By giving up on graffiti, Bill de Blasio opens the door to more decline
By Heather Mac Donald
July 23, 2020 | 8:01pm
Mayor Bill de Blasio has canceled a graffiti-eradication program that cleaned private buildings, thus deliberately sending the city back to its worst days of crime and squalor.
Nothing sent a stronger signal in the late 1980s that New York was determined to fight back from anarchy than the transit system’s campaign against subway graffiti. That campaign was based on broken-windows policing, a theory that recognizes that physical disorder and low-level lawlessness, such as graffiti, turnstile-jumping and litter, telegraph that social control has broken down. That low-level lawlessness invites more contempt for norms of behavior, including felony crime.
https://nypost.com/2020/07/23/by-giving-up-on-graffiti-de-blasio-opens-door-to-more-decline/