt that they were doing something real about serious crime. And a certain amount of guns, knives and drugs were taken off the streets. Crime dropped so drastically – more than 60 percent – that New Yorkers were safer in the subway than on the street.

Bratton’s strategy in the subway was based on the “Broken Windows” theories of Prof. James Q. Wilson of Harvard University. In March 1982, Wilson and George L. Kelling had published an article in Atlantic Monthly called “Fixing Broken Windows.” Bratton read and absorbed it, and began putting some of its principles into practice while he was still in Boston. Wilson once summarized the theory this way:

“We used the image of broken windows to explain how neighborhoods might decay into disorder and even crime if no one attends faithfully to their maintenance. If a factory or office window is broken, passersby observing it will conclude that no one cares or no one is in charge. In time, a few will begin throwing rocks to break more windows. Soon all the windows will be broken, and now passersby will think that, not only is no one in charge of the building, no one is in charge of the street on which it faces. Only the young, the criminal, or the foolhardy have any business on an unprotected avenue, and so more and more citizens will abandon the street to those they assume prowl it. Small disorders lead to larger and larger ones, and perhaps even to crime.”1

A few years later, Bratton was to apply these ideas to the entire city of New York, when he was appointed Police Commissioner in early 1994 by the newly-elected mayor, Rudolph Giuliani. The timing was right; every poll indicated that crime was the number one issue for all New Yorkers. Giuliani was a career prosecutor who had never before held elective office. He had promised in the election campaign to do something about crime and he chose Bratton as his general. As his mantra, Bratton chose: Focus, direction, supervision. If his top police commanders were hardened into cynicism – a common condition of all cops, everywhere – he got rid of them. They had to believe the job could be done, the war could be won. He assembled a team of smart, tough, dedicated veterans, including Jack Maple and an Irish-born street commander named John Timoney. He hired a famous television reporter named John Miller to help get the message to the public. Together, they were a merry crew; serious men do not have to be solemn. I spent some time in their company in those early months and spent more time laughing than I’d have done in the company of professional comedians. Beneath the laughter there was utter seriousness. They were in a just war with the Bad Guys, and they were absolutely determined to win. Together, they mapped out a simple strategy.

“We were confident we could reduce crime and disorder,” Bratton later wrote, “but if we did it by antagonizing the public, or in a disrespectful way, or in an abusive way, or in a way that alienated an already suspicious public – particularly the minority community – we would win the battle but lose the war.”

The goal was to reduce crime by 40 percent within three years. Most old cops laughed; so did some politicians, journalists and citizens. Bratton’s boys were serious. They knew what had to be done bout violence: 1) attack drugs and drug dealers with cold fury, since drugs – particularly the white powder called crack – were the heart of the matter, responsible directly or indirectly for an estimated 70 per cent of the city’s violent crimes; 2) attack the supply of guns, in the same way they were going after the drug dealers.

To start that process they used the Broken Windows theory. There were laws on the books against loitering, public drinking, using the streets for toilets. Beat cops were ordered to enforce those minor laws, and made the same discoveries Bratton and Maple had encountered in the subways. Those kids drinking on the corner and throwing bottles in the streets also were carrying drugs or guns. That man urinating against the wall of someone else’s house was also wanted for more drastic crimes. When a gun was discovered, the carrier of the gun was grilled by police about where he bought that gun. Without their guns, most of these tough guys become scared little boys; they often gave up the gun dealer, or at least provided a link in the chain of that gun’s history. Every gun was tested by ballistics officer who could tell if it had been used in serious crimes.

The same was done with people holding drugs. Simple questions were asked, and most of them were answered. Where did you buy the drugs? What’s the dealer’s name? Where does he live? Where does he get his supply? Drug users have very little will. They can be broken easily, more often with small acts of kindness – a cigarette or a ham sandwich – than with beatings or threats. Some can be converted into “confidential informants”, or CIs, the invaluable (and often contemptible) informers who are essential to the operation of any big city police department. Such informers can lead police to more serious criminals: murderers, armed robbers, the leaders of auto theft rings. The cops on the beat were discovering a larger truth: arresting a man for urinating in public could lead to the arrest of killers.

In addition, they had to go after the teenaged hoodlums who were committing so much of the city’s crime and staining its air with so much fear. In New York, as in every other American city (and apparently in Mexico City), teenagers were committing most of the crime. If three people in their sixties walked down your street at midnight, you kept walking home. If three teenagers were coming your way, you tensed, crossed the street, or ran. This was not paranoia. In the United States, most crime is committed by males between the ages of 14 and 17. From 1985 to 1992, the murder rate increased 50 percent among young white males and 300 percent among black males. The victims of those black murderers were almost always other black males; I remember writing a newspaper column citing statistics that showed that more blacks had been killed by other blacks in 1990 than by the Ku Klux Klan in the entire 20th century.

But Bratton and his crew also knew from the statistics that all young males were not criminals. Since the 1970s, it had been common knowledge that 50 percent of these teenaged crimes were committed by only six percent of the age group. The cops called them the Six Percenters. Part of the New York strategy was to identify and pressure those Six Percenters. This did not require the services of master detectives. Most of the Six Percenters lived home with their mothers (the fathers having vanished into the wind). Most had neighborhood reputations and adapted nicknames. Most “packed heat” (carried guns). Most had enemies. Cops stopped them in “Broken Windows” situations, frisked them, and if they found guns or drugs, arrested them. When they were released on bail, or on parole (after serving time), the local cops and parole officers followed up, making home visits, reminding them that they were marked men and should behave well or be sent back to jail.

The Six Percenters often drove the gang culture too. The hardest young men assembled softer young men around them, forging them into units that were meaner and more violent than their individual parts. In neighborhoods where the gang culture prevailed, some young men joined such outfits as a means of self-protection. For others, the gang represented the only family they had ever known. It was the hardcore Six Percenter at the center who moved the gang into drugs and violence. Bratton’s men decided to treat each gang as if it were a single criminal. Each member had to be known to the local precinct commander. The characteristics of each, the weaknesses, the family structure, the names of girlfriends and adult friends: all became part of the dossiers. But the gang was the criminal. Attack the Six Percenters who formed the core and the gang would disintegrate.

Information, in short, was at the heart of the strategy. Maple sketched the overall strategy one night on a napkin in a restaurant. It had four parts:
Accurate and Timely Intelligence
Rapid Deployment of Police
Effective Tactics
Relentless Follow-up and Assessment

The very first step was the gathering of intelligence. Top police commanders had to know how much crime was taking place and where, and they had to know it immediately. To assist this task, Bratton and Maple made full use of the computer, which was emerging as an absolutely essential tool in the war against crime. For decades, the city had been broken into various borough commands, which in turn were broken into precincts. The gathering of accurate statistics on crimes, arrests, and crimes solved had been a sluggish, even slothful bureaucratic process. Local commanders were often more concerned with protecting themselves and their jobs than in protecting the public. They clerked crimes better than they solved them or prevented them. Simple information often took months to gather and send on. By the time such facts reached the commissioner’s office at the top of the chain of command, they were already stale. Bratton said later:

“Maple put it most succinctly. Think of the Battle of Britain: Germany was getting ready to invade the British Isles. The British had fled Dunkirk and had only 450 Spitfires to protect their cities, while the Germans had thousands of bombers able to attack anywhere in England. However, the British had one thing the Germans didn’t: radar. Despite very few resources, the British knew where the enemy was. Using their radar information, they were able to mobilize the 450 Spitfires exactly against the German bombers. Timely, accurate intelligence; rapid response; effective tactics; relentless follow-up – that’s what won the Battle of Britain and that’s how we’re going to win the battle of New York.”

Bratton and Maple created a series of top-level weekly meetings at Police Headquarters (later twice a week). They were driven by the study of computer statistics and became known as the Compstat meetings. Every precinct commander was required to be present, in full dress uniform as a mark of respect for the process. When some commanders complained that they couldn’t get through rush hour traffic, Bratton scheduled the meetings for 7 a.m. The message was clear: this is more serious than a long night’s sleep. All assembled in the operations room, which had seating for 115 people, but usually contained almost 200 with the addition of representatives of the district attorneys, the school system, the parole officers and some special police organizations. The commisioner and his top brass presided. And computer screens showed for the first time in the modern era a true picture of crime in the city. The computer screens showed the entire city, and its individual components, and graphically illustrated which areas required a swift and pervasive police presence.

“The maps made crime clusters visual,” Bratton later explained. “It was like computerized fishing; you’d go where the blues were running.”

If there were surges in some areas, the individual commanders were grilled: what was happening, who was doing it and what were the police doing to fight it? Each commander had to explain himself. Each had to assume responsibility in his own area. Each was encouraged to think creatively about solutions.

“Some commanders enjoyed it, others were intimidated, others annoyed, “ Bratton said later. “Some were good performers who enjoyed the spotlight, others were solid on substance but no good onstage, still others couldn’t get it right. It was a process that quickly identified who the real stars were. If a commander wanted to get noticed, he did it at Compstat. On the other hand, one good way to bring your career to a screeching halt was to bomb there consistently. Compstat was police Darwinism; the fittest survived and thrived.”

Some of the worst commanders got the message; they either changed, or retired. The best commanders began to thrive.

“We were often amazed,” Bratton remembered later. “Commanders came up with solutions and innovations that none of us on the command staff had thought of. It was great to watch their minds at work.” He elaborated: “No one ever lost his job over not having the right answers. No one got in trouble for crime being up in their precinct. People got in trouble if they didn’t know what the crime was and had no strategy to deal with it.”

In summarizing Compstat, Bratton said that it contained four basic levels:
“We created a system in which the police commissioner, with his executive core, first empowers and then interrogates the precinct commander, forcing him or her to come up with a plan to attack crime. But it should not stop there. At the next level down, it should be the precinct commander, taking the same role as the commissioner, empowering and interrogating the platoon commander. Then, at the third level, the platoon commander should be asking his sergeants, 'What are we doing to deploy on this tour to address these conditions?’ And finally you have the sergeant at roll call – ‘Mitchell, tell me about the last five robberies on your post’; ‘Carlyle, you think that’s funny, it’s a joke? Tell me about the last five burglaries’; -- all the way down until everyone in the entire organization is empowered and motivated, active and assessed and successful. It works in all organizations, whether it’s 38,000 New York cops or Mayberry, R.F.D.”

This strategy, as described in detail in Bratton’s book called Turnaround2, had to be based on one assumption: the fundamental honesty of the police themselves. The commanders could not “cook” the statistics to make themselves look better; if they did this, they would be instantly dismissed, and deprived of their pensions. And all of the cops had to be free of corruption. This was not easy; corruption still exists in the NYPD, and in many other police departments. But it was essential to make clear to cops and public alike that corruption would be attacked ruthlessly. Bratton moved around the city, directly speaking to cops at rollcalls. He made a video shown in all precinct houses. Part of his message was intended to convince honest cops that their own lives were being endangered by the acts of the corrupt. He told them:

“I’m going to try and change that image they all have of you, but to do that I need you to work with me. I can only tell the stories that you give me. If you give me stories of brutality, corruption, and dishonesty, those are the stories I’ll have to tell. I’m not going to protect you. If you give me stories of courage, honesty, and hard work, I’ll also tell those stories. It’s up to you. And if you break the law, I’m going to fire you, I’m going to put you in jail. I’ve worked too long in this profession, and too many others have dedicated their lives, to have the profession dishonored by a few.”

He was ferocious against corruption; in one famous case, he took the badges of corrupt cops, and removed their numbers forever from the rolls of the NYPD, explaining: “No other cop will ever wear a badge with a number stained by corruption.” He preached one other fundamental concept: “citizens are entitled to respect while cops need to earn it.” In other words, the war on crime did not have to be accompanied by brutality or bad manners. Cops were trained professionals, with a variety of tools beyond the gun and the fist. One was a sense of humor; potential riot situations could sometimes be defused by a joke or a laugh, one based on the notion that “we are all in this together, so let’s cool it before someone gets hurt”.

In other cases, simple good manners could be effective. The general public, after all, was not the enemy; it was the cop’s best friend. The enemy was the criminal. The criminal preyed on the general public. The local cop who befriended shopkeepers, schoolteachers, community leaders, church officials was ending his own isolation, his own paranoid loneliness. He was building allies. If he treated such people with aloofness or suspicion or contempt, he was enforcing his own isolation. In times of trouble, he would be absolutely alone. If he extorted money from shopkeepers, or looked the other way during drug deals, he would be the object of hostility. If he got into some trouble, the general public would be rooting against him.

Bratton’s presence began to change things right away. Six weeks after he was sworn in, the first statistics arrived. Crime had dropped 16.8 percent below the levels of the same period in the previous year. By the end of the first year, overall crime was down 12.3 percent (more than the “impossible” goal of ten percent). Shooting incidents fell by 16.4 percent. Murders dropped by 18.8 percent – 385 fewer murders than the year before. Bratton set a new goal: a 15 per cent drop. The commanders in the various precincts and more important the cops on the street – the infantry in the war on crime – brimmed with renewed passion. By July 1995, murder was down 31 percent over the previous year, robberies 21.9 percent. Burglaries 18.1 percent, auto theft 25.2 percent and overall crime 18.4 percent. Bratton resigned in 1996, because the egomaniacal Giuliani wanted full credit for the successes in the war on crime. But the system was in place. Crime has dropped in every year since, in good weather and bad.

There were other factors involved, of course. As president, Bill Clinton signed the Brady Bill which started drying up the supply of automatic weapons. The crack plague began to ebb; some of the young turned to heroin, which makes its users nod out instead of go wild for new supplies. Some said the drug gangs had settled their differences and were no better organized; others insisted that young people had seen the havoc wrought by crack among their older brothers and sisters, their mothers, their older relatives. Nobody knows for certain why it has happened, but crack is fading as a drug of choice among the young.

Meanwhile, a new flood of immigrants, including an estimated 200,000 Mexicans, was also changing New York. They hadn’t come to New York to become criminals. They took jobs, often the worst available, and worked hard and insisted that their children take advantage of the school system and stay straight. The Korean grocer worked too hard to allow some teenaged thug to steal apples from his fruit stand; he would chase the thief with an axe. The immigrants were a good example to many other young Americans; if they could come here without money, without papers, without the English language, and begin to succeed, why are we hurting ourselves with self-inflicted wounds? The immigrants began adding social cement to New York.

Most important of all the non-police factors in the change was the economic boom that began with Clinton’s election in 1992. The stock market grew, driven by the new technologies. Jobs appeared that were not there before (many invented by those immigrants, who were repeating the cycles of the Jews, Italians and Irish of the beginnings of the century). Welfare rolls began a steady drop: from 1.2 million to the current average of about 750,000. Families stabilized, as employed men stayed with their wives. The graduation rates of African-Americans and Latinos increased. The teenage pregnancy rates --children having children – dropped almost 40 percent. We saw again what we had always known: crime is not a job, but it is certainly an occupation.

On the street level, life was changing quickly. The central city, freed of its sense of menace, began to blossom again. The pattern was general in most other American cities, but New York’s progress was far ahead of every other American city. For those who lived there, the change was glorious. We came out of our small fortresses and hideouts, blinking in the sunshine. The siege was over.

My Other City

I would be an arrogant fool to say that the experience of New York can be repeated in that other city of my heart. New York and Mexico City share many characteristics: large populations, a steady stream of new arrivals, a dark side that might never be fully illuminated. But no city is exactly like any other city. Each has its secret templates of history, geography, and myth. Each lives with its own economic realities. Each has a separate ecology. But the example of New York does offer one huge lesson: we can never surrender hope.

Hope might be the heart of the matter. If you love a place as complicated as a city, hope itself might seem irrational. But as Jack Maple once said: “reasonable people don’t change the world; the world was changed by unreasonable people, because when you were unreasonable you got reasonable results.” By unreasonable, he meant setting goals that most would dismiss as unattainable. If you hope for a homerun, you might hit a double. That is no small thing. But it requires a secret act of faith, a capacity for rational belief, along with some healthy skepticism. Long ago, Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist writer, used an expression that can still serve every modern city dweller: “Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intelligence.”

The will must be optimistic if anything is to change for the good. Our intelligence whispers: this can never work. But the collective urban will must answer: it might. In any event, the attempt must be made. Flight and abandonment are too easy. We must join Sisyphus, rolling that boulder up that mountain, knowing that it will roll down. Only the thoroughly cynical, or those without heart of faith, would not make the attempt.

Each night now, as I walk through the streets of New York, I think of Mexico City when I was young. I have a grandson who is a year old. Some day, I want him to see Mexico City as it used to be. I want him to walk along the Reforma in the evening, holding a girl’s hand, and eating an ice cream cone. I want him to hear music drifting from the doors of cantinas and walk in and say buenas noches and order a beer. I want him to walk along Avenida Juarez at any hour of the day or night, and see women with their men coming from new hotels, and bookstores full of browsing students, and a concert crowd emerging later from the Palacio de las Bellas Artes, murmuring about music and not about murder. I want him to walk down Lazaro Cardenas without fear, knowing that his grandfather walked here once when it was named San Juan de Letran, and go to the Garibaldi and sit in the Tenampa and listen to someone play Anillo de Compromiso. I want him to understand the courage and the dignity and honesty of the average Mexican. If he gets lost, I want him to ask directions from a policeman and not be afraid for his life. Goddamn it: I want all Mexicans to have that city again, rich and poor, young and old, and yes, I want my grandson to have it too.

Such a hope is not irrational, and not a fiction woven from nostalgia. I thought my New York was gone forever, and I was wrong. Men of will and honesty and courage can change anything. Come back, O Mexico, my lost city. We, your children, await you.