THE MACHETE MADMAN: UGLY BLAST FROM PAST

TWENTY three prior arrests, including for menacing with a machete, and this madman was still walking the streets?

Seeing Sook Yeong Im, a pretty young tourist, lying blooddrenched on the sidewalk after crazy career criminal Frederick Young allegedly twice slashed open her arm with his viciously honed weapon, brought rushing back the fear that all New Yorkers felt in the preRudy Giuliani era.

Back then, rampant crime was killing not just one person every four hours, every day, but also killing Gotham. That the recent assault occurred in Bryant Park on a sundrenched, earlysummer morning seemed to unravel the gains that the efforts of thousands over 20 years had achieved to make New York once more the capital of the world. Are we back to Son of Sam or the Wild Man of West 96th Street?

No one unfamiliar with Bryant Park a quartercentury ago would believe that this lush oasis behind the gleaming marble New York Public Library, thronging with tourists and businesspeople enjoying its cosmopolitan cafés and Parisian lawn chairs, was once a nogo zone.

Drug sellers plied their trade in broad daylight. Muggers lurked in the bushes.

Along with the city’s cleanup of the subways and its ubiquitous graffiti and chasing out the bums and pickpockets, the Bryant Park Corporation’s simultaneous transformation of a squalid dustbowl into a gleaming commons at Manhattan’s very center were the two big signs that what human failing had spoiled, human effort could redeem. New York, we realized, did not have to die.

Behind both accomplishments was the nowfamous Broken Windows theory: When city authorities allow public spaces to fill with dope sellers, vandals and prostitutes, and let bums and madmen panhandle aggressively and smear filth and urine everywhere, honest citizens will stay away out of fear and disgust.

The sense that nobody cares about public order will embolden the illintentioned to commit serious crimes. But clean up the rubbish and graffiti, arrest the petty criminals, get the madmen into medical care, and urban vitality will return.

Meanwhile, serious crime will go down, because criminals will know cops can stop and question them and frisk them for weapons on probable cause, and that lawbreaking will send them to jail. Bryant Park and the subways gave the theory its first tryout — and it worked.

But what resistance the experiments had to overcome! The homeless, the media falsely claimed, were laidoff workers, forced out of their oncesecure lives by a heartless capitalist economy. Why should the insane not be free to live their “alternative lifestyle,” which in practice meant freezing to death on the streets, or driven with predictable regularity to push someone in front of a subway?

As for the bums and criminals, so many of them AfricanAmericans: Were they not forced into that state by 300 years of oppression? Wouldn’t punishment be “blaming the victim?”

Still, so obviously was the city dying under such enlightened tolerance that its overwhelmingly Democratic voters elected Republican Giuliani as mayor in 1993 to restore law and order.

He named Bill Bratton police commissioner to institute Broken Windows policing. Crime fell with amazing rapidity, and the city snapped back to life, once people stopped being afraid to go out to restaurants and theaters or walk the interesting and now safe streets.

Now Mayor de Blasio has quashed that. Stopandfrisks are down 95 percent from their 2011 high. Broken Windows policing is again under attack from “enlightened” opinion, which also again trumpets the myth of omnipresent American racism.

De Blasio himself leads the chorus, slurring the NYPD as racist oppressors and warning his biracial son not to give them any excuse to brutalize him.

Without support from City Hall, no wonder cops fear to do their jobs and shootings are up for two years in a row, a first since the preGiuliani era. No wonder Gotham had 19.5 percent more murders in the first five months of 2015 than in the corresponding period last year.

And no wonder cops didn’t want to put their careers on the line to mess with Frederick Young — an obviously crazy black man, muttering and carrying something suspicious in a garbage bag. Expect more senseless crimes, along with evergrowing fear in the streets, until de Blasio is out of City Hall.

Myron Magnet, City Journal’s editoratlarge and a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, is the author of The Founders at Home.

Adapted from Manhattan Institute’ s City Journal.

Drug sellers plied their trade in broad daylight. Muggers lurked in the bushes.