title taken from “Blue Fever” by Blue Boy aka Super Blue
Gotham Returns to the 80s
Who didn’t love the 1980s? Big hair. Crazy fashion. Madonna and Run D.M.C. on the airwaves. It was a magical time. Well, it was also a time of high crime, a health epidemic, and due to the Cold War, tension between the US and Russia. Seems a lot like the 2020s, huh?
In the 80s it was dangerous to live in New York City. Crack and cocaine abuse were rampant, causing a spike in crime. Violent crimes averaged over 200,000 each year in the 80s, murder rates were in the 2,000s, and aggravated assaults averaged around 90,000. For perspective, the murder rate in 1989 was 2,246. It was 558 in 2019, even though there are almost 200,000 more residents in NYC.
Meryl Streep on the subway. Photo cred: Great Future Stories
But in the 2010s wages increased by 2.5% and the city added over 100,000 new jobs. The economic shift as well as additional green spaces and bike lanes made the city feel safer. However, we are seeing a resurgence of crime in 2022.
“The city recorded a 41% increase in overall major crime through the first months of 2022 compared to the same period last year, including a nearly 54% increase in robberies, a 56% increase in grand larceny incidents and a 22% increase in rape reports, the data shows. Murders increased by 10%.”
While the overall rate of crime in NYC is on the decline, the surge is concerning because much of it is happening in the streets in broad daylight and even in the subways.
In January, a 40-year-old Asian woman died after being pushed in front of a train at 9:30am at the Times Square station. On March 31st, a 12-year-old Black child was shot in the head as he sat in a parked car in Brooklyn. A 22-year-old man was stabbed on a Brooklyn-bound train in an apparent unprovoked attack by a male stranger. A 57-year-old Asian woman was punched in her face at 6:30pm in midtown Manhattan. The suspect in that case, Steven Zajonc, was charged with hate crimes for attacks on six other Asian American women. The most heinous crime was the subway attack on April 12th when Frank James opened fire on the N train after detonating a gas explosive. 13 people were shot and others injured, but no one can calculate the toll this takes on those of us who rely on the subway to navigate the city.
But fear not, citizens of Gotham! Mayor Eric Adams has a plan…sort of.
In his Blueprint to End Gun Violence, the Mayor explains that The NYPD will deepen its work by:
Enhancing existing Public Safety Units with new Neighborhood Safety Teams
Putting more officers on patrol
Deepening coordination with the ATF and FBI
The plan has already received backlash from critics as it is not as holistic as he purports. One critic cited that Adams opposes the 2017 Raise the Age legislation that gave shared jurisdiction over certain charges against 16–17 year olds in New York to the family court system rather than exclusively to adult criminal court. However, Adams asserts that young people need to face harsh punishment to obstruct the iron pipeline.
“If a 16 or 17 year old is arrested on a gun charge, law enforcement should ask the individual where they got the gun,” Adams writes. “If the individual refuses to disclose that information, prosecutors should have the ability to charge the individual in Criminal Court, rather than Family Court.”
This would not only result in more juveniles detained with adults, but his approach will likely leave them behind bars as bail would be drastically higher in criminal court.
The Legal Aid Society, Brooklyn Defender Services, The Bronx Defenders, the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem and Queens Defenders welcomed some of the planned measures, including job development, but criticized "Mayor Adams' focus on discredited punitive and surveillance-based strategies, including his call for additional rollbacks to bail and discovery reform, amendments to Raise the Age, increased use of facial recognition and reinstatement of the NYPD's historically racist Anti-Crime Unit.
But the Mayor has other fish to fry as he deals with the public health crisis, much like Mayor Ed Koch did during his tenure in the 80s.
The health crisis at that time was the AIDS epidemic. Over 100,000 Americans died AIDS between 1981 and 1990. In fact, it became the leading cause of death among young adults in the United States. Despite its prevalence, there was not much known about it.
Unlike today, people did their own research and decided that they could not be affected by the disease. This photo is from a real campaign by the People of Color Against AIDS to combat the misinformation coming out of the Black community about the epidemic.
Protests sprang up around NYC to call attention to the lack of research into the deadly disease as it seemed that the public was limiting the impact to homosexuals and drug users. Basically, if you don’t want to get AIDS, don’t be gay or use drugs.
Good thing we don’t give the uninformed a platform to make dangerous statements about a disease they don’t understand anymore. Oh, wait….
AIDS research advocates. New York, June 1983.
NYC Firefighters Protest Vaccine Mandate. New York, Oct 2021.
The COVID-19 pandemic hit New York City hard and the lockdown made Gotham near unrecognizable. Streets were deserted, restaurants closed, and subway cars were almost empty. Once the vaccine was made widely available, the city began to once again have a heartbeat. The vaccine rollout, however, led to strict mandates.
City workers, including firefighters and teachers, were told that they had until February 11th, 2022 to get the vaccine or lose their jobs. The announcement was a shock as just a few months earlier city workers were considered heroes for keeping the city running during the lockdown. Labor unions protested and initiated lawsuits as they considered getting or not getting the vaccine a personal medical choice that should not put their jobs at risk. However, Mayor Eric Adams characterized the employees’ termination as quitting, saying that they’re choosing to leave their jobs by not following the rules. “It’s not about termination, it’s about vaccination.” A statement he would later walk back when he signed an order exempting NYC-based athletes and entertainers from the private sector vaccine mandate while leaving the rule intact for the vast majority of private employees citywide.
Much of what Mayor Adams says about this double standard sounds a lot like Reganomics. "A small number of people have an outsized impact on our economy," Adams said referring to athletes. Oh, Regan. Will we ever be rid of your economic influence?
So New Yorkers, get your crack pipes and leg warmers out. With the rise in violence and an unmanaged health crisis, it looks like we’re going back to the 80s!
Check out the latest Rant and Rave episode! The Return: The 80s on YouTube.
