May had been unseasonably moist and June unreasonably cool, but this week New York City's 7,795,471 residents finally read unmistakable signposts of an impending weather change — and with it a threat of sociological change. Shortened were Manhattan's winter skyscraper shadows; the tall towers of stone, glass and burnished metal reached upward nearly shadowless under the hazy midday sun.
Tenements, still the city's drab cincture to its towers, menaced a thousand rubbish-strewn, treeless streets. Subway passengers broiled; Broadway theaters and side-street restaurants hung "Delightfully Air Conditioned" banners or closed for the season. The greenery-edged hem of the metropolis echoed to domestic sounds —the whir of lawnmowers, the jingling ice-cream-truck bells, the clink of beer glasses, shrieks of splashing children in backyard wading pools.
In its summer quest for the tourist dollar, the world's largest city paraded an exuberant proclamation for the tourist to read: "New York Is a Summer Festival." But grimly unfestive was a shadowy battle that had swirled through the city streets during winter and spring, indeed during all the seasons since World War II.
On one side of the battle: a segment of New York's 1,500,000 seven-to 20-year-olds whose values have so warped to the point that their crime rate has risen 60% in five years. On the other side of the battle: New York City's police department, facing a problem that has no real precedent in the department's 329 years of dealing with every crime known to man.
Last week, as schoolchildren slammed textbooks shut and hit the beckoning streets with shouts and shenanigans, New York's finest, 23,657 strong, hit the streets to do battle.
Against the Jungle. New York's police, a force almost as large as two army divisions, had made plans as thorough as an army's offensive. The department was at near peak strength; by special order no more than 12% of personnel would be on vacation at any one time. The remaining 88% turned eyes away from the schools and wintertime haunts, kept watch on the tenement streets and summer hangouts.
Pinpointed especially were the most threatened of New York's 34,000 acres of park, 725 playgrounds, 17 swimming pools and 18 miles of sandy, sunny beach as well as 14 "high hazard" slum areas, where more than 100 organized gangs prowl the streets. To these potential trouble points went 700 extra police in uniform or plainclothes, on foot or in radio cruisers, trained and ready to study the faces of an uncertain generation and to move in hard and fast on its rebels.
The deploying army in blue had an order of the day: "Our prime function is the protection of life and property and the maintenance of law and order, and this function will be carried out against any persons, regardless of age, who willfully and maliciously thumb their noses at law and order and who persist in thinking that the laws of the jungle can be transplanted to the streets of New York." The order's author: 51-year-old Stephen Patrick Kennedy, the hard-boiled career cop who is the 25th police commissioner of the City of New York.