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Like the brutal rape of the Central Park jogger and the murder of Yusuf Hawkins in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn last year, Watkins' death quickly assumed a larger symbolic meaning. Outside the city it confirmed what most Americans already believed: New York is an exciting but dangerous place. Among New Yorkers it reinforced the spreading conviction that the city has spun out of control. A growing sense of vulnerability has been deepened by the belief that deadly violence, once mostly confined to crime-ridden ghetto neighborhoods that the police wrote off as free-fire zones, is now lashing out randomly at anyone, anytime, even in areas once considered relatively safe.
New Yorkers were quick to notice that the Watkins family were attacked even though they were traveling in a group of five, including three men. But such a precaution did not prevent them -- or thousands of city residents -- from being victimized. "Crime is tearing at the vitals of this city and has completely altered ordinary life," says Thomas Reppetto, president of the Citizens Crime Commission, a private watchdog group. "Worst of all, it is destroying the morale of our citizens."
The looming question in many minds was what, if anything, people could do to protect themselves when children were no longer safe in their beds. "New Yorkers can put up with dirty streets, poor schools and broken subways," warns Mitchell Moss, director of the urban research center at New York University. "But New Yorkers cannot take uncertainty -- risks, yes, but not uncertainty."
At times the city has seemed so consumed with crime that it was incapable of thinking about anything else. Nursery-school teachers in some of the city's tougher neighborhoods train children barely old enough to talk to hit the floor at the sound of gunshots. They call them "firecrackers" and reward the swift with a lollipop.
What has most dismayed many New Yorkers is the tepid response of the city's leaders to the surge of mayhem. Like everyone else in New York, Mayor David Dinkins and his handpicked police commissioner, Lee Brown, seem at a loss for remedies to the worst crime wave to hit the city in a decade. "New York is in desperate need of leadership," says Moss, "and it simply isn't there." A TIME/CNN poll of New Yorkers taken during this summer's rash of killings showed that only 47% approved of Dinkins' performance, and an equal number believed he is no different or worse than his abrasive predecessor, Edward I. Koch.
New York's plunge into chaos cannot be blamed on Dinkins, who has been in office for only nine months. In fact, he has inherited the whirlwind sown by decades of benign neglect, misplaced priorities and outright incompetence at every level of government. If during the city's close brush with bankruptcy during the 1970s Gerald Ford was willing to let New York drop dead, the Reagan Administration seemed eager to bury it. Since 1980, cutbacks in federal aid have cost New York billions, with funds for subsidized housing alone dropping $16 billion. Despite a series of state and local levies that now place New Yorkers among the most heavily taxed citizens in the nation, the city has never recovered from those setbacks.