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The Killing Costs
Youthful criminals prey on the most defenseless victims. The very young, the old, the lame, sick and blind are slugged, slashed and shot. They have retreated with broken limbs and emotional scars behind triple-locked doors. Many never venture out at night; some do not even risk the streets during the day. In confinement, their anguish is not heard. Often poor and not well educated, they do not know where to turn or how to complain.
So what's new? ponders the director of a juvenile facility in New York. The old folks have been assailed for years. The kids, he insists, have a "value system" of their own that should be respected. They are rebels, by his murky reckoning, against a society that does not give them a chance. One peculiar value is demonstrated by a teen-ager who prowls Manhattan's Upper East Side in search of eyes to gouge. To date, he has made known attempts on a bus driver, a journalist, an Egyptian tourist, the son of former Manhattan Democratic Party Leader Edward Costikyan and others. He was never locked up because he was underage.
Elizabeth Griffith, 84, a black woman, was beaten in her New York City apartment by two black teenagers. "I didn't feel the blows because I was so numb from the choking," she recalled. "The big one hollered, 'Hit her!' and the little one would come over and hit me again. And I looked at the little one and said, 'Shame on you.' I saw death and I was dead, and I started to call the Lord. I was thinking to myself, 'What a nightmare, oh, what a nightmare!' " A nightmare shared by innumerable others who cannot count on the basic minimum of a supposedly civilized society: personal safety. Says Jim Wilson, a black homicide detective in Harlem: "Anybody should be able to go out on the streets any time he wants."
Analysts tirelessly—and correctly —say that unemployment, slum housing, inadequate schools and the pathology of the ghetto contribute to the spreading scourge of youth crime. But the reverse is also true: the ripple effects of crime eventually overwhelm a city and destroy its élan. People are frightened away from downtown, reducing business for stores, theaters, restaurants. In their place, thick as weeds, sprout porno houses, massage parlors and gambling havens, where criminals thrive.
Crime is decimating communities like Harlem. Says William Lundon, a homicide detective: "It's as if there were a cancer out there, with the doctor operating every day." To ward off robberies, Harlem merchants—almost all of them blacks—often stay open 24 hours a day. But the longer they are around, the more chance there is that they will be assaulted. One all-night grocer, a genial man in his 60s who was shot in the