Social trust is a core feature of city living. It requires us to judge those who hurt our shared community.
In high school, I got arrested for spraying graffiti. After a horrible night in central booking—penned in with women jailed for 1990s crimes like sidewalk joint-smoking and MetroCard fraud—I had my moment in court, then got pancakes at the Veselka and went straight to school. It was a deeply unpleasant experience: so violating, so humiliating. A female cop searched inside my bra. The toilet had no door. It impressed upon my teenage mind the realization that I had really fucked up. One cop asked me what I’d been thinking. My parents asked me what I’d been thinking. Of course, I hadn’t really been thinking about my own behavior. But now I was thinking about how, with a few more bad decisions, my own story could go wrong in any number of ways.
As it turned out, the city didn’t want me painting on its property: It cared about my behavior.
What has changed in New York City in the past decade is that, by changing our public safety policies, we stopped our criminal justice system from doing the same amount of official judging that it used to. The city no longer cares about people’s behavior. And this, critically, has changed how actively we all informally watch and judge.
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Hannah Meyers is director of the policing and public safety initiative at the Manhattan Institute.
Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images